Decent article yes, good entries.
But one particular sentence at the end about League of Legends sort of irks me:
"
League of Legends not only essentially killed the RTS genre as we know it [...] "
The RTS genre never really 'died', I.E. every one of the available studios in the entire industry suddenly stopped making them altogether. I mean hey, if people really want to put it that way; they often refer to the RTS genre as "dead", either now or they'd say so up to 10 years ago too. It is true that for quite a period of time the RTS genre did have its sort of marked lows (slow down in frequency and variety of RTS games across platforms but on PC as well) during the late 2000s to the mid 2010s or so. However, RTS games have been made every single year nonetheless.
I mean if anyone actually want lists, years, numbers and references then Google is already good enough of a start (one that the article's author could have taken the time to use):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_real-time_strategy_video_games
(I mean just sort them by Year, and go from 2021 at the top and... that's it)
The genre never quite "died", per se. In fact, Steam's Early Access feature and system allows many studios to make games in the likes of
They Are Billions with a lot more ease in the current industry. Yes, the 'big studios' out there wouldn't have said yes to the project that's pretty much 99.9% true. But the tools are there now. We could say the same for
Grey Goo and some others. The big(ger) studios are usually more comfortable just remastering their old RTS games (like EA with C&C's Remastered version, or Blizzard with SC Remaster at first, and then WX3 Reforged... as bad as that one turned out).
I think the best way to put it is simply to say that developers don't
want to (to 'risk' it), or aren't
thinking of doing RTS games enough (they're too preoccupied by following the trends, the 'what's hot right now' genre, to satisfying wider audiences by swimming in the safe and tested waters); but the prevalence of MOBA games ' in-lieu ' of (or the preference by studios of making MOBAs) RTS ones is only a thing if you think of it that way in your head; while in reality it isn't really a constant of two opposing forces, one of which is magically impeding on the other's capacity to even exist. It's merely up to developers out there to take the plunge and just make an RTS game.
But the other way around would be hard to say, right? If RTS games were to somehow regain major popularity (perhaps like never before in the entire history of the genre) and would go as far as to supersede the production of MOBAs, would we then say that " RTS games killed MOBAs! " ... ? I don't think so. The worst we'd say would be something like "that doesn't mean MOBAs are dead, I can still log in to League of Legends right now and plenty of people still play it" or "Yeah right, RTS games killed MOBAs but Blizzard just announced HOTS 2, go figure".
So, not only MOBAs aren't responsible (as a genre) for the apparent demise of RTS gaming, but on an individual title basis League of Legends itself is definitely - on its own - not the reason, or not a reason for anything that may have happened to the RTS genre. If anything, League of Legends' popularity as a MOBA game actually did compete against other MOBAs very effectively. But LoL didn't magically siphon the players base of C&C, SC, Age of Empires or Warhammer 40K into its pool of fans. That would be like saying that Super Smash Bros "killed" other Fighting games in the industry, or that it negatively impacted the popularity of a completely other genre.
So yeah, sure, the RTS genre did have its slow years; that's 100% accurate. It did lose popularity, but the actual genre never "died". If we want to talk about game genres that actually died and are pretty much 99% never done anymore; we could start with Light Gun games, or we could delved into the Point-and-Click adventure games, or 2D / Semi-3D or full 3D arcade / classic style Shoot 'em Ups.
www.denofgeek.com
Facebook
Twitter