Strategy games are no longer limited by the "stigma" of being "Smart Man's Games", says Ara developer

rockpapershotgun.com:

It's a good time to be a strategy game developer, according to Oxide Games, developers of Ara: History Untold, which happens to be a strategy game. Speaking to me during a showing of Ara - which is notable among turn-based 4X games for playing out every player's turn simultaneously - the creators offered a rousing characterisation of the genre, suggesting that strategy games have somewhat shucked off their association with stifling complexity and elitism, thanks not least to the recent influence of board gaming.

"When I started my career doing games, strategy games sort of felt very niche, and we weren't really investing in making new ones," commented chief graphics architect Dan Baker, whose credits include 2008's Civilization: Revolution and 2010's Civilization V. "There just weren't that many and the budgets were really small, so they were really scrappy." He thinks the genre's fortunes have "exploded" in recent years, however.

"It's unbelievable right now, not just in the triple A space, but in indie," added fellow Firaxis alumnus and Oxide Games design director Michelle Menard. "Just the amount of new players who are interested, the different kinds of new players who are interested - it's a wide open market space now. So things that might have been interesting to do, but years ago, you never would have never gotten internal support.

"It used to be like: that's too out there, that's too crazy, we have to stick to what we know will work, because our market caps at two million, so don't be too insane," she said. "Whereas now the potential markets are so much bigger, and there's so many more things you can do."

It's hard to put hard numbers to these claims, mostly because, as Menard suggests, "strategy" now