Call me a skeptic if you must, but I think most would agree that there are fewer players enjoying RTS games and as a result fewer games being developed for the genre.

Currently the last champions of RTS have been reduced to a few significant names, Starcraft 2 that has seen a decline with its e-sports centric audience (most likely mobbing towards the ever popular MOBA genre) and Command & Conquer which had its last official released game panned by Critics and abandoned by fans(Company of Heroes 2 is the other other recent RTS example). The attempt to make a Free to Play C&C apparently failed as well, it’s pretty damning to see the two biggest names in a once popular genre fail to keep a foot hold as they once had.

In a competitive environment they can be quite difficult to play, and quite stressful at times due to how unforgiving they are. More so than team games. This can scare a lot of people away in the long term. The thing to keep in mind is that because there is no reliance on a team, all losses and any mistakes are 100% the fault of the player. This leads to a lot of bruised egos. Also because of this difficulty, it is very difficult to play 1v1 in a casual way, especially right now. Most of the lowest level players have dropped out so anyone just starting is going to be facing some fairly tough competition compared to if they started even a year back.

Most of the people I know who switched from SC2 to DOTA/League did so because they like the team atmosphere and find it less stressful to play.

For non-competitive RTS, it seems like many of the developers have been stuck in a bit of a rut. The Creative Assembly games have been all kinda bland for the last couple, and CnC is basically dead. AoE Online was a bit of a bust so whether or not we will see something new from that series I don't know.

I'm a huge fan for innovation in the genre such as the RPG elements introduced in Warcraft 3 or the focus on capturing bases/checkpoints in Dawn of War / Z and wish to see more of this as I believe it's one of the things to draw players back into the scene. That and perhaps innovating the multiplayer experience to more social for the more casual market that's available.

tarcraft 2 that has seen a decline with its e-sports centric audience

Has it?

Do you happen to have figures?

Having researched RTS extensively for my article series (history of RTS), my current thought pattern would bet that there are fewer games, but larger audiences (as is the case with many genres in this age of convergence).

I don't see this as a dying genre, but rather, a genre that's emancipating. The concept of MMORTS is not entirely foreign, though a few forays have failed when attempting to do so.

Most likely, there's only so much one can add to the original RTS design without breaking its well-refined 'chess-feel'. Visual can keep being upgraded, but there isn't much else to do. Unless a brand is involved that is.

Warhammer 20k (Dawn of War II) was released in 2011, along with Illyriad (an MMORTS).

2012 Saw Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion and a few Grand Strategy (Real time) games which qualify as RTS.

2013 Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm, Planetary Annihilation (Epic Scale RTS), Comapny of Heroes 2.

2014 - Agreed, hardly anything...

2015 - 5-6 major titles slated for production

I don't see evidence that RTS has become unpopular... Can you provide some?

While small it appears that the tournament funding for the SC2 scene has been diminishing slowly since 2012 before the expansion was even released while it is also being "out-popularized" by MOBA games in which the funding has increased exponentially.

http://www.esportsearnings.com/history/2014/games

Although an incomplete list this article shows that the quantity of quality titles coming out has diminished over recent years. Granted it takes more money and time to create AAA titles now so that must still be taken into consideration I suppose. As for the actual number of players playing these games it's entirely my speculation that they're decreasing. I don't see much hype or discussion about the genre (even though someone just recently started a hype thread about C&C on this board!)

I still believe over time investors will continue getting less confident with the genre opting instead to continue producing FPS titles and MOBA games in the already over saturated market.

Has it?

Do you happen to have figures?

I don't have any figures either, but I got the same feeling. I think that , compared to other genres, RTS games are really unpopular, there are only the really big names (Warhammer/Starcraft).

In my personal opinion the reason is the PC. Large publishers do not really target the PC market (hi-rate of piracy), other then producing sequel after sequel of an already successful brand. The console market is by far more interesting for publishers and RTS games are notorious hard to play with a controller.

Maybe some indie studios will provide more RTS games.

Because story driven pretty little first person shooters and the similar open world adventures make more money?

I honestly feel rts as a genre is doomed to stagnate. They dont lend them selves to emerssion as much as other titles.

Too. They dont have much room for new ideas beyond theme. But these are my opinions.

I don't really see this as anything new. RTS games have always played second fiddle to the more popular RPGs and Shooters. Also I think a lot of developers have distilled the mechanics down to produced the MOBA and Tower defence games that seem to be so popular nowadays.

Also the last console generation (PS3 and XBOX360) did everything but kill mouse driven PC gaming. Most PC titles were simply console ports but, now steam and kickstarter seem to be driving a renascence of real PC games written for PCs so we may see a resurgence of genuine RTS games in the near future.

I've been looking for a good RTS for ten years.

I dislike the direction they were going ever since Starcraft was introduced. While SC had many great things with a "perfect imbalance" set of factions after some patches, it also changed the strategy aspect that players wanted. Specifically, players demanded less "strategy" more race and rush. Playing online if you turn a game anything down from the fastest possible speed the other players will curse at you and leave.

Starcraft and C&C and other RTS games are nice enough in a local game, but go online with strangers and the G.I.F.T. kicks in, where friendly games don't exist. Either you are berated as noob or berated as a cheater, either option filled with profanity. Companies cannot realistically patrol it so their online community quickly falls apart.

LAN games are great, but suffer badly from piracy so the studios need to provide massive server support, which makes the games that much more expensive. Then you need people to moderate all the semi-anonymous jerks out there, and it stops looking like a good project.

Couple the problems -- hard to consistently make money and hard to maintain a community -- and bigger organizations stop developing the games, going for easier products.

I used to be a big fan of RTS, and I am one of the people who stopped playing RTS altogether.

(I will use Blizzard's RTS as examples, as they are the ones I have played the most.)

The game that killed my interest with RTS was Warcraft III. I didn't quite like the direction that Blizzard took with WC3. Micromanaging, heroes level system, completely imbalanced heroes, and it was hard to make a comeback. If you lose a battle, you lose the game. Without a comeback, it takes the fun away from RTS. Losing a unit is like losing a finger. It is not fun anymore, it becomes stressful.

Then, Starcraft II came along, and I could kind of see what they were trying to do with it. They brought back the ability to control large amount of units, and the game was kind of fun. I actually had my interest back, but then came the realization that in order to become good at this, I have to spend a lot of hours playing, just like any other game. I don't have time for that. SC2 was still stressful to a certain extent.

With DotA, I can play several sessions non-stop until I realized it's 3AM. With today's RTS, one game is enough. I can no longer handle the emotional toll, because the game is ongoing, the stress is ongoing, you have dozens of units to control, and a map to watch over. There is no break until you win or lose, and a game takes about half an hour to complete. That's pretty long to endure.

In DotA, you control one unit only, you have time to watch over the map. If your hero die or healing at the base, you can relax a little bit even for a few seconds. And the stress isn't building up until you engage the enemy heroes. Farming is stress free. So there's a good amount of emotional dynamic in MOBA games. While in RTS it's building up and up and up.

I think for RTS to pick up again, there need to be some sort of change in the way you play it. Have certain things to be automated so player can focus on other things.

Get rid of the peons/workers/peasants concept. They are completely unnecessary now. Resource mining should be automatic. One click to upgrade your resource throughput. This is current RTS: build more peasants, oops need to build a farm before I can do that. 20 minutes later, oh shit I forgot to build the peasant, no wonder my gold is running out, and now I am behind my opponent, I lose. !!!!

You don't need to free up a peon to build a thing.

Change the extreme clicking, the control over individual units.

Change the dreaded scroll-map-by-moving-your-mouse-to-the-edge-of-the-screen thing. When WC3 was announced that it would be in 3D, I was excited because now I thought I could zoom out to see the entire map. No. They didn't do it. Instead, you zoom in to see your units up close and personal. What was that for? In RTS, I want to strategize, direct units to certain spots in a map. If my only tool to do that is a tiny minimap on the corner of the screen, that's not good.

All of that, or maybe I am just getting old.

When it comes to building a multiplayer community, free to play MOBAs definitely have a lower barrier to entry, in terms of both price and the skills necessary to be decent at the game. RTS really isn’t suited for F2P monetization, as evidenced by the cancellation of the new C&C game, and it doesn’t have the mainstream appeal of other competitive genres like FPS.

Most of the people I know who switched from SC2 to DOTA/League did so because they like the team atmosphere and find it less stressful to play.

I also get the sense that that’s probably the majority opinion, but for me it’s actually the opposite. I don’t play MOBAs because I feel more stressed about letting the rest of the team down, whereas when it’s a 1v1 I’m more relaxed because I’m just playing for myself.

There are a few approaches that I think RTS can take to keep the genre fresh. There is a lot of relatively unused genre blending that I think would be engaging, and I think there are a lot of good ways to blend for instance, RTS and RPG gameplay in an interesting way. With the project I'm working on, I'm actually more interested in the RTS/4X combination, which I think is one of the other obvious evolutions of the RTS genre. I'd say that Sins of a Solar Empire and Divinity Dragon Commander were both good recent examples of that sub-genre of RTS, where you have the slow paced, big picture strategic element, but you also have direct control of real time battles. Unfortunately, I do think that Sins and especially Divinity suffered from less than stellar implementations of the core action-RTS mechanics and micromanagement elements that players have come to expect from these kinds of games.

When WC3 was announced that it would be in 3D, I was excited because now I thought I could zoom out to see the entire map. No. They didn't do it.

I disliked other things about the game, but this is one thing that Supreme Commander does pretty well -- you can actually zoom out until the entire map is visible, and when you zoom out far enough to make visual identification of units difficult they are abstracted as icons representing the type of unit -- I'd like to see that functionality expanded upon (to more capably handle groups of units and display other information) and included in more games.

(Note that Supreme Commander is the most recent RTS I have played by quite a long shot, so it's entirely possible I've missed this feature in other newer games.)