I find eSports bad for gaming. People are focusing so much on watching others and being competitive, not caring much in about enjoying the games they play. I see even kids doing it, just sitting back and watching others instead of actually playing the game.

When I go to a field to play football, most people are just having fun, no one is trying to be like a professional. Those people that are extremely competitive end up not wanted around. On video games on the other hand it feels like everyone wanna be a professional of eSports and play competitively, even on games that are not meant to be. It just ruins the experience.

The author is HuK, a former professional SC2 player.[0] It's understandable why he would focus on the esports aspect more, however, he does point out that RTS games need a way better social side. The game needs lots of players that just play it for fun to really support a strong competitive scene.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuK

I would love to play another RTS with a nice campaign. I don't care if my game is a poor esport. But no, everything must be an esport now, with ladders, seasons and whatever, unless it just can't.

For me the fun of RTS is slowly discovering new units and their application.

After I know the full tech tech tree RTS games become fairly boring to me.

The Command and Conquer (and Red Alert) campaigns were awesome. Loved playing them.

The thing is, esports and casual play help each other out. Streamers and tournaments are watched by hordes of casual players who are able to appreciate what's going on only because they play themselves, albeit at a much lower level. So from a community-building perspective, the ideal game should be playable by both pros and casuals.

I’m sorry but the whole points of RTS is competition. It’s like complaining that we’re talking about tweaks to make chess more competitive.

Blizzard at some point publicly said that more than 60% of Starcraft 2 players never clicked on the "Multiplayer" button. This is why is has so much resources put into SP campaign with special units, recorded audio and cutscenes.

IMO this is why RTS genre really died out - the studios focused too much on eSport aspect and abandoned most of their paying customer base which wasn't interested in crazy clickathrons. Multiplayer games are very very loud, but they're not the ones paying most of the money.

When smaller studios tried to copy Starcraft 2, they usually cut down on singleplayer content and sales tanked with that.

The single-player campaigns were a major focus for many early RTS. Even Warcraft II many players mostly played the single-player, but that was probably the tipping point due to the success of Battle.net.

Eh, I'd say the campaign of WC3 was a pretty big focus, or at least Blizzard clearly considered it one since it formed the basis for a lot of WoW's storyline.

Nah, I've always been terrible at RTS games but I'm still obsessed with them.

I'm also pretty far into creating a generative RTS and it's turning out well. Maybe you'll like it too!