Quote Originally Posted by Rodin View Post
Could part of the decline be due to the original fans aging out of the genre?

I used to love RTS games as a kid. I got into the genre early with Dune 2 and never looked back. I was never all that good, but actually playing the game never presented any difficulty.

These days, I find myself completely incapable of multi-tasking at the level required to play an RTS. And not multi-player either - just managing the basics against a computer AI is very difficult. My mind just doesn't move quickly enough to keep up.

If that's true of more people than just me, that could be a problem for RTS developers. Younger kids don't have the same high profile titles to draw them into the genre, and their existing customers have moved on.
I think there is a lot of proof that "retro game design" is actually a lot more popular than a lot of publishers believe, as is shown from Indy developers and Kickstarter. Some publishers are figuring that out, most aren't. So a lot of older game styles that publishers though were no longer popular are, they're just not making games for them because they don't think they are. Space/flight also falls into this too. I know a lot of people that wish for something like old school Privateer or Wing Commander (Star Citizen showed the demand, though they seem to be failing to deliever) but a publisher will make something with some of those aspects and pile a bunch of other things "the kids these days want" on top of it and kill the experience in the process then wonder why it didn't do that well. It is also why some franchises have stayed around because they stay relatively close to the original design ideas, and when they do try something way out of line they get a lot of flack for it.

As for RTSs in particular, one of the key "attributes" of good players is clicks per minute, aka micromanging, so they think "huge levels of micromanagement is what makes an RTS good" but in reality that is one of the main things that drive normal players away. I don't want to have to spend dozens of hours researching the game and learning all the idiosyncrasies of it and have to play constantly to be any good, but that's how they build those games now. That happens with many games designed for "the competitive gaming scene" where dedicating your gaming life to this one game is expected to be any good at it.