This is misleading. The most popular competitive games: League of Legends, Dota 2, CSGO, and SC2, are all PC exclusives. The problem with RTS games isn't that they don't work on consoles, it's that they aren't that fun to play for most people. It takes a long to play a single game, and there's no progression.
With the push to make strategy games more like RPGs (heck look at all of the FPS games with "loadouts" and RPG elements), games like League and Dota really work much better, and have more people playing them than any other game ever. For example, more people played league of legends yesterday[1] than have bought the last CoD game since November[2].
Obviously only taking league into account kind of breaks everything, because it's the most popular anything that has ever existed, but I'm not sure how people don't understand that the PC gaming market is much larger than the console gaming market[3].
> it's that they aren't that fun to play for most people
I question if repetitive games like MOBAs are really more fun, or just have an greedy and addicted game mechanics that has been pioneered with the old Diablo 1 (1996). Is it only me that playing MOBA is to let your off steam, clear your mind like playing a simple ego-shooter or passively watching a TV series on your sofa after you come home from hard work. Or is it really fun to play like traditional non-repetitive games?
Example: I remember Farmville, and for me the fun part was very short and it quickly got a lot of repetitive greedy work and the game tried a lot to get me hooked.
MOBAs have a killer learning curve. You only know you can be better because for about a month straight when you first start you just /lose/ to people who are obviously better.
But you do improve, and you start to feel like a bad ass.
Of course then ELO comes in and ensures you only ever win 50% of the time. It is always made obvious that there is another level of skill above what you currently possess.
I prefer single player games with bots which difficulty level is selectable. Playing against 8 "very hard" bots and winning 80% and having the freedom of a real/classic RTS is a lot more rewarding at least to me. Some people prefer repetitive work that the hone ability to perfection in a factory like a human robot. Some prefer always changing gameplay that requires macro and micro management and economic amd military strategy fun to play. If there is a game selection for both groups, everyone would be happy.
>PC-only titles are scarce these days because profitability is too low to justify an AAA budget
This is one of those things that gets repeated that just BS. Counter Strike, Dota and LoL are all PC exclusive and they're all where professional esports is clustered right now. Valve is making money hand over fist on microtransactions. They take a small cut from each one, and all you have to do is look at the recent activity [1]* on a single item from a single game then extrapolate it out to realize how much money they have rolling in.
* I just went to the steam community market, clicked on the first case I saw an linked to it.
IIRC there was quite a fight between Martin and Elon for control of the company, it wasn't pretty
Which brings me to a point regarding this article: I don't want to be a dick but most startup postmortems don't tell the truth. Besides that most founders fail to realize exactly where they failed the fact is that the startup environment itself isn't transparent at all.
On that last point: a year ago I was talking to a friend who just closed his startup and he gave the typical "not enough traction/not enough funding" explanation they should be selling as hallmark cards already. Last month I bump into him after a meetup and the story was quite different: his startup was unfortunately used as filler along many others by a group of investors who needed to put a show because they were using government funds to finance these companies. All the participant startups got some seed money but at the end of the day all the full amount of funding was given to one single company with no employees a half-baked product that failed to launch and founded by none other than the younger brother of one of the investors who then moved his entire operation to singapore, and then nothing.
There are tons of stories like that, and founders can't say anything because when something like this happens and in the heat of the moment its most likely they would look like sore losers and the last thing they need at that point is to scare away other potential investors by looking like a rogue founder.
My point is that we rarely if ever get the whole story.
I remember there were plenty of RTS games for the Genesis and SNES, but by the time of the PS2 hardly any strategy games launched on consoles.
PC-only titles are scarce these days because profitability is too low to justify an AAA budget