PerfectDeath

yup, after that mod I thought, why hasn't relic or someone else done this yet?

Solo, that reminded me of some RTS mods where the moders hosted a website where you could customize a card "deck" which the player could bring into the mod's online battles, level up, etc. Only game I know off hand that does that is wargame.

Funding is definitly one of the factors that influences the development of RTS games. A more traditional design can be a difficult sell in a market where very vocal people will discredit it for "not innovating" without realizing that polishing a title requires iterations to build on itself. Even with the title I am working on the new and never seen before stuff grabs people's attention first. However, I have found that what keeps someone playing is not the new bells and whistles, it is the core gameplay and balance.

Should I open a new topic? I did not intend to derail this topic. (I was hoping for some good conversation about the current RTS market developments outside of the MMOs)

If only game development was that cheap. =P Skull Girls reported that they would need $250 grand for a single character.

Oh god, I really have to hold back my sales pitch here. I am one of the devs for an MMORTS that is 6 months form completion; however, as we have announced on our very recent livestream the MMORTS is a genre that has few metrics. Thus, we're needing to launch a kickstarter to push our 6 remaining months of development to get more stuff in by launch. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2122031929/novus-aeterno-a-true-aaa-mmorts Our team are avid strategy gamers who really wanted to play this kind of game, but no one was making one. So, 7 years later, we're emerging form our caves. I'll stop this here to avoid any topic take over, but I do want to bring up that there are still some strong RTS games emerging. Some of these tend to bring very new and experimental twists to the RTS genre. Some go down the very tactical route like Men of War, this game has not recieved much notice due to the lack of replay support. It is very difficult to create replay files with that kind of engine (everything is under the effect of physics, no dice rolling accuracy, just spread). These generally break away from the older traditional mechanics of RTS games. I do think it is out of intimidation of titans like Star Craft. curses... guess I took too long, someone from our stream already beat me to commenting here about NA, I was nerding out too much. =P