Hell, starcraft created the concept of a professional gamer being a thing. To say that RTS games dont have popular appeal is just outright wrong.

3D isnt a bad thing though, C&C Generals did it fantastically.

That doesn't really contradict their premise about making modern RTS. StarCraft and Age of Empires 2 are ancient at this point. An entire generation of kids has grown up since they came out.

I don't think the fact that you could make a successful mainstream RTS way back then really says much about whether you could make one in 2024.

Or Command & Conquer, which didn't had as strong of a competitive community comparatively, but were very successful through their fun story campaigns. Also, there's some pretty successful real time 4X titles too that very much hit mainstream audiences, despite being even more of a niche due to their scale. I think a lot of RTS games often tried too much to compete with the esport niche too, trying to replace the established titles, which is kind of an impossible task. Doing an RTS that doesn't aim for this goal can still be successful however, if one puts the focus on that instead of targeting unreachable heights.

A lot of the competitive RTS crowd transitioned to MOBAs and it's hard to scratch that itch with an old-school RTS now. Having the full offline and online package was key of the time when those games were popular and you don't get that when the competitive space has moved on.

But you have a point. RTSs at their peak were super triple-A stuff, with mind blowing execution and production value for the time. Point and click adventures have a bit of the same problem, they used to be these massive technical showpieces and as a mid-size or indie thing they are a tougher sell when the modern equivalent of investment is going to absolutely insanely huge games in other genres. Even when a triple-A studio does one of those you tend to not get as much of a massive investment, and when you do (say, Total War: Warhammer, or even Manor Lords) they do see success. It's just never going to be the same because you're never going to call your friends over to show them Warcraft 2 running on your PC.

I mean, StarCraft was mentioned in the article. He just doesn't think RTS is big enough for AAA dev companies when they're all trying to sell tens of millions of games

That's not to say RTSes can never be any kind of hit: StarCraft 2 sold many millions of copies, Bruno noted, and Crate Entertainment only needs to sell a million to make "an OK return," he said. The series has also been an esports phenomenon. But for a company like Blizzard, he doesn't think that's enough anymore, which is why the developer stopped making new RTSes, or at least seems to have for now.

To Tiberian Sun and StarCraft were my obsession for years. SC2 was pretty awesome, but I would not trust Blizzard to make another good RTS at this point.

Are we going to pretend Age of Empires 4 doesn't exist? The last expansion outsold every single one from AoE2.

Modern RTS games are just (mostly) sloppy, unfinished, cashgrabs with no vision.

As were many classic RTS games. I fondly remember Machines, a fully 3D example from the late 90s. I recently noticed the CD case describes it as "3D Real-Time Startegy."