The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it’s “no longer the kind of RTS I want to play,” says Crate Entertainment CEO

Crate Entertainment has been working on some very ‘PC gaming’ game genres: first it made an action RPG, Grim Dawn, then it made the city-builder Farthest Frontier (which is scheduled to leave early access at some point this year). , and is now also working on a real-time strategy game. Unlike some of its contemporaries, however, Crate isn’t trying to crack the code for making a mainstream RTS megahit: real-time strategy is a “nerdy genre,” joked Crate Entertainment CEO Arthur Bruno in a recent interview with PC Gamer, and he accepts the limited audience that implies.

The idea that classic-style RTS do not appeal to the widest possible audience is now widely accepted as common knowledge; It’s the reason why game publishers have been somewhat averse to RTS since the golden age of the ’90s and ’00s. During our chat, Bruno recalled how his plans to make a new RTS game were met with resentment during a meeting with a certain well-known holding.

“Maybe two years ago, I had a meeting with the Embracer Group, which was scouting us for an acquisition,” said Bruno. “Honestly, I wasn’t really interested because I don’t want to work for anyone else in any way, shape or form, but it’s often educational.

“So I go to meetings to see what there is to hear. And they asked what we were working on, and when I mentioned an RTS, people visibly complained, like, ‘Oh, why would you work on an RTS?’ You know, they said, ‘An RTS is like it’s PC-only in nature, why would you work on a single-platform game when you could have done something cross-platform and in another genre?’ And I’m thinking, well, the fact that you don’t want to do an RTS is exactly why it’s a great opportunity for us.”

(Regarding the state of the Embracer Group today, Bruno laughed and replied, “I think I dodged a bullet.”)

The biggest companies are leaving genre gaps for smaller developers like Crate Entertainment to fill, in other words. Bruno thinks this is because big publishers expect flash hits that return 10 times their investment – “When you operate on this scale, you want to build something that has the potential to sell 30 million copies.” he said – and he doesn’t think the RTS genre will ever produce that kind of success. If so, he is skeptical that the game in question would truly be an RTS as he defines it.

“Now I see interviews with people who are working on RTS games at these other companies, and a lot of them are trying to figure out how to make RTS more popular,” Bruno said. “And for me, I feel like RTS will never be as popular. I mean, I’m sorry to say this, but as much as I love it, it’s a nerdy genre, there’s only a limited portion of the population that is always interested in this type of game unless you change it to the point where it’s no longer the type of RTS I want to play.”

That’s not to say that RTSes can never be any kind of success: StarCraft 2 sold many millions of copies, Bruno noted, and Crate Entertainment only needs to sell one million to make “a good return,” he said. The series has also been an esports phenomenon. But for a company like Blizzard, he no longer thinks that’s enough, which is why the developer has stopped making new RTSes, or at least appears to have done so for now.

Crate Entertainment’s next RTS hasn’t been formally announced – they’ve just let people know they’re working on it – and contrary to the speculation Bruno says he’s found in certain Steam reviews, its development hasn’t taken away resources. from city builder Farthest Frontier, which is expected to get optimization improvements, a new tech tree, and other changes before its 1.0 release later this year.

During our wide-ranging discussion, Bruno also said he encountered misconceptions about the size of Farthest Frontier’s development team – it’s not a large team, which is why Crate doesn’t need to aim for tens of millions of sales – and expressed some frustration with the comparisons he saw with the “solo-developed” Manor Lords.