there are no AAA RTS coming out like they did in the 00s
The 00s didn't have AAA gaming like we have today.
Release-SC2 wouldn't even count as AAA nowadays. The core team was like 40 developers (~300 with auxiliaries).
A lot of people say AAA back then was in a better state or different somehow, but the fact is that back then there was no AAA that would even remotely be comparable to the 1000+ people productions nowadays.
It's apples and oranges.
AoE4 is likely the closest thing in scale to what would go for AAA back then, it came out recently, has similar player numbers to SC2 (~10k vs 18k), similar developer numbers (Relic has 200-500 employees, unclear how many worked on AoE4) and that's definitely no AAA.
they fail because RTS was to a large degree about multiplayer. many considered the campaign to just be a tutorial for mp. competitive players moved on to mobas and such, less demand, genre stagnated. there is still demand from offline players of course and that is being catered to by smaller studios, but it's nothing like in the heyday of blizzard and co.
You are right that competitive strategy players partly moved on to more "focused" experiences, be it Mobas or other genres with some strategy to it (like World Of Xs) that didn't even bother with single player content.
But otherwise, you have this mostly backwards.
Even back then, most people just played single player (maybe a bit of MP) and then moved on to other games. Take Starcraft + Brood War, for example. ~10 million units sold in ~10 years. Of those, you can estimate about 2-4 million actually participated in multiplayer (optimistic estimation based on what data one can find about the share of MP people in games that have both a strong SP and MP component, which is those 20+%).
Spellforce 3, a game that undoubtedly went under marketing-wise (as in, nobody did any marking for it, nobody talked about it, etc.), based on an IP barely known outside of Germany/Slavs, so everything stacked against it, still sold 400k+ units (not counting the various versions which will add more).
It is largely the SP folks that played every now and again and otherwise moved on, which made those games' money.
In general, MP people don't earn the developers money, they
cost them money. In development time and hosting costs. Which makes those half-assed multiplayer attempts (as with SF3) so bewildering to me, but that's another topic.
Recouping that money is no easy task without plastering MTX all over people's faces (or being an MMO with a very different financial structure to begin with).
It was never "many considered the campaign to just be a tutorial for mp" - that has always been just the stance of MP focused people, which always were a minority among all players, albeit the most active minority for obvious reasons.
Now, if you want to say "MP focused RTS games are dying out"... you'd still be wrong.
The combined player numbers of active titles are quite huge - it's just that there are so many more titles than there used to be, with not many more players coming in to make up for that higher number of titles.
Looking only at SC2 multiplayer activity (
SC2Pulse ), you can clearly see that the numbers are declining only extremely slowly since 2016 (an eternity in the gaming world) and I'd bet money the biggest drops coincided with bigger releases in the genre (or are post-release drops, normal for every game).
That's not the sign of a genre in decline, it's looking quite healthy to me.
I'm very curious what numbers Stormgate will pull on actual release, IF (and that might be a big if) they actually manage to develop a good game (which is what most devs aiming at the MP crowd have failed to do).
only casuals played offline
If those "casuals" (dude, actual casuals don't even play RTS games to begin with
) make up 70%+ of your player base, that's who you should cater to.
Kind of obvious, one would think...
