I was watching something recently about how there don't seem to be any new RTS games anymore, and I think there's a few reasons for that problem. The most obvious is how few people still seem to be playing, but why aren't there more people?

The first is complexity creep. The genre as a whole has gotten very deep and complex, such that there's no good entry point anymore. I tried to introduce a couple friends to StarCraft II, but they found the experience overwhelming. It is not a simple game; there are a lot of moving parts to that thing. I think that's good and part of the fun, but the extraordinary depth and complexity is a HUGE hurdle.

I think the second problem is how the genre lost sight of the role of the campaign. The campaign is like an extended tutorial for how to play the game, but it has to be subtle about it. When I make that statement in person, the average person immediately begins frothing at the mouth about how badly they hate tutorials, which is why it is important to be subtle about it. For example, when you're playing StarCraft (the original), each mission introduces a new unit. People's natural tendency is to build the new unit to see what it does; the trick is to stack the map so that people naturally figure out how it works without having to be told. The mission that introduces drop ships puts the enemy base on an island, which forces you to build Wraiths and/or drop ships. Because Wraiths have very poor air-to-ground damage, you are subtly encouraged to build drop ships. The Zerg mission that introduces Ventral Sacs (the Overlord drop ability) has a long, winding, narrow and heavily fortified path leading to the enemy base... and also happens to have a ledge with absolutely no air defense of any kind that lets you drop into the back of the enemy base and kill their workers. The whole map is rigged to make you realize you need to use an Overlord to get around the extreme static defense.

It isn't just the units that you're trained on; it's also the controls. There are missions that give you a fixed number of units, then expect you to finish using those units. If you know what you are doing and micro/control them well, you will easily be able to push your way through the mission. If you do not, you will probably struggle. These missions always have at least one unit that you are required to keep alive - subtly telling you that you must think about how you choose to organize your units. It also happens to be a unit too powerful to leave behind while the little guys do all the dirty work.

I mention StarCraft because it is so well made in this respect, but the less popular Relic RTS Impossible Creatures worked similarly. In that game, you designed your units from freakish animal mash-ups. That is an extremely complex problem to work through if you sit down and look at all the animals at once, but the campaign takes you through and gives you just a few animals on each level. The game suffered a little bit from stat balance problems, but it was ultimately a fun experience and the campaign provided all the education you needed to have fun (without being completely in your face about it).

Modern RTS games seem to eschew the "campaign as tutorial" route, but I think it was what made a significant number of games playable, especially if they had any multiplayer component at all. Even if you just beat up on computers the whole time, the Command and Conquer campaigns also taught you how to play the game well enough to have fun when engaging with what is, at its heart, an extremely complex and challenging game.

Actually making an RTS game is also extremely difficult, which surely plays a role. I'm sure there's more reasons, but I'm tired and it's late.