8mo ago

The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO

www.pcgamer.com The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO

Real-time strategy is a "nerd genre," says the developer, and he's happy to make one on those terms.

Games @lemmy.world

www.pcgamer.com /games/rts/crate-ceo-rts-genre-interview/

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Look at every mainstream game and youll easily see why RTS games could never go mainstream. They're all the same, like the wall of Buzz Lightyears in Toy Story. Over the shoulder camera, action adventure. Batman, God of War, Resident Evil, the list goes on. None of these were mainstream games until they all started looking and feeling the same.
- This is demonstrably false. I mean, if "mainstream" means "successful to broad audiences", that'd be games with crafting/building elements (Forntite, Roblox, Minecraft, The Sims), sports games (FIFA) and a bunch of competitive games (League of Legends, CounterStrike, CoD). Plus a couple of outliers, too (Mario Kart, GTA V, Animal Crossing). Batman, God of War and RE do... fine? They do fine. But they're not the "mainstream" of the gaming industry, they are games for a specific slice of players, they would need 10x the reach to compete.
  RE4 Remake sold what? 5-7 million units? Mario Kart was breaking 50 million last year. People don't have a grasp on what games are actually popular.
  
  Youre saying that RE4 remake sold the same number of copies as Anthem. So either Resident Evil, a franchise that is basically a household name since the 4th game with multiple movies, is not mainstream, or Anthem is? Resident Evil is equally as mainstream as Mario or Minecraft is, because becoming mainstream does not only depend on sales.
  If someone who didnt play games saw you playing a certain game, would they think you were a nerd for playing that game? Generally, that is a good metric to measure what is mainstream or what isnt. People will look at a game like Stellaris and instantly think only a nerd would play it. And I mean, yeah, only a nerd would play Stellaris. But they wouldn't think that only a nerd would play Resident Evil, and they would probably be able to guess it was Resident Evil, despite themselves not playing video games.
  Regardless, my point still remains that I agree with the CEO of Crate. RTS cannot be a mainstream genre without losing its core identity that makes the RTS genre different from other games.
  
  Wait, what?
  Who thinks anybody is a nerd for playing anything? Did you time travel from the mid 1990s? What the hell? Civilization 6 and Total War:Warhammer are the top 29 and 30 most played games on Steam right now, Resident Evil 4 is 221 on that list. Stellaris, incidentally, is number 45.
  Maybe you make a habit of giving Civ players wedgies, I don't know how old you are, but over in the real world that's not a thing. Mainstream means mainstream, and it's way more likely that both your mom and your little brother play Civ or Mario Kart than Resident Evil or God of War.
  "Mainstream" doesn't mean your online friends like it. People who make things "mainstream" don't post about games online, they just... play them.
- Oh yeah God of War did horribly on PS2.
  Wait no, it did phenomenally.
  
  Sales aren't a good metric of determining whether something is mainstream or not. Notably, Anthem had over $100 million in sales. I wouldn't exactly consider Anthem to be a mainstream game.
  
  What metric would you approve of? Awards? It got a bunch of Game of the Years
  
  I honestly didn’t know that sales figure for Anthem, that’s gross. They stole peoples’ money. That said, Anthem is an exceptional outlier. The difference between God of War and Anthem is that people play and played God of War.
  
  Sales aren't a good metric of determining whether something is mainstream or not.
  Uh.
  Maybe you could make a case that the popularity of a genre is separate from the popularity of a game. A single-game genre might be less popular than a genre with ten entries, even if the single game sells better than all of the games in the other genre.
  But I have a hard time saying that popularity can't be linked to something being mainstream.
- Other than the slightly similar camera angle - and emphasis on slight: those games have very different styles of camera - those are completely distinct games.
  I get the idea that you're not a fan of those titles for their design choices which led to mainstream success, but holy crap give them an iota of credit.
  
  They're not dissimilar. Each of them before maybe 2016 had very different styles of camera and gameplay. Most notably, Resident Evil played nothing like God of War. They looked completely different and shared no similarity other than basic features such as being a video game, or requiring player input to move the player avatar. But now, they have the same camera, their control schemes are largely the same, and they both heavily focus on action and spectacle.
  My point is that mainstream wants basically everything to be the same. Same controls, same camera, same graphic style. It's why an RTS could never work for mainstream. You can't have an RTS that gives you effective control without a top-down camera. You can't have an RTS that has action combat without slowing the game pace down to a literal crawl.

85 comments