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

pcgamer.com:

Crate Entertainment has been working its way through some very 'PC gaming' game genres: First it made an action RPG, Grim Dawn, then it made town builder Farthest Frontier (which is scheduled to leave early access sometime this year), and now it's also working on a real-time strategy game. Unlike some of its contemporaries, however, Crate isn't trying to crack the code to making a mainstream RTS megahit: Real-time strategy is a «nerd genre,» Crate Entertainment CEO Arthur Bruno joked in a recent interview with PC Gamer, and he accepts the limited audience that implies.

The idea that classic-style RTSes don't appeal to the biggest possible audience today is widely accepted as common knowledge; it's the reason game publishers have been somewhat RTS averse since the golden age of the '90s and 2000s. During our chat, Bruno recalled how his plans to make a new RTS game were met with groans during a meeting with a certain well-known holding company.

«Maybe two years ago, I had a meeting with Embracer Group, who were kind of feeling us out for an acquisition,» said Bruno. «I honestly wasn't really interested, because I don't want to work for anybody else in any capacity, but it's often educational.

»So, I go to the meetings to see what there is to hear. And they asked what we were working on, and when I mentioned an RTS, people visibly groaned, like, 'Ah, why would you work on an RTS?' You know, they said, 'An RTS is like PC-only by nature, why would you work on a single platform game when you could have made something multiplatform and another genre?' And I'm thinking, well the fact that you don't want to make an RTS is exactly the reason why it's a great opportunity for us."

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

The biggest companies are leaving genre voids for smaller developers like Crate Entertainment to fill, in other words. Bruno thinks that's because big publishers are hoping for