Aaaand just like that you alienate the few audience members you have left. Bravo!

"I'm also getting annoyed by the anti-hardcore sentiment that you have Jim."

Okay, THIS is a new one. Please explain my brand new bias to me please. I have so many ones now, it's hard to keep track, and I am REALLY interested in my new hatred of hardcore gamers.

The reason why RTS games don't get any favor for me, is how they've stopped being fun. My brother plays RTS games (or used to), and whenever I watched him begin a match, it was like watching someone have a twitching heart-attack - his fingers flew across the keyboard, perspiration ran down his face, as his eyes strained against the screen, watching and cursing each unit he controlled, always silently saying "faster, faster". He wasn't having fun anymore.

I loved Starcraft. But I don't play it anymore - because it's become such an incredible chore, such an incredible drain to play online, if you want to win. It's no longer about having fun, or about escapism - it's all about who can ZERG RUSH fastest. I know it's a shameless stereotype, but go up against any Korean player, AND YOU ARE DEAD! I tried my hand at micromanaging, and no matter how good I got at it, I only ever won 40-50 percent of the games I played.

RTS games just no longer appealed to me. I will still buy Starcraft 2, because it had a great storyline and I want to see how it ends. But like many MMOs, playing it online felt like a job or a difficult, stress inducing task. I can't even begin to tell you the RAGES I've seen some RTS players get into because of a bit of Lag, or because they accidently pressed the wrong key, or they had to get up to feed the dog because it wouldn't stop whining.

Until an RTS doesn't degenerate into who can RUSH, RUSH, RUSH the fastest, I don't think they will find an expanded audience.

Stay cool Jim.You should just take some sort of Zen approach to that by saying that you are biased against everything. That attitude will definetly leave you with a lot less anger because it enables you to ignore all those people who will take everything you say as a personal insult against them.
Just as a good example why de Plater is right, would probably be C&C3 which I enjoyed as long as I stayed in the single player campaign, but as soon as I switched over to online I permanently got my ass handed to me because I was unable to do 300 micromanagement actions/second. On the other hand I could still go online in RA2 and I would have absolutely no problem to win some of the matches I play. That's mainly because this game still allowed a normal player to become good at it. But the giant complexity and all the small stuff like the additional building cues led to me actually spending more time lokking at the menu than at all the pretty little explosions. I'm still under NDA but whith the demo already released I don't think I'm breaking it when I tell you that I participated in the Endwar beta and that I enjoyed this game's online component way more than the one of C&C3 because it actually put the focus back on seeing what your units are doing and then telling them what to do next, rather than just requiring you to know all the hotkeys and switching between them at lightspeed in order to win. That for me actually brought the strategy element back into the game because you had time to think about one. In C&C3 you usually just spammed the one good tactic that you had thought of against your enemy and hoped, that it would annihilate him before he could do the same to you.

way to alienate hardcore fans, ubisoft. i get what you're saying, but maybe this would've been a better way to say it:

"rts games can be pretty complex, and many people love that. that's cool, and for those people, there are plenty of great, complex rts games. but many other people like simpler gameplay, so we're trying to make an rts for that audience."

there. no genre "suffers" from listening to fans. you just have to know who your target market is, and then scale your production costs accordingly. clearly, they're going for a bigger, more general market. as the joker says, bad choice of words.

These guys clearly haven't played Company of Heroes. Starcraft and Command and Conquer can suck my hardcore playing dick.

Complexity =/ Depth.

@byrc - His comments may annoy you but dude's in the business to sell games at a profit. The hardcore RTS set isn't enough to sustain the business model. You can get annoyed, but it's not in the interests of the publishers to make their products at a loss.

I'm a big fan of RTS games, have been since i was a kid and it saddens me to see the genre decline in popularity. I'd disagree that it's to do with the genre itself though.

RTS games work perfectly on a PC and terribly on a console, and with the increasing focus of the games industry on consoles rather than PC, traditional PC genres will decline. The solution then is to take the ubisoft route and try to develop a control method adapted to consoles. Obviously voice commands won't work properly, or wil need to be supplemented by other controls so we're probably still quite far from a decent setup..

The main hope has to be Halo Wars. Not out of fanboyish devotion but just from the length of time it's spent in development and the way it's tailor-made for consoles. Hopefully it will prove that an RTS can be viable on a console and then we'll see a resurgence of the genre.

Anyone agree with me?

Oh and Red Alert 3 is out soon on 360 so that might be ok, but it's got to have been developed with the PC in mind so it's probably not got the same promise that Halo Wars does.

This man's comments are just one of a vast wave of retardednes at Ubisoft and a number of other publishers, a push to simplify things for the mythical "casual gamer", nee "retard".
Somebody tell this asshat about Sins of a Solar Empire's sales.

Well uh...I think TBS games are doing alright. You know, Advance Wars, Disgaea, FFTactics. Maybe they should try that?

i played the demo of endwar. it was fun, but it got really overwhelming when i had 14 someodd units on screen and i was trying to get all of them to shoot at different targets. it got crazy. but it is fun for what it does and it brings a new take on the strategy game to the console. thumbs up.

He's right and wrong. Some strategy games are becoming very complex, but thats not the problem; its how accessible they are. Unfortunately, this guy, like much of the games industry, probably confuses accessible with simple. In my mind, the real reason most rts game sales are dropping these days is simply that they're shallow, boring games with some pretty colours and explosions that keep you interested for about 10 minutes.

Its the ones like Company of Heroes and Dawn of War, and even Supreme Commander (although thats getting a bit complicated again) that do well; ones that are easy enough to get the hang of but have some depth to keep you playing.