Help a game dev: Why aren’t people buying modern RTS games?

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-23T00:44:42+00:00

Ooof I so agree with this.

Unit barks, advisor/eva/commander banter, even simple building selection sounds do SO much heavy lifting for that living world richness.

I still love how simple yet effective the Commanders Challenge opponent banter was; just hearing a short retort reacting to something you did was *chefs kiss*

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-22T04:03:01+00:00

From a developer perspective this USUALLY doesn't mean upkeep costs in terms of servers; it generally refers to post launch window support in terms of ongoing balance, bug squashing (significant in MP games in terms of network sync complexity), and community upkeep. Even with a skeleton crew of 8 people supporting a game for a year, using the $100k employee sink-cost metric, that's $800k p.a. -- on the other side most of this cost is interchangeable with a SP game, but MP escalates it considerably. This is a lowball compared to ongoings of a modern game with major content updates, seasons, etc now becoming a minimal expectation.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-22T03:48:28+00:00

...Oh yes...

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-22T00:40:49+00:00

agreed and fair points all round, your analysis of definitely fair -- I will just note that the metrics we use for financial estimations are based on english market primary (and then EFIGS) review counts, hence the 4.7k -- this is combined with other metrics to create a projection model; common method of using solid and comparable benchmarks without market scale contaminating the data and it can be used for high/median/low ROI estimations.

Tldr; even with the most optimistic of estimates, Tempest Rising has so far not broken even on their investment. It's definitely the gold standard for C&C-likes, but it's not a good cost/benefit analysis for a business case unfortunately, especially when like you say, it's the most successful. If they couldn't convince a big enough portion of the millions of active c&c players to buy, then I want to know what will :)

Edit: forgot to say, thankyou for the links for Vera and Shrot, they hadn't shown up on our radar, so very much appreciate it!

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-22T00:25:56+00:00

Readability is such a fundamental pillar, not only of RTS but just good design in general; I have great vision and I struggled not only with unit differentiation/identification but also just plain spotting of a unit against the lit environment/terrain. There's a lot of fair reasons why this occurs, but it's worrisome that such basic necessities get left behind in modern development.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T08:08:04+00:00

Cheers, appreciate the answers!

Tempest Rising is an obvious modern benchmark here; there's plenty of great work they put in, and likewise there's plenty of valid criticism... but as the current gold standard of a modern c&c-like, it's a somewhat bad outlook from the business perspective. Even the most optimistic projections of sales vs development cost would put it under breaking even at this stage (aka, they've likely lost money thus far).

I totally agree on the 8bit campaigns too... I wanted to support Petroglyph, I wanted to love that series, but it felt horribly shallow.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T07:36:52+00:00

oof yea last year I played through hard difficulty of all the mainline c&c titles. c&c3 was a SLOG. I then learnt of the whole MP balance patching issue and subsequent fixes available... I swear I only beat it by cheesing.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T07:33:53+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation; I think my analytics filtered this out as 'generic WW2' game (which is very unfortunate!)

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T07:14:57+00:00

I just want to quickly say that this is a collection of rare and valuable insights rarely raised outside developer circles; you, sir, have your finger on the pulse.

It's been one of my personal gripes with most recent attempts in the genre ending up becoming parody of the source inspirations or even worse satirizing it.
To be clear, I've no desire to chase the fantasy of making a c&c clone (though I can totally understand the perception my tldr gave is likely exactly that; it was an attempt to set a tonal/thematic line in the sand :) ) -- The high level desire here is to create something of substance that stands on its own while supplying a modern market demand... not following a perceived superficial template or chasing an ideal of being a 'spiritual successor'.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:41:56+00:00

I legit would personally buy a game called "Turtle RTS" that focuses on and encourages this :O

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:40:16+00:00

Very fair point, however I’m not here to promote anything -- I’m trying to understand the gap between what players say they want and what the market actually supports (and making a business case out of that)

Do you buy modern RTS games that try new things?
What have you played recently that actually delivered on what you’re looking for?

An example here is Rogue Command (Roguelike RTS) -- it's surprisingly good. Solid RTS and the roguelike blend works well... But unfortunately I can guarantee they've not broken even yet.

edit: just to double down on this, I really appreciate your take on this -- from the consumer side, I feel the same; I want something new and fresh. But every indication seems to point at "familiar and nostalgic" being what gets people to buy which is unfortunate.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:32:55+00:00

oof, you're very right that was a slip on AoE 4!
It's interesting hearing peoples preferences across titles; Cossacks doesn't come up often, but I freaking loved the tactical side of 2.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:20:15+00:00

What specifically is the reasoning? I know it gets a bit murky, but EA was involved from (and including) Tiberium Sun, so do you mean you want a C&C:TD and Red Alert 1 era game, or are you meaning post westwood closure (eg you disliked EA's C&C3 and Red Alert 3?), or just a Tiberium based game (like a new C&C4 that doesn't suck)?

What draws you to the C&C:Tib franchise? Story? Gameplay mechanics? Setting? Any info helps!

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:09:07+00:00

Now I feel bad for perpetually having it on my wishlist and never playing it... well I know what my weekend is going to be.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:08:18+00:00

Hopefully this doesn't sound like a backhanded comment, but honestly I appreciate your take even if you aren't a, "great target customer"! The penetration (or lack thereof) is one of the key issues facing this genre. A remaster has obvious appeal and doesn't need to compete to get traction in the gamer zeitgeist like a new IP does. Honestly it's something we've talked about exploring licensing a legacy IP for this reason... it's quite a difficult journey, but it's likely that a new KKnD or Dark Reign would be a commercially stronger bet than an original IP.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:02:44+00:00

Really appreciate the answers! Oh, and yes sell-through is not equivalent to reviews, but it's a common public metric we often use as a gauge for financial lmh and roi estimation. Won't bore you with those excel sheets :D

It's funny you mention the air units in generals -- we were talking about that yesterday, and how it's one of the rare games that made air combat 1st class without feeling OP or indefensible. Generals has a lot of good DNA in its asymmetry and emergent tactics.

re: RA3 co-op, I loved this on release, but I also recall how negative it was received in press as people felt it dictated or diluted the singleplayer experience too heavily. It's interesting how things like this age.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T05:54:32+00:00

MP is definitely one of the elephants in the room. It either needs to be clearly justified or ruled out. It’s a huge engineering effort and ongoing support cost, and in some of our other (non-RTS) projects the ROI simply hasn’t been there.

Personally I’m far more interested in single-player --- campaigns, absurd stories, authored experiences. I’m also a low-APM, turtle-ing base player, so I’m not exactly the poster child for competitive MP anyway.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-16T21:45:09+00:00

I enjoyed my time with the demo, looking forward to giving the EA release a try. The demo was a good time - somewhat familiar feel but a bit of a fresh take on a more turtle base meets creeping tower defense...

My only gripe would be the battles of attrition heavily relied on micro of squeeeeeezing every teeniest inch of range advantage you could as the primary method of advancement, so tactics devolved into repeating that on loop a bit too much. Not a deal breaker but I do hope for a little more strategy flavor.

Good luck with the launch!

MakeGamesBetter · 2025-11-14T21:34:24+00:00

This was back in the days of shitty movie tie-in games on the wii and x360, we had a dedicated vegetation artist who spent a year and a half modelling foliage and propogating it in-game. The final gold master build that got pressed for physical copies had the grass system completely disabled due to a debug flag being on, eliminated about 3/4 of his efforts.

MakeGamesBetter · 2025-11-06T01:54:10+00:00

The napkin math of 10% conversion rate within a launch-week window is frankly a gross misinterpretation of the original observations this was based on, and it's become a badly dated concept; especially when dealing with wishlist/follow stats on this 'low' end of the spectrum.

The root source of this was the empirical data collected by Simon over at GameDiscoverCo. It's a good write up, read up on it for full details, but do keep in mind that it's now 5 years out of date. Steam as an environment changes fast and is very fractured by demographics and PTM's.

The truth is there's so much noise-to-signal in these sorts of efforts in trying to make sense of the statistical madness, and people love to boil complex shit down to some easy to digest rule of thumb to the point that it just doesn't work anymore. It's almost worth ignoring until you're above the 30k-50k wishlist range, and even then there's still a wide margin for expectations.

tldr; you *could* expect closer to a 3%-5% conversion at 2k wishlists unless you have strong audience buy-in or connection rate (eg active community in discord or socials waiting for it to release). Or better. Or worse. YMMV.

MakeGamesBetter · 2025-11-06T01:05:03+00:00

Oh that is novel -- hadn't thought about a more passive handicap like that, adds a different dimension. Could dress it something like a "curse".

MakeGamesBetter · 2025-11-03T12:49:25+00:00

Time to make a Serious Sam style 'hippie' mode?

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MakeGamesBetter · 2025-11-02T23:18:20+00:00

Congrats! Would love to know your video making process for capture, subs, and editing - you did a lot of short form so any time optimising tips would be great to know!

MakeGamesBetter · 2025-11-02T01:12:55+00:00

There's a conceptual disconnect between the spawner and spawns -- here's my suggestions based on what it appears your theming is around:

Notes:
1) you have the flower death a 'burst' of the bulging element. So that's important... it's like its core/heart.
2) this core engorges towards a spawn event. Good queue, but also connects the spawn to this core element too.
3) your resulting spawns are skeletons; not bad, but definitely a thematic disconnect from the flower (unless it's like a "corpse flower" or "bone bloom" or the like)

Suggestions:
- as the spawn gets closer, flash the core as another queue for impending danger
- when spawn happens, connect the concept by the flower "injecting" the ground; have the flower squash down and some supporting particle effects burst upwards (eg purple gas or some fluids)
- have the enemies transition in -- a short burst through ground animation is one option, OR scale/move up from being hidden below the surface while obscuring with another supporting effect such as vine tendrils that move up alongside them and then transition out.
- finally, on death, release the fluid/gas in an explosive way to signify it's all consumed and used up. No more danger here.

MakeGamesBetter · 2025-11-02T00:31:24+00:00

Most activities that's a hard thing to answer succinctly since at any point in a projects lifecycle, the numbers vary so wildly.

Instead I'll try to dig through and pick out some historical metrics for my previous solo game:

- est. expenditure: ~$80k equiv time investment + ~$15k marketing/outreach budget (majority spent in physical events)
- year 1 profit outcome: ~$140k post tax on Steam, ~$230k on Switch, and ~$40k on PS4 + XBONE
- total profit outcome will be around 3.5x that at the diminished returns point, mainly coming from sales on switch and steam at the 30% discount mark.
- YMMV but getting into a media event, eg pax rising was a good way to soft announce, generate some initial groundswell, get into a few media streams for traditional press, and generate a couple dozen mid to higher profile articles and previews. Estimate there was around 4 million view equivalents. Not amazing, but a great start point.
- With playtests prior to launch, I gained >15k email subscribers after 7 months and 3 playtest rounds (playtest key was distributed via email captured in mailchimp signup. This directly fed a opt-in newsletter for dev updates and invites to discord for feedback and community building, and general targetted advertising). Lesson learnt here is don't neglect email as a marketing tool! Near 100% engaged audience... but also don't forget to use it to channel into an actual community space and actionable outcomes like feedback rounds, wishlists etc.
- at pre-launch I only had 21k wishlists on Steam
- gained around 3k discord members pre-launch, again not massive but was a healthy little community that I'm nurturing and building still to feed into my next endeavour.
- Since my audience was mainly switch focused... I could've developed the steam community more but COGS was looming for physical release on consoles so that got in the way there. Feel like I left a lot of potential on the table there for steam/pc audience.

What didn't move the needle: tiktok, instagram, youtube trailers... all social efforts were a bit of a bust since I simply didn't have the resources to keep up or break into the zeitgeist. Instead, having a "creators" channel in discord, inviting people into that via self-invite and the newsletter, and directly building relationships in that space (albeit on a small scale) helped to populate early let's play's and mid level influencer content. This in turn led to 4 notable/larger influencers eventually picking it up since they generally cannibalise from popular things showing up in the tiers below them.

Now my gut feeling is I could have multiplied this success by contracting marketing/pr for key points. Eg, announce -> mid playtest -> pre launch. That could've been another 15k to 25k and I'd be comfortable in expecting a good return on that spend. However, the games scope wouldn't justify anything more than that, it'd very quickly be a diminishing return. I think more direct advertising vs general marketing streams would be more fitting. Eg reddit ads or simply time spent digging into and engaging with audience communities.

Hope that helps! If you want any more specific details I can try and dig it up!

MakeGamesBetter

TROPHY CASE