....and this is hugely disappointing to someone like me that was there when the genre started to take hold. I was there when Dune 2 hit the scene and there weren't even that many people that had computers that could run it. Yet, when they managed to sell 10,000 copies of the game it was considered a success. These days numbers like that will have your company in bankruptcy in no time - especially once the piracy hits.
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For younger gamers, it wouldn't surprise me if they haven't ever played and RTS game and can probably only name a few of them. Keeping in mind that I am referring to a specific kind of RTS game where you collect resources, build buildings and defenses, and also have to be mindful about conquering new territory in order to take over a map. Games like Warcraft, Command and Conquer, Starcraft, and to a certain extent some of the Warhammer games are all big names in this industry.
It isn't that these games are not a lot of fun, because I think any Starcraft fan can say that they definitely are, it's just that these days so much is expected of a new game as far as sales are concerned and for RTS games like the ones I mentioned, using anything other than a keyboard and a mouse is just a terrible way to experience the game.
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Back in the good ol' days of gaming a friend of mine had Starcraft 64 on the N64 and I had a go at playing it. Dear lord was this game damn near unplayable. The controls are just never going to be conducive to using any controller and for anyone that had ever played it on a computer, this was just frustratingly bad. Controllers have come a long ways since then but I can't imagine any hand-held something or other that could be a good alternative for a keyboard and a mouse. If you want to excel at RTS games, or even if you want to have fun with them, you need to be able to assign multiple hotkeys for just about anything you want and this simply isn't going to be possible on a controller.
So there goes 80% of the market-share out the window right there since the companies who might be considering making an RTS game are not going to go after just one branch of it, especially when PC games are the ones most likely to be hacked and released for free using torrent sites.
Also, we have seen how willingly some people walk into microtransactions. I don't personally know ANYONE that participates in this sort of stuff, but it seems that more and more devs are opting to have at least some level of this in almost anything that they release. The biggest and most recent travesty of gaming is Diablo Immortal which unfortunately is making a million dollars a day on microtransactions and well, from a business point of view this makes a lot of sense on their part, even though I think that the people who are pumping hundreds or even thousands of dollars into a single game are out of their damn minds.
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Why would Blizzard devote resources to making Starcraft 3 when they can just keep doing crap like this? SC wont be playable on a phone, so most opportunities for microtransactions end right there.
Perhaps there will be a renaissance of sorts as far as base-building RTS games are concerned but I can't really imagine too much of an incentive existing for studios to even attempt to market one of them. This is a shame in my book, because it is one of my top-two favorite genres of all time.