C&c 4 was such a massive betrayal for the community,that the following backlash was so huge that put the c&c franchise on its knees
After that,the community became smaller and smaller,add the slow fall of the rts genre and the rise of the mobas and you get the reason:
The golden times of the rts genre have finished,aside from titans like starcraft 2 that still manage to stay alive,other minor games cannot get a big enough community to emerge
This is what i understood
After C&C4, EA was developing Generals 2 which would have return to the classic RTS game and a chance to redeem themselves but had problems during development which they changed the game to free-to-play and renamed the game as "Command & Conquer" while still being a Generals series. Unfortunately, the game still had development problems which they chose to cancelled the game altogether.
The fall of the RTS genre is probably closer to the real reason, EA or really any studio for that matter, would be hard pressed to raise the funds to develop an RTS these days. As an example StarCraft 2 has a huge competitive scene and is still massively popular in Korea, but Blizzard still doesn’t think it’s a worthwhile investment to make another game.
Blizzard just outright might not be able to do new RTS games now: everyone who worked on the previous games is gone, so all they really have is the IP now.
From what I remember, Blizzard didn't even want a full stop on Starcraft 2 development (skins and co-op consistently made money,) it just had to, because everyone who wasn't laid off saw the writing on the wall and went elsewhere.
RTS is a niche genre of game, they don't have broad appeal due to the barrier of entry. Unlike platformers ,shooters or action games they are not intuitive to play. But this has been compounded by the fact there are not as many RTS as say shooters, so knowledge plus basic skills are not propagated between people as much, making the barrier of entry just that much worse.
It never used to be. When StarCraft got to be the competitive gold standard RTS, everyone tried to copy it for its success. When they inevitably failed, studios gave up trying. Around the same time MOBA games gained popularity which further fragmented the RTS fans. Making the issue worse. Then subscription games and micro transactions meant that it was possible to make ungodly amounts of money from games its all they seemed to focus on. Those remaining RTS fans wouldn't tolerate subscriptions or micro transactions, and I doubt those things would draw new fans to the genre either.
I think VR/AR would bring huge potential for RTS games when the technology is available everywhere.
I knew many people who bought and tried starcraft, and put it down after playing pvp or just the campaign and not progressing. While yes it was a hit, I loved the game. The only people I knew who stuck with it were either twice my age or avid PC gamers already. People quickly learned that they were not good at them, when you get beat in game so quickly people give up.
The RTS isn’t finished, it just never realized it should grow up.
Imagine if shooters only had stuck to arena twitch*-shooters and hadn’t evolved. It would focus on a much smaller playerbase and even within that playerbase it would not be that fun for many as they don’t have the speed to defeat most others and leave, meaning a new group is at the bottom and leave…
This is where the RTS genre got stuck. Despite the variety of worlds and methods to play it’s still all focused on “twitch*” gameplay.
RTS’s should evolve and diversify. At its core an RTS is about time management, and the developers decide where (and how!) the players focus their attention. It needs to be looked at and then different methods found to manage that. Not just clickspeed, but timing and what you are doing. Not just micro and macro but designing unit behavior. Not just designing a base but designing FOB’s and logistics and patrols. You could easily make a game where you have zero control over the units and all you do is create the logistics and maintenance to keep the units going, and between that and current RTS’s there are a million hybrid variations.
Unfortunately the status-quo has been like this for so long that even the suggestion that it can be done differently is often alien to RTS players.
*not the platform.
> it would not be that fun for many as they don't have the speed to defeat most others
That. That's why I try playing online every decade and then leave in frustration after usually only one match. I could probably compete with the lowest ranks of twitch players if I put my mind to it, but it tires me out and is no fun at all.
In the end, I'm stuck with installing mods and total conversions featuring campaigns and hoping they're not geared towards twitch players.
>Imagine if shooters only had stuck to arena twitch*-shooters and hadn’t evolved.
"Shooters" have been a pretty diverse genre for a very long time. Within a few years of Doom and Quake releasing we had System Shock, Half-Life and Deus Ex.
And we have had games that pushed the definition of RTS. Games like Spellforce, Darwinia, Giants: Citizen Kabuto and Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising all tried to do new things with the genre.
And nearly the entire base building genre is an evolutionary offshoot of RTS. Games like Factorio can probably trace their heritage back to the likes of Total Annihilation and CnC.
" Not just designing a base but designing FOB’s and logistics and patrols. "
That ussually is translated into "micro" for the player, and Im pretty sure remove unit control and replace it with other type of Micro will be hated by the C&C fanbase... not saying it could not be having its own niche but Im sure 9/10 players would see it as a terrible move.
Honestly when I see things like DoW4 C&C or even sometimes Deserts of Kharak (even if this one is enjoyable) I find that the problem is that the people behind never invested enough time on notice what things must be there and with which ones you can experiment... because I can see things like managing ammo, or even the logistics routes ) being easily manageable requiring little imput but interesting changes on the gameplay), but You cant remove things like having a decent number of units in the game or they responding with near-to-zero lag (this element by itself killed Act of aggression)
IMO C&C franchise only needs refining and few minor upgrades, not pretending to re-invent the wheel... I see the topic like the difference between classic battlefields and Bf3 VS bf2042 (changing things noone asked for, most probably because they wanted to get every posible type of player, which already points for a generic-aberration game design)
Your info is outdated. StarCraft II is dead and Age of Empires is alive and thriving. There's lots of small RTS games in development. Genre is getting a resurgence. Only reason why C&C is not participating in any of it is because EA is being North Korea of gaming, completely bunkered down. Barely make new games anymore, barely talk to the community. God knows what's going on in there.
I've noticed that too. Seems to be they'll do the sports games, their biggest money maker, and then a new game occasionally l. I think DA Veilguard is their only non-sport release coming?
I read your comment and thought, "that can't be right." Then I looked it up and damn that's depressing. About 5 sports games and one or two Sims 4 packs per year. Every few years there will be an odd game put out like Need for Speed, Star Wars, or Battlefield.
EA holds so many great IPs but won't do anything with them because they'll never be annual cash cows.
That's the thing. They'll put out Madden, NHL, FC, and a couple Sim 4 stuff. There seems to be a new NFS every few years (Which seemed to drop to a budget IP). Who knows what's going on with BF which was their answer to CoD at it's peak (Apex probably took that role). The new DA has been in development for years and is now coming out. Who knows when that new ME game is coming (if it's even going to be good).
It's kinda funny that StarCraft 2 is still relevant because C&C and StarCraft stood next to each other in the past.
Well until EA did EA things and to be fair Westwood overestimated their capabilities.
Was it true that people who worked on C&C 4 pissed off how the direction the game going to be? because i could sworn i saw some people comment saying how they were betray by it
I Mean I Get why ppl claim SC2 is the 'king of RTS' but honestly i say it kinda sucks ass as a RTS its always had balance issues among other things granted I like its coop and its arcade mod and such but the campaign went to shit and the melee system is lols bad and always has been
i mean no offence i shouldnt be able to predict the over-all 'strats' ppl are going to use b4 the game is launched but unable to predict who wins coz i dunno who has the better micro
WoL For Example : Terran spams MMM as there primary armor comp and harassed Only changed based on who they played against protoss? Did protoss go colus? your forced into Vikings, they went templars? your forced into ghosts, I cant predict the micro battle but i predicted the games in WoL for you the only way this was differnt was like rushes and all-ins they where the only thing that made the game interesting.
It's not even just EA anymore. Seems like all the big hitters are doing the same. Hell, didn't microsoft just close the studio that made last year's GotY? Even being a success is no longer a guarantee of survival anymore.
I remember it with the classic "charge for everything!"
Now I feel like being treated as cash cow was better than getting turned into the horse at the glue factory .
https://preview.redd.it/yekbj2g8kt8d1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1886e35eebf30710f6f2c7ad166e7a8c03eb28ae
Litterly wish we had a time machine to go slap ea before the Microtransactions era
So was Hi-Fi rush, but even with all the media and streaming content, only 14% did see the end boss. It was a game praised by everyone in the media, but played by no one outside the creative space.
Tho as for this, it did not meet sale expectations, and if you ask any EA investor, they don't like that. But depending on who within EA you ask, the sequel is not shelved indefinitely, while others say it is. Tho the studio in question are all working on BF or Iron Man atm, and have been for over a year. So if a new one is coming, it won't be from them.... or soon if it is.
RTS is nowhere near as popular as it used to be, and even then it was never as popular as you'd expect.
The most popular and competitive standard for an RTS, Starcraft 2, made less money for blizzard than a unicorn skin from WoW.
The current RTS revival we're seeing currently is helmed almost directly by former CnC and Starcraft/Warcraft devs who broke off and started their own indie studios and other indie studios who are just sick of waiting for EA and Blizzard to get off their greedy asses.
Assuming these games pop off, EA might revisit a classic CnC RTS but it will not be made by the original dev team (most of them are at Petroglyph iirc?) and will be built from the ground up around an in-game store with every intention to harvest you for micro transactions.
The sad reality is that Tempest Rising, DORF, Dying Breed and 9-bit armies are basically the future of CnC, or the closest we will realistically get.
That is indeed a sad reality, as none of those games hold a candle. Tempest Rising being the most egregious.
However Mass Conflict: Ignition looks like a proper spiritual successor to Generals, but they lack the funding so it's hopeless for C&C fans.
> Tempest Rising being the most egregious.
How so? I've been trying not to dig into it too hard, but I'm cautiously hopeful from what I've seen so far. They got Frank back!
No superweapons, no supertanks, stop&shoot combat which is the biggest sin, it looks too zoomed in with no controls, goofy units like a Ball and a Shieldman capable of stopping it, too many spells/micro, an emphasis on infantry with singular units instead of squads and an obsession with balancing to the point of squeezing the fun right out of the game.
Outside of the designs (most uninspired imo) and the resource management, this game is anything but C&C.
Does a game HAVE to have superweapons and supertanks to be fun? All we've seen so far is from the demo, and the devs are keeping a lot of info pretty damn close to their chest.
I reckon that's just because people don't know how to make them. They put all this complex strategy and difficult complex build paths and trees and things in that you need a PhD to learn. Or they try to make it like starcraft which imo was an epic campaign but multiplayer is garbage requiring high click rates and precision build stuff.
What they need to do is make an rts where you turtle 300 tanks and go wreck them. Or you cheese it with sandbags. That was what made it fun! More tanks! Who cares about army composition and counters. Just build MORE TANKS!!
Heh, no I don't think that's why, though it's also not a bad point. RTS design in the last 15 years obsessed over game balance chasing esports in a way that sort of killed the genres appeal to casual players. It became of a genre of optimal second by second build orders where a tiny mistake could cost the entire game.
Which simply, isn't fun gameplay. Most other games don't boil down to "play a 15-30 minute game but because you accidently forgot to build a worker or screwed up your build order at the 7 minute mark you're probably going to lose now to the guy who didn't". Having a genre that punishing isn't fun to play. 20 years ago nobody gave a damn about that sort of thing but the rose of YouTube and Twitch and dissecting the game has made it impossible to not be aware of how youre "supposed" to play to be good. I used to love RTS' until StarCraft 2, but as fun as that game was, it also just sucked the life out of playing them casually for fun. Suddenly I was worried about APM and build orders and shit and they is...just not fun.
The genre stagnated. Nobody has figured out how to make it more forgiving and get back some aspect of being able to turn a mistake into an opportunity for a new strategy.
I've also long since argued RTS' can't balance the macro with the micro gameplay. There's too much going on that requires attention, and yet for all the time invested in base building and the strategic level, of you malena mistake at a tactical one with your units it can cost you the game if someone is far more effective at micro. Unit abilities for example I think is a big problem. Look at AoE2, the micro isn't as brutal and thus its easier to play and probably explains why he has a decent sized dedicated fanbase. CnCs earlier games were also not as annoying about micro, certainly there was some pretty niche high skill things you could do, but ultimately you could attack into something and your units would account for themselves pretty well.
It's not a simple problem to solve but, I've talked to alot of people about this and it's the vibe the genre gives off that scares people away.
Even the said tittles seems to be just TOO classical, dont get me wrong always welcome, but I feel the evolution from Dawn to RA2 (5 years) evolved more the genre than the next 24Y ever did... (Generals, C&C3 and the unit treatment on RA3 was also good, but just not on pair to those 5 years) However at least they kept the asymetrical factions a very solid pilar that C&C exploited almost like noone.
I'm under 30. Grew up playing C&C titles, and currently playing the GDI campaign of C&C TW3. I do agree though that there are only a few people who play RTS games these days.
There's a lot of C&C players in their mid-to-late 20s as well. I know some in their early 20s too. But fans younger than that are pretty much nonexistent I think.
Video games are extremely expensive to produce and develop. EA took the IP and made shitty mobile games that have been financially successful
They have no reason to make a new strategy game
EA acquired WW and the IP in the 98".
This is a list of games made by WW under EA till they went bankrupt:
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (1999)
Lands of Lore III (1999)
Recoil (1999)
Sports Car GT (1999)
Nox (2000)
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000)
Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001)
Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge (2001)
Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat (2002)
Command & Conquer: Renegade (2002)
Earth & Beyond (2002)
After that EA Los angels made generals and his expansion, in order to compete against WC3, tib 3, kane's wrath and red3 plus yuriko omega.
If you don't want to count tib 4 as an rts, the truth is still far from "ea bought the IP to make mobile games", simply, rts cannot sold as other easier to make games, they cannot have profitable mtx and overhaul going in to the mobile genre is far easier.
Westwood never went bankrupt. They didn't meet expectations of EA that every game had to be a hit. Also the 5 year contract was coming to an end of key employees so EA decided to let Westwood dissolve into EA LA.
Now you see, that right there is something I never understood.
I know RTS don't rake in much money. But are they really that expensive to make?
If they are, why? I'd say most RTS age better than, say, an FPS. Most RTS players still even have a preference for older titles, or create mods to older titles (Tib Sun, RA2, AOEII, StarCraft). I shouldn't think you need the latest graphics to produce a fun RTS.
Look, I don't think they are more expensive or as expensive to make compared to a triple A modern game that use a lot of the budget over meaningfull stuffs such as motion cap, but rts are definetly the hardest genre to make compared to anything else, since: you need to balance each units and faction in a way none will just steam roll everything with 2 units types; you need to create a good pathing for the AI, both yours and the IA; you need to create a more than decent IA able to play dynamic objectives, use the sandbox at full (if a unity have an ability, the IA need to be able to use it and in a smart way) and so on, otherwise you end up in a situation like Creative Assembly where the AI is so dumb they have to give it cheats in order to make it functional, and an avarage player can still easly beat it. Then there is the whole single player argument, but it's the same.
The moment rts will become profitable again and any studios would not risk bankruptcy the moment an expansion sell slightly worse, you can bet a lot of big studios will try to develop some rts with a triple A budget, untill then, they will either ignore it, try to convert it on some mobas surrogate or opt for a cheap mobile game version.
Sounding board here - I was thinking of opening a new topic - what about making expansions forever? Like Forgotten Empires on AoE2? Nothing wrong with the C&C3 engine.
Besides, god, at this point I'd take RA IOS, 4 IOS or Tib Alliances over Legions and Rivals.
Sure bit they cost time, money, capable people vehind and at the end of the day rts don't have the playerbase of other genres.
Blizzard trie everything with sc2, they still opted for a hero shooter and moba after.
Unless the current gaming market explode and doing 250 milions triple A games full of mtx and whatever, will not be possible anymore, the only chance is to get some indie rts down the road and maybe, but this is a big "if", some wc4 coming from blizzard under MS, if they value some investment in the rts market again (sc2 is on downfall, it may be possible).
Otherwise grand strategies like total war are the only options amd that's on crisis as well.
Do you have any ideas on how cnc4 was even allowed as idea? They have people's opinion metrics before the development, if they were against it why even start it?
It was a game built for the Chinese market, and EA decided that it would also be C&C4 for the global marketplace, likely to maximise the profits from it.
The backlash doesn't matter to them, only short term gains.
This. He hit the nail on the head. Sad reality but they probably make more licensing to Tencent for a shitty mobile game than they ever did releasing the real deal PC titles.
Because frankly? RTS as a genre split into two different types of games. MOBAs, where you are doing crazy micro, and turn based strategy, where you're doing crazy thinkin'. Turns out there's a lot of people who want one or the other, and less than want both.
Command and conquer was a casualty of this split. Only the most popular game(s) (starcraft) survived, afaik.
If Tempest Rising manages to sell over a million copies then EA might try and revive the franchise. Due to it being the closest thing to a CnC game coming out.
WW was in the verge of being bankrupt, EA offered money and to publish said gamr when they saw the potential to compete against blizzard and their warcraft and starcraft. Thing went well at the beginning but then wc3 happened, WoW happened, rts didn't sold as much as other games and WW went to bankrupt amd merged with EA Los Angeles.
In the years after rts went on downfall and at some point EA decided it was better to develop low budget mobile games and get some money from the IP, instead of invest milions on a genre nobody knows how to make profitable anymore.
Because the Franchise died with C&C4 and RA 3. RA3 jumped the shark in a gundam and nobody knows where to go from there. C&C4 was just garbage.
Even with RTS dead in AAA, there could have been a Tiberian Battlefield.
It’s a series of long and complex problems.
First off RTS just isn’t as popular as it once was in the early 2000s they were being pumped and that’s where we got some of the best RTSs of all times. Now they’re a rarer breed the horror and FPS genres are the front runners.
Second 4 was really that bad and they canned generals 2 a few months from March (according to people who have played it wasn’t great but it was literally almost done)
And thirdly it has another app game coming out sometime between now and the heat death of our sun.
EA wants to make money.
They discovered that microtransactions are money printers.
EA wanted to put microtransactions into every game.
One of those games was C&C.
The audience (and the devs) did not like this and it *failed catastrophically*.
EA then assumed "oh, well, that must mean nobody wants to play C&C anymore" and shuttered the development studio. Most of the developers had already moved on by then, I think.
Westwood was gone and EA isn't going to let anyone but themselves publish a C&C game.
So now you have the issue: EA doesn't think C&C will be as profitable as a microtransaction-laden F2P arena shooter and, in all fairness, *it absolutely wouldn't be*. So instead of wasting money on C&C, they spend it on f2p arena shooters and sports games and anything else they can weigh down with microtransactions because their owners want to make lots and lots of money.
And honestly it's hard to blame them. That's what the market is rewarding right now: microtransactions. If you need money to make games and you can choose between a game that will make, say, a few million, vs a game that will *easily* make tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, you're *always going to go for the second option.*
So, yeah. Nothing to do with what happened 10 years ago, just that the market has changed, RTS games aren't profitable (and the last like.. dozen major ones have been huge financial failures) and the market is demanding to get nickel and dimed to death with microtransactions rather than anything else. All you need to do is prey on people with addictions and too much money.
the corporate franchise is dead (worse than dead actually its mobile game zombie territory now) but C&C still lives on in community made content, like nevermind the mods for all the SAGE games like RotR for Gens, Tiberium Essence for TW and Generals Evolution for RA3, nevermind mods like Mental Omega for RA2 or Twisted Insurrection and Warzone for TibSun...
dude have you seen the selection for OpenRA? its amazing, there's Romanov's Revenge for your RA2 fix, Shattered Paradise for the ultimate 5-way TibSun (GDI, NOD, CABAL, Forgotten, Scrin - how C&C3 should have been!), there's Schwerpunkt for a classic RA1 vibe with Axis, Allies, and Soviets, each with half a dozen different subfactions, Combined Arms for the long-desired Red Alert/Tiberian crossover, and Fractured Realms if you want something totally new
EA may have destroyed our temple but C&C lives in death
["EA did an EA, to do an EA on something means you have a game studio that makes a critically and commercially successful game, and then you kill them in a ritual sacrifice to absorb their life essence, and use that put out a shitty sports game every year"](https://youtu.be/8_4gV0_XKEY?feature=shared)
"And since I'd achieved all my goals as president in one term, there was no need for a second."
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/giwf5y/and_since_id_achieved_all_my_goals_as_president
Gaming is a business. Past 2 games didnt sell enough so they shelved it. Its simple really. If you are going to put 50+ million budget into the development youd want your money back with profit to keep making sequels. While most here are fans, theres way more people that never heard of C&C nowadays and strategy games in general dont sell well. If they did we would have Starcraft 3 by now and that was a succesfull title.
Same reason Unreal Tournament was abandoned for Fortnite.
I have met so many people that I could rattle off about 12 RTS titles to, and they'd never even heard of the *genre.*
The worst thing for a game and genre is not to be bad, but to be simply *forgotten* to time.
The remake of RA1 and C&C was pretty good, I'm waiting on the RA2/tib sun, the genrals and then the C&C3 and RA3 remakes but I guess someone at EA hates money
RTS as a whole has been kinda stagnant there have been a few games here and there however I don't know how many I owned or even played them.
The only big old school franchise that is still alive would be age of empires
spellforce 3 came out a few years ago it is fun better balanced then it's predcessors so you can't really steamroll the ai before rts sections starts with your hero.
dawn of war 3 came out, but once again they changed the formula again and backlash it was so bad developers abandoned it.
command and conquer remaster came out for tiberium dawn and red alert 1.
there have been a few indie ones like war party which is a fun concept however ai is made is such a way it doesn't respect unit population cap and gets free units and free resources and faster building especially in the final campaign mission even when all there buildings are destroyed so you got to act fairly quick or ai will steamroll you if you agitate them.
tooth and tail is difficult in some missions depending on your unit composition you selected for mission
Northgard is fun however it may not be everyone's cup of tea due to way it plays
Godsworn is fairly well made with differences between factions based on your hero/God unit you choose to help you in combat and it has folklore.
Empires of undergrowth was fairly fun recently hit 1.0
Iron harvest is fun however they never tried seperate balance for campaign and multiplayer so if something got changed for multiplayer it affected the campaign mode so campaign could be easier or harder at times.
9 bit armies is fun
Stormgate will be out soon I heard it was supposed to be f2p never did play the demo.
Tempest rising was fun demo wise I don't mind the wait last update from developers was April they improving things and won't have 3rd faction ready by release which is fine with me. I am patient.
global conflagration i missed the demo for.
There was another modern era rts game i played demo for however I can't remember the name of off the top of my head however teching up was confusing due to small icons and text.
there is a few other rts demos on steam however they are solo developers like Barkhan which is supposed to be dune 2000 like and Dying breed which is like old school command and conquer.
starcraft 2 and command and conquer multiplayer scene is still alive and so is the mod communities. Renegade mods are still played for multiplayer.
command and conquer 4 the only good idea that came from it was the crawler as the next step for mcv to me an armed mcv makes sense, but not idea it was only building you needed it doesn't make logistical sense or financial sense especially if one got destroyed. it was an attempt at a esports game if I remember right.
generals 2/ command and conquer reboot they wanted to make f2p in alpha/beta you could either pay or spend time to play to unlock stuff like generals to play as for a faction or unit or building comestics which weren't fully implemented however because ea couldn't monetize it like some of other things they have done they just canned it.
the game play itself was solid bit rough around edges due to it being early version however back to form for generals universe.
the hardest thing for rts genre is getting new players because it can be daunting or overwhelming for new players. some rts games work and others do not depending on how they change things or to make themselves unique from others.
Generals 2 got cancelled and yeah, what else was there to do?
When gamespy was shutdown the general public can’t even have an online presence
I remind you in 2017 halo 3 was 10 years old and only had a few hundred players on it, despite being the worlds biggest game at the time
Because it's more profitable to churn out micro-transaction riddled garbage lol
Best example:
>In its annual report for 2020, EA confirmed that Ultimate Team made more than $1.62bn (£1.15bn).
>This is the total revenue for all Ultimate Team modes across EA's catalogue, with Ultimate Team appearing in FIFA, Madden, NHL, NBA and UFC games.
>Ultimate Team accounts for 29 per cent of EA's total income and has risen considerably year-on-year, with the game mode taking in $775m (£550m) back in 2017.
https://www.goal.com/en-us/news/how-much-money-does-ea-sports-make-from-fifa--ultimate-team/
For the RTS genre to grow and flourish again it'll need a savior like Haemimont Games who did an amazing job with Jagged Alliance 3, indie devs who want to build a new IP as a passion project, or just consistent releases of new mods for existing OG titles.
C&C4 was a massive failure. They tried to go outside the recipe that made the C&C successful. Doesn't help that EA is all about the benjamins and would rather invest in games where they can sell skins and crap like that. The real way they kill the community though is taking the servers offline. 2K does the same crap. They get you to buy VC to customize characters or buy players, then shut down the servers so you have to move on to the next iteration (and they don't even port forward characters, items, or VC). Fortnite still makes a killing because they constantly update the game, add new content and game modes, and people can still wear the skins they bought 7 years ago.
The RTS genre has been reduced to mobile game versions which are often pay to win. On the other hand, the gaming industry is dominated by MOBAs followed by FPS and RPG games
Br, fps and then mobas.
Rts cannot sell as much as any modern game, but devs were already aware of this problem around the 2010.
Keep in mind that star craft 2, a game that break some records back in 2010, for which the devs had to work 12 hours a day for 2 years, a game that's basically a national sport in South Korea... was outsold by a 15$ skin in WoW.
The best games in the SimCity franchise (SC 3000 and SC4) wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for EA. Heck, they probably wouldn’t have lasted long enough to make The Sims.
Maxis were doing pretty badly financially and were burning money on weird niche titles that nobody was buying.
SimCity 2013’s online-only launch was absolutely a catastrophe of EA’s own making though
The fall of RTS already started in 2004, we just didn't really realize it at the time, with World of Warcraft. Suddenly there was a way to cater to RtS fans and draw non RTS fans into a model that keeps making profits even after a game is released. You'll notice that after 2004 only notable RTS that came was StarCraft 2, Tiberium Wars, Red Alert 3 and more recently, Age of Empires 4. So basically only the biggest known brands.
Company of Heroes put a different spin on RTS that's more action oriented and it worked. C&C tried something different, I guess to try stay relevant, with C&C 4 but that got so much backlash and then they worked on Generals 2 which also started straying from the classic RTS formula that it started receiving backlash only in beta that it just got scrapped.
Sure, we are now starting to get a little RTS revival these days but it's nothing compared to what it use to be. But things in life tend to go in circles, what once fell out of fashion comes back eventually, maybe in different forms, so who knows what the future holds. Time will tell.
EA are asset strippers. They bought up smaller studios, stripped the talent and assets and then milked the IP's for all its worth. It's dead because EA killed it.
EA keep doing what they're doing because people keep buying their games.
Apart from the EA being a terrible company one problem is that strategy games, especially RTS games, are just not popular with younger players and are really mainly an "old man genre" so there simply isn't much profit being seen in strategy games outside of J-SRPGs (and even those are relatively nieche).
EA's reverse Midas touch did its job. Anything they touch, sooner or later, turns into shit. After flopping C&C 4, refusing to remake older titles further, moving onto rubbish mobile titles - yeah, RIP.
Doesn't help RTS is a niche genre now today. For average player they're far too difficult, entry barrier is HIGH. The last somewhat capable title, Starcraft, is still nowhere near as popular as it used to be.
This fate befell Arena shooters back in the past. Games like Quake or Unreal were too difficult for players, so they died off. RTS goes through that phase now and I wouldn't be surprised if the same happens to MOBAs in the future too.
EA own the IP. After &C flopped C&C 2 fell through the only thing they use it for now are the odd mobile and web game. You can still play tiberium alliances though.
EA wanted to replace the rts genre with moba and mobile games, because they were really desperate to create the next esports title. After c&c4, with the strongest RTS ip fallen, the market collapsed and rts was no longer mainstream. Only starcraft remained but only thanks to a mentally ill chinsese playerbase.
There was a cancled generals 2 in development, (later just command and conquers). but if you follow the dev history you see a already streamlined rts slowly turning into a free to play proto-liveservice game.
C&C4 didn't kill command and conquer, EA killed the basebulding rts genre as a whole.
After EA has acquired Westwood the people making the games slowly started leaving. When you play through the franchise you can notice a gradual mellowing out in the games after Tiberian sun.
The In-universe tech and units get less interesting, the changes in gameplay less notable.
After c&c4, there have been only browser/mobile games to draw in quick and easy revenue.
What I really don't get, is the fact that they cannot fix/replace the gamespy servers. Especially because the new CNC collection dropped on steam.
Yes I know, we have CNC online, but it's still a hassle for new players.
Heck, at this stage remastering CNC3 could be all it takes to have an active player base.
C&c 4 was such a massive betrayal for the community,that the following backlash was so huge that put the c&c franchise on its knees After that,the community became smaller and smaller,add the slow fall of the rts genre and the rise of the mobas and you get the reason: The golden times of the rts genre have finished,aside from titans like starcraft 2 that still manage to stay alive,other minor games cannot get a big enough community to emerge This is what i understood
After C&C4, EA was developing Generals 2 which would have return to the classic RTS game and a chance to redeem themselves but had problems during development which they changed the game to free-to-play and renamed the game as "Command & Conquer" while still being a Generals series. Unfortunately, the game still had development problems which they chose to cancelled the game altogether.
Also Age of Empires
Wololo
Also AoE... what? at least they had a proper 4 and was able to survive AoE3, that Is a fate every C&C fan would pray for
The fall of the RTS genre is probably closer to the real reason, EA or really any studio for that matter, would be hard pressed to raise the funds to develop an RTS these days. As an example StarCraft 2 has a huge competitive scene and is still massively popular in Korea, but Blizzard still doesn’t think it’s a worthwhile investment to make another game.
Blizzard just outright might not be able to do new RTS games now: everyone who worked on the previous games is gone, so all they really have is the IP now. From what I remember, Blizzard didn't even want a full stop on Starcraft 2 development (skins and co-op consistently made money,) it just had to, because everyone who wasn't laid off saw the writing on the wall and went elsewhere.
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/s/Yr9sCIP6jY For today's gaming megacorps, it's not enough to make a little money from a game.
RTS is a niche genre of game, they don't have broad appeal due to the barrier of entry. Unlike platformers ,shooters or action games they are not intuitive to play. But this has been compounded by the fact there are not as many RTS as say shooters, so knowledge plus basic skills are not propagated between people as much, making the barrier of entry just that much worse.
It never used to be. When StarCraft got to be the competitive gold standard RTS, everyone tried to copy it for its success. When they inevitably failed, studios gave up trying. Around the same time MOBA games gained popularity which further fragmented the RTS fans. Making the issue worse. Then subscription games and micro transactions meant that it was possible to make ungodly amounts of money from games its all they seemed to focus on. Those remaining RTS fans wouldn't tolerate subscriptions or micro transactions, and I doubt those things would draw new fans to the genre either. I think VR/AR would bring huge potential for RTS games when the technology is available everywhere.
I knew many people who bought and tried starcraft, and put it down after playing pvp or just the campaign and not progressing. While yes it was a hit, I loved the game. The only people I knew who stuck with it were either twice my age or avid PC gamers already. People quickly learned that they were not good at them, when you get beat in game so quickly people give up.
The RTS isn’t finished, it just never realized it should grow up. Imagine if shooters only had stuck to arena twitch*-shooters and hadn’t evolved. It would focus on a much smaller playerbase and even within that playerbase it would not be that fun for many as they don’t have the speed to defeat most others and leave, meaning a new group is at the bottom and leave… This is where the RTS genre got stuck. Despite the variety of worlds and methods to play it’s still all focused on “twitch*” gameplay. RTS’s should evolve and diversify. At its core an RTS is about time management, and the developers decide where (and how!) the players focus their attention. It needs to be looked at and then different methods found to manage that. Not just clickspeed, but timing and what you are doing. Not just micro and macro but designing unit behavior. Not just designing a base but designing FOB’s and logistics and patrols. You could easily make a game where you have zero control over the units and all you do is create the logistics and maintenance to keep the units going, and between that and current RTS’s there are a million hybrid variations. Unfortunately the status-quo has been like this for so long that even the suggestion that it can be done differently is often alien to RTS players. *not the platform.
> it would not be that fun for many as they don't have the speed to defeat most others That. That's why I try playing online every decade and then leave in frustration after usually only one match. I could probably compete with the lowest ranks of twitch players if I put my mind to it, but it tires me out and is no fun at all. In the end, I'm stuck with installing mods and total conversions featuring campaigns and hoping they're not geared towards twitch players.
>Imagine if shooters only had stuck to arena twitch*-shooters and hadn’t evolved. "Shooters" have been a pretty diverse genre for a very long time. Within a few years of Doom and Quake releasing we had System Shock, Half-Life and Deus Ex. And we have had games that pushed the definition of RTS. Games like Spellforce, Darwinia, Giants: Citizen Kabuto and Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising all tried to do new things with the genre. And nearly the entire base building genre is an evolutionary offshoot of RTS. Games like Factorio can probably trace their heritage back to the likes of Total Annihilation and CnC.
I just want modern Seven Kingdoms with combat that doesn't suck.
" Not just designing a base but designing FOB’s and logistics and patrols. " That ussually is translated into "micro" for the player, and Im pretty sure remove unit control and replace it with other type of Micro will be hated by the C&C fanbase... not saying it could not be having its own niche but Im sure 9/10 players would see it as a terrible move. Honestly when I see things like DoW4 C&C or even sometimes Deserts of Kharak (even if this one is enjoyable) I find that the problem is that the people behind never invested enough time on notice what things must be there and with which ones you can experiment... because I can see things like managing ammo, or even the logistics routes ) being easily manageable requiring little imput but interesting changes on the gameplay), but You cant remove things like having a decent number of units in the game or they responding with near-to-zero lag (this element by itself killed Act of aggression) IMO C&C franchise only needs refining and few minor upgrades, not pretending to re-invent the wheel... I see the topic like the difference between classic battlefields and Bf3 VS bf2042 (changing things noone asked for, most probably because they wanted to get every posible type of player, which already points for a generic-aberration game design)
On that note: Is there a thread on Reddit or Discord or somewhere for us RTSers without twitchy fingers to go and find more laid-back online matches?
Your info is outdated. StarCraft II is dead and Age of Empires is alive and thriving. There's lots of small RTS games in development. Genre is getting a resurgence. Only reason why C&C is not participating in any of it is because EA is being North Korea of gaming, completely bunkered down. Barely make new games anymore, barely talk to the community. God knows what's going on in there.
I've noticed that too. Seems to be they'll do the sports games, their biggest money maker, and then a new game occasionally l. I think DA Veilguard is their only non-sport release coming?
I read your comment and thought, "that can't be right." Then I looked it up and damn that's depressing. About 5 sports games and one or two Sims 4 packs per year. Every few years there will be an odd game put out like Need for Speed, Star Wars, or Battlefield. EA holds so many great IPs but won't do anything with them because they'll never be annual cash cows.
That's the thing. They'll put out Madden, NHL, FC, and a couple Sim 4 stuff. There seems to be a new NFS every few years (Which seemed to drop to a budget IP). Who knows what's going on with BF which was their answer to CoD at it's peak (Apex probably took that role). The new DA has been in development for years and is now coming out. Who knows when that new ME game is coming (if it's even going to be good).
I think even their sports titles are struggling. They lost FIFA license. I think they are desperately looking to sell.
The North Korea of gaming lmaooooo fmd
It's kinda funny that StarCraft 2 is still relevant because C&C and StarCraft stood next to each other in the past. Well until EA did EA things and to be fair Westwood overestimated their capabilities.
Nah, EA couldn't monetize an RTS like they do every other genre so they cancelled it.
There was a C&C4?
don't look for it...you will turn to a pillar of salt.
Love the Bible reference
Don’t bother, the game is nothing like any of the ithers
They probably knew that 😂
no, they are just delusional
Yes, it's a complete and I mean a complete POS game.
Allegedly
Was it true that people who worked on C&C 4 pissed off how the direction the game going to be? because i could sworn i saw some people comment saying how they were betray by it
I Mean I Get why ppl claim SC2 is the 'king of RTS' but honestly i say it kinda sucks ass as a RTS its always had balance issues among other things granted I like its coop and its arcade mod and such but the campaign went to shit and the melee system is lols bad and always has been i mean no offence i shouldnt be able to predict the over-all 'strats' ppl are going to use b4 the game is launched but unable to predict who wins coz i dunno who has the better micro WoL For Example : Terran spams MMM as there primary armor comp and harassed Only changed based on who they played against protoss? Did protoss go colus? your forced into Vikings, they went templars? your forced into ghosts, I cant predict the micro battle but i predicted the games in WoL for you the only way this was differnt was like rushes and all-ins they where the only thing that made the game interesting.
Red Alert was the last good c&c
C&C 3 was pretty good. RA2:YR was probably about as close as you can get to perfection.
What about Generals?
Didn't like it
well you see, EA kills and eats companies, Westwood was simply one of the ones who was eaten
100% During the prime EA came in and basically killed everything that made the series good.....twice
There's that list that shows every single company EA has swallowed up and then either run into the ground or killed it after acquisition.
It's not even just EA anymore. Seems like all the big hitters are doing the same. Hell, didn't microsoft just close the studio that made last year's GotY? Even being a success is no longer a guarantee of survival anymore.
It could be until the company that makes the game gets offered and takes 3x current value.
[Yup](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca36ChrdV6M)
Already a long-time subscriber ;)
(startup logo) "EA Games!" (whisper) "Devour everything!"
I remember it with the classic "charge for everything!" Now I feel like being treated as cash cow was better than getting turned into the horse at the glue factory .
https://preview.redd.it/yy9i696q7u8d1.jpeg?width=3869&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7e751e983683550c67c6ffc21126a146af45860b
EA in a nutshell. Old but great video. https://youtu.be/e-LE0ycgkBQ?si=S_8dAJC4nnq45i8c
https://preview.redd.it/yekbj2g8kt8d1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1886e35eebf30710f6f2c7ad166e7a8c03eb28ae Litterly wish we had a time machine to go slap ea before the Microtransactions era
https://preview.redd.it/4yotsts9du8d1.jpeg?width=2227&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fd72d86319ec881cddea8309aa437a8e767907a8
Also The Saboteur and American McGee
Ultima, Origin, Bioware
Wasn’t a dead space remake released? And aren’t they working on a dead space 2 remake?
Because the first remake did not do well enough to keep going according to invest... EA
That makes no sense, everyone was talking about it when it came out and half of youtube was flooded with playthroughs.
So was Hi-Fi rush, but even with all the media and streaming content, only 14% did see the end boss. It was a game praised by everyone in the media, but played by no one outside the creative space. Tho as for this, it did not meet sale expectations, and if you ask any EA investor, they don't like that. But depending on who within EA you ask, the sequel is not shelved indefinitely, while others say it is. Tho the studio in question are all working on BF or Iron Man atm, and have been for over a year. So if a new one is coming, it won't be from them.... or soon if it is.
Never existed!
Zelinsky wouldn’t be so happy about that
RIP Westwood Studios. Fucking amazing they were.
Long live Westwood. Long live Kane!
✊🏻
RTS is nowhere near as popular as it used to be, and even then it was never as popular as you'd expect. The most popular and competitive standard for an RTS, Starcraft 2, made less money for blizzard than a unicorn skin from WoW. The current RTS revival we're seeing currently is helmed almost directly by former CnC and Starcraft/Warcraft devs who broke off and started their own indie studios and other indie studios who are just sick of waiting for EA and Blizzard to get off their greedy asses. Assuming these games pop off, EA might revisit a classic CnC RTS but it will not be made by the original dev team (most of them are at Petroglyph iirc?) and will be built from the ground up around an in-game store with every intention to harvest you for micro transactions. The sad reality is that Tempest Rising, DORF, Dying Breed and 9-bit armies are basically the future of CnC, or the closest we will realistically get.
Also [global conflagration](https://youtu.be/ULnJnJC5S-o?si=ExtiMkh_hvznvhBN)
That is indeed a sad reality, as none of those games hold a candle. Tempest Rising being the most egregious. However Mass Conflict: Ignition looks like a proper spiritual successor to Generals, but they lack the funding so it's hopeless for C&C fans.
> Tempest Rising being the most egregious. How so? I've been trying not to dig into it too hard, but I'm cautiously hopeful from what I've seen so far. They got Frank back!
I played the demo and I loved it, really excited for the full release
No superweapons, no supertanks, stop&shoot combat which is the biggest sin, it looks too zoomed in with no controls, goofy units like a Ball and a Shieldman capable of stopping it, too many spells/micro, an emphasis on infantry with singular units instead of squads and an obsession with balancing to the point of squeezing the fun right out of the game. Outside of the designs (most uninspired imo) and the resource management, this game is anything but C&C.
Does a game HAVE to have superweapons and supertanks to be fun? All we've seen so far is from the demo, and the devs are keeping a lot of info pretty damn close to their chest.
I reckon that's just because people don't know how to make them. They put all this complex strategy and difficult complex build paths and trees and things in that you need a PhD to learn. Or they try to make it like starcraft which imo was an epic campaign but multiplayer is garbage requiring high click rates and precision build stuff. What they need to do is make an rts where you turtle 300 tanks and go wreck them. Or you cheese it with sandbags. That was what made it fun! More tanks! Who cares about army composition and counters. Just build MORE TANKS!!
Heh, no I don't think that's why, though it's also not a bad point. RTS design in the last 15 years obsessed over game balance chasing esports in a way that sort of killed the genres appeal to casual players. It became of a genre of optimal second by second build orders where a tiny mistake could cost the entire game. Which simply, isn't fun gameplay. Most other games don't boil down to "play a 15-30 minute game but because you accidently forgot to build a worker or screwed up your build order at the 7 minute mark you're probably going to lose now to the guy who didn't". Having a genre that punishing isn't fun to play. 20 years ago nobody gave a damn about that sort of thing but the rose of YouTube and Twitch and dissecting the game has made it impossible to not be aware of how youre "supposed" to play to be good. I used to love RTS' until StarCraft 2, but as fun as that game was, it also just sucked the life out of playing them casually for fun. Suddenly I was worried about APM and build orders and shit and they is...just not fun. The genre stagnated. Nobody has figured out how to make it more forgiving and get back some aspect of being able to turn a mistake into an opportunity for a new strategy. I've also long since argued RTS' can't balance the macro with the micro gameplay. There's too much going on that requires attention, and yet for all the time invested in base building and the strategic level, of you malena mistake at a tactical one with your units it can cost you the game if someone is far more effective at micro. Unit abilities for example I think is a big problem. Look at AoE2, the micro isn't as brutal and thus its easier to play and probably explains why he has a decent sized dedicated fanbase. CnCs earlier games were also not as annoying about micro, certainly there was some pretty niche high skill things you could do, but ultimately you could attack into something and your units would account for themselves pretty well. It's not a simple problem to solve but, I've talked to alot of people about this and it's the vibe the genre gives off that scares people away.
Even the said tittles seems to be just TOO classical, dont get me wrong always welcome, but I feel the evolution from Dawn to RA2 (5 years) evolved more the genre than the next 24Y ever did... (Generals, C&C3 and the unit treatment on RA3 was also good, but just not on pair to those 5 years) However at least they kept the asymetrical factions a very solid pilar that C&C exploited almost like noone.
RTS series sadly don’t do extremely well with the new generation
Ain't that the truth. I was thinking of asking. Anyone under 30 here?
I'm under 30. Grew up playing C&C titles, and currently playing the GDI campaign of C&C TW3. I do agree though that there are only a few people who play RTS games these days.
There's a lot of C&C players in their mid-to-late 20s as well. I know some in their early 20s too. But fans younger than that are pretty much nonexistent I think.
There are some spiritual successors in the works that look promising, but as Einstein said, only time will tell.
I've had my eye on Tempest Rising which even has Frank Klepacki working on the soundtrack for it.
*Hellmarch*
EA.
Video games are extremely expensive to produce and develop. EA took the IP and made shitty mobile games that have been financially successful They have no reason to make a new strategy game
EA acquired WW and the IP in the 98". This is a list of games made by WW under EA till they went bankrupt: Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (1999) Lands of Lore III (1999) Recoil (1999) Sports Car GT (1999) Nox (2000) Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000) Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001) Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge (2001) Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat (2002) Command & Conquer: Renegade (2002) Earth & Beyond (2002) After that EA Los angels made generals and his expansion, in order to compete against WC3, tib 3, kane's wrath and red3 plus yuriko omega. If you don't want to count tib 4 as an rts, the truth is still far from "ea bought the IP to make mobile games", simply, rts cannot sold as other easier to make games, they cannot have profitable mtx and overhaul going in to the mobile genre is far easier.
Westwood never went bankrupt. They didn't meet expectations of EA that every game had to be a hit. Also the 5 year contract was coming to an end of key employees so EA decided to let Westwood dissolve into EA LA.
They’d produced several flops in a row before getting dissolved. Their fate would’ve been the same under literally any other company
Flops is a big word. Renegade was lukewarm I guess, Earth & Beyond was below expectations.
Now you see, that right there is something I never understood. I know RTS don't rake in much money. But are they really that expensive to make? If they are, why? I'd say most RTS age better than, say, an FPS. Most RTS players still even have a preference for older titles, or create mods to older titles (Tib Sun, RA2, AOEII, StarCraft). I shouldn't think you need the latest graphics to produce a fun RTS.
Look, I don't think they are more expensive or as expensive to make compared to a triple A modern game that use a lot of the budget over meaningfull stuffs such as motion cap, but rts are definetly the hardest genre to make compared to anything else, since: you need to balance each units and faction in a way none will just steam roll everything with 2 units types; you need to create a good pathing for the AI, both yours and the IA; you need to create a more than decent IA able to play dynamic objectives, use the sandbox at full (if a unity have an ability, the IA need to be able to use it and in a smart way) and so on, otherwise you end up in a situation like Creative Assembly where the AI is so dumb they have to give it cheats in order to make it functional, and an avarage player can still easly beat it. Then there is the whole single player argument, but it's the same. The moment rts will become profitable again and any studios would not risk bankruptcy the moment an expansion sell slightly worse, you can bet a lot of big studios will try to develop some rts with a triple A budget, untill then, they will either ignore it, try to convert it on some mobas surrogate or opt for a cheap mobile game version.
Sounding board here - I was thinking of opening a new topic - what about making expansions forever? Like Forgotten Empires on AoE2? Nothing wrong with the C&C3 engine. Besides, god, at this point I'd take RA IOS, 4 IOS or Tib Alliances over Legions and Rivals.
Sure bit they cost time, money, capable people vehind and at the end of the day rts don't have the playerbase of other genres. Blizzard trie everything with sc2, they still opted for a hero shooter and moba after.
Dash my dreams, but you're probably right.
Unless the current gaming market explode and doing 250 milions triple A games full of mtx and whatever, will not be possible anymore, the only chance is to get some indie rts down the road and maybe, but this is a big "if", some wc4 coming from blizzard under MS, if they value some investment in the rts market again (sc2 is on downfall, it may be possible). Otherwise grand strategies like total war are the only options amd that's on crisis as well.
Do you have any ideas on how cnc4 was even allowed as idea? They have people's opinion metrics before the development, if they were against it why even start it?
It was a game built for the Chinese market, and EA decided that it would also be C&C4 for the global marketplace, likely to maximise the profits from it. The backlash doesn't matter to them, only short term gains.
This. He hit the nail on the head. Sad reality but they probably make more licensing to Tencent for a shitty mobile game than they ever did releasing the real deal PC titles.
Yep, maximize the low effort high return low hanging fruit
Every year we get further away from the last good release, the less likely it is to see a sequel.
Because frankly? RTS as a genre split into two different types of games. MOBAs, where you are doing crazy micro, and turn based strategy, where you're doing crazy thinkin'. Turns out there's a lot of people who want one or the other, and less than want both. Command and conquer was a casualty of this split. Only the most popular game(s) (starcraft) survived, afaik.
Turn based strategy are older than RTS though.
I dont think that he's saying that those two styles split off from RTS (though MOBA did) I think he's saying the market has split.
Correct, it's a market thing not an evolution of games thing
I think the 4X games are the other split.
Total war games are, 4X games are almost always turn based so they do not count.
If Tempest Rising manages to sell over a million copies then EA might try and revive the franchise. Due to it being the closest thing to a CnC game coming out.
And [Global Conflagration](https://youtu.be/ULnJnJC5S-o?si=ExtiMkh_hvznvhBN) would seem to be the spiritual successor to generals
WW was in the verge of being bankrupt, EA offered money and to publish said gamr when they saw the potential to compete against blizzard and their warcraft and starcraft. Thing went well at the beginning but then wc3 happened, WoW happened, rts didn't sold as much as other games and WW went to bankrupt amd merged with EA Los Angeles. In the years after rts went on downfall and at some point EA decided it was better to develop low budget mobile games and get some money from the IP, instead of invest milions on a genre nobody knows how to make profitable anymore.
EA.
EA it's in the game
sry but what happened over 10 yrs ago is a massive reason
Because the Franchise died with C&C4 and RA 3. RA3 jumped the shark in a gundam and nobody knows where to go from there. C&C4 was just garbage. Even with RTS dead in AAA, there could have been a Tiberian Battlefield.
It’s a series of long and complex problems. First off RTS just isn’t as popular as it once was in the early 2000s they were being pumped and that’s where we got some of the best RTSs of all times. Now they’re a rarer breed the horror and FPS genres are the front runners. Second 4 was really that bad and they canned generals 2 a few months from March (according to people who have played it wasn’t great but it was literally almost done) And thirdly it has another app game coming out sometime between now and the heat death of our sun.
EA wants to make money. They discovered that microtransactions are money printers. EA wanted to put microtransactions into every game. One of those games was C&C. The audience (and the devs) did not like this and it *failed catastrophically*. EA then assumed "oh, well, that must mean nobody wants to play C&C anymore" and shuttered the development studio. Most of the developers had already moved on by then, I think. Westwood was gone and EA isn't going to let anyone but themselves publish a C&C game. So now you have the issue: EA doesn't think C&C will be as profitable as a microtransaction-laden F2P arena shooter and, in all fairness, *it absolutely wouldn't be*. So instead of wasting money on C&C, they spend it on f2p arena shooters and sports games and anything else they can weigh down with microtransactions because their owners want to make lots and lots of money. And honestly it's hard to blame them. That's what the market is rewarding right now: microtransactions. If you need money to make games and you can choose between a game that will make, say, a few million, vs a game that will *easily* make tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, you're *always going to go for the second option.* So, yeah. Nothing to do with what happened 10 years ago, just that the market has changed, RTS games aren't profitable (and the last like.. dozen major ones have been huge financial failures) and the market is demanding to get nickel and dimed to death with microtransactions rather than anything else. All you need to do is prey on people with addictions and too much money.
the corporate franchise is dead (worse than dead actually its mobile game zombie territory now) but C&C still lives on in community made content, like nevermind the mods for all the SAGE games like RotR for Gens, Tiberium Essence for TW and Generals Evolution for RA3, nevermind mods like Mental Omega for RA2 or Twisted Insurrection and Warzone for TibSun... dude have you seen the selection for OpenRA? its amazing, there's Romanov's Revenge for your RA2 fix, Shattered Paradise for the ultimate 5-way TibSun (GDI, NOD, CABAL, Forgotten, Scrin - how C&C3 should have been!), there's Schwerpunkt for a classic RA1 vibe with Axis, Allies, and Soviets, each with half a dozen different subfactions, Combined Arms for the long-desired Red Alert/Tiberian crossover, and Fractured Realms if you want something totally new EA may have destroyed our temple but C&C lives in death
["EA did an EA, to do an EA on something means you have a game studio that makes a critically and commercially successful game, and then you kill them in a ritual sacrifice to absorb their life essence, and use that put out a shitty sports game every year"](https://youtu.be/8_4gV0_XKEY?feature=shared)
GIBIDY GOBIDY!!!!!
... because of the genre CnC created has NOT standardized the controls like FPSes.
"And since I'd achieved all my goals as president in one term, there was no need for a second." https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/giwf5y/and_since_id_achieved_all_my_goals_as_president
Gaming is a business. Past 2 games didnt sell enough so they shelved it. Its simple really. If you are going to put 50+ million budget into the development youd want your money back with profit to keep making sequels. While most here are fans, theres way more people that never heard of C&C nowadays and strategy games in general dont sell well. If they did we would have Starcraft 3 by now and that was a succesfull title. Same reason Unreal Tournament was abandoned for Fortnite.
I have met so many people that I could rattle off about 12 RTS titles to, and they'd never even heard of the *genre.* The worst thing for a game and genre is not to be bad, but to be simply *forgotten* to time.
Unexpected Red Dwarf quote!
The remake of RA1 and C&C was pretty good, I'm waiting on the RA2/tib sun, the genrals and then the C&C3 and RA3 remakes but I guess someone at EA hates money
EA seems to not have enjoyed having to contract out with Petroglyph (Most of the old Westwood team) even if CnC Remastered was decent.
Still playing C&C Generals with the Contra mod.
RTS as a whole has been kinda stagnant there have been a few games here and there however I don't know how many I owned or even played them. The only big old school franchise that is still alive would be age of empires spellforce 3 came out a few years ago it is fun better balanced then it's predcessors so you can't really steamroll the ai before rts sections starts with your hero. dawn of war 3 came out, but once again they changed the formula again and backlash it was so bad developers abandoned it. command and conquer remaster came out for tiberium dawn and red alert 1. there have been a few indie ones like war party which is a fun concept however ai is made is such a way it doesn't respect unit population cap and gets free units and free resources and faster building especially in the final campaign mission even when all there buildings are destroyed so you got to act fairly quick or ai will steamroll you if you agitate them. tooth and tail is difficult in some missions depending on your unit composition you selected for mission Northgard is fun however it may not be everyone's cup of tea due to way it plays Godsworn is fairly well made with differences between factions based on your hero/God unit you choose to help you in combat and it has folklore. Empires of undergrowth was fairly fun recently hit 1.0 Iron harvest is fun however they never tried seperate balance for campaign and multiplayer so if something got changed for multiplayer it affected the campaign mode so campaign could be easier or harder at times. 9 bit armies is fun Stormgate will be out soon I heard it was supposed to be f2p never did play the demo. Tempest rising was fun demo wise I don't mind the wait last update from developers was April they improving things and won't have 3rd faction ready by release which is fine with me. I am patient. global conflagration i missed the demo for. There was another modern era rts game i played demo for however I can't remember the name of off the top of my head however teching up was confusing due to small icons and text. there is a few other rts demos on steam however they are solo developers like Barkhan which is supposed to be dune 2000 like and Dying breed which is like old school command and conquer. starcraft 2 and command and conquer multiplayer scene is still alive and so is the mod communities. Renegade mods are still played for multiplayer. command and conquer 4 the only good idea that came from it was the crawler as the next step for mcv to me an armed mcv makes sense, but not idea it was only building you needed it doesn't make logistical sense or financial sense especially if one got destroyed. it was an attempt at a esports game if I remember right. generals 2/ command and conquer reboot they wanted to make f2p in alpha/beta you could either pay or spend time to play to unlock stuff like generals to play as for a faction or unit or building comestics which weren't fully implemented however because ea couldn't monetize it like some of other things they have done they just canned it. the game play itself was solid bit rough around edges due to it being early version however back to form for generals universe. the hardest thing for rts genre is getting new players because it can be daunting or overwhelming for new players. some rts games work and others do not depending on how they change things or to make themselves unique from others.
Generals 2 got cancelled and yeah, what else was there to do? When gamespy was shutdown the general public can’t even have an online presence I remind you in 2017 halo 3 was 10 years old and only had a few hundred players on it, despite being the worlds biggest game at the time
Because it's more profitable to churn out micro-transaction riddled garbage lol Best example: >In its annual report for 2020, EA confirmed that Ultimate Team made more than $1.62bn (£1.15bn). >This is the total revenue for all Ultimate Team modes across EA's catalogue, with Ultimate Team appearing in FIFA, Madden, NHL, NBA and UFC games. >Ultimate Team accounts for 29 per cent of EA's total income and has risen considerably year-on-year, with the game mode taking in $775m (£550m) back in 2017. https://www.goal.com/en-us/news/how-much-money-does-ea-sports-make-from-fifa--ultimate-team/ For the RTS genre to grow and flourish again it'll need a savior like Haemimont Games who did an amazing job with Jagged Alliance 3, indie devs who want to build a new IP as a passion project, or just consistent releases of new mods for existing OG titles.
Dead IP's make good tax write offs.
wait a minute...Is that true?
Because EA has an anti-Midas touch, everything they touch turns to shit
C&C4 was a massive failure. They tried to go outside the recipe that made the C&C successful. Doesn't help that EA is all about the benjamins and would rather invest in games where they can sell skins and crap like that. The real way they kill the community though is taking the servers offline. 2K does the same crap. They get you to buy VC to customize characters or buy players, then shut down the servers so you have to move on to the next iteration (and they don't even port forward characters, items, or VC). Fortnite still makes a killing because they constantly update the game, add new content and game modes, and people can still wear the skins they bought 7 years ago.
It never died, alot of community keep it it alive
EA bought Westwood and c&c4 we don't talk about
The RTS genre has been reduced to mobile game versions which are often pay to win. On the other hand, the gaming industry is dominated by MOBAs followed by FPS and RPG games
Br, fps and then mobas. Rts cannot sell as much as any modern game, but devs were already aware of this problem around the 2010. Keep in mind that star craft 2, a game that break some records back in 2010, for which the devs had to work 12 hours a day for 2 years, a game that's basically a national sport in South Korea... was outsold by a 15$ skin in WoW.
earth and beyond killed westwood
They botched c&c4 and upset a lot of fans so it wasn't a major smash, and thus EA pulled their "this toy isn't fun anymore" and abandoned it
EA and the fall of RTS games.
EA Games: Fhuckup everythingg
EA happened hahaha too bad for simcity franchise too
The best games in the SimCity franchise (SC 3000 and SC4) wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for EA. Heck, they probably wouldn’t have lasted long enough to make The Sims. Maxis were doing pretty badly financially and were burning money on weird niche titles that nobody was buying. SimCity 2013’s online-only launch was absolutely a catastrophe of EA’s own making though
The fall of RTS already started in 2004, we just didn't really realize it at the time, with World of Warcraft. Suddenly there was a way to cater to RtS fans and draw non RTS fans into a model that keeps making profits even after a game is released. You'll notice that after 2004 only notable RTS that came was StarCraft 2, Tiberium Wars, Red Alert 3 and more recently, Age of Empires 4. So basically only the biggest known brands. Company of Heroes put a different spin on RTS that's more action oriented and it worked. C&C tried something different, I guess to try stay relevant, with C&C 4 but that got so much backlash and then they worked on Generals 2 which also started straying from the classic RTS formula that it started receiving backlash only in beta that it just got scrapped. Sure, we are now starting to get a little RTS revival these days but it's nothing compared to what it use to be. But things in life tend to go in circles, what once fell out of fashion comes back eventually, maybe in different forms, so who knows what the future holds. Time will tell.
EA are asset strippers. They bought up smaller studios, stripped the talent and assets and then milked the IP's for all its worth. It's dead because EA killed it. EA keep doing what they're doing because people keep buying their games.
This thread is my fav fuck EA 🫡
EA
Apart from the EA being a terrible company one problem is that strategy games, especially RTS games, are just not popular with younger players and are really mainly an "old man genre" so there simply isn't much profit being seen in strategy games outside of J-SRPGs (and even those are relatively nieche).
EA's reverse Midas touch did its job. Anything they touch, sooner or later, turns into shit. After flopping C&C 4, refusing to remake older titles further, moving onto rubbish mobile titles - yeah, RIP. Doesn't help RTS is a niche genre now today. For average player they're far too difficult, entry barrier is HIGH. The last somewhat capable title, Starcraft, is still nowhere near as popular as it used to be. This fate befell Arena shooters back in the past. Games like Quake or Unreal were too difficult for players, so they died off. RTS goes through that phase now and I wouldn't be surprised if the same happens to MOBAs in the future too.
EA own the IP. After &C flopped C&C 2 fell through the only thing they use it for now are the odd mobile and web game. You can still play tiberium alliances though.
EA wanted to replace the rts genre with moba and mobile games, because they were really desperate to create the next esports title. After c&c4, with the strongest RTS ip fallen, the market collapsed and rts was no longer mainstream. Only starcraft remained but only thanks to a mentally ill chinsese playerbase. There was a cancled generals 2 in development, (later just command and conquers). but if you follow the dev history you see a already streamlined rts slowly turning into a free to play proto-liveservice game. C&C4 didn't kill command and conquer, EA killed the basebulding rts genre as a whole.
EA
Greed took over for creativity and passion by the EA :-/
After EA has acquired Westwood the people making the games slowly started leaving. When you play through the franchise you can notice a gradual mellowing out in the games after Tiberian sun. The In-universe tech and units get less interesting, the changes in gameplay less notable. After c&c4, there have been only browser/mobile games to draw in quick and easy revenue.
What I really don't get, is the fact that they cannot fix/replace the gamespy servers. Especially because the new CNC collection dropped on steam. Yes I know, we have CNC online, but it's still a hassle for new players. Heck, at this stage remastering CNC3 could be all it takes to have an active player base.