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

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.