Crate Entertainment has worked its way through several very "PC games" game genres: first making an action RPG, Grim Dawn, then making town builder Farthest Frontier (which will leave early access later this year), and now also working on real-time strategy games. Unlike some of its contemporaries, however, Crate is not trying to crack the code to make the mainstream RTS megahit: Real-time strategy ""Jean of Geeks

The idea that classic style Rts does not appeal to the largest possible audience today is widely accepted as general knowledge. The game has a lot to offer; that's why game publishers have been somewhat RTS-hating since the Golden Age of the 90s and 2000s.During our chat, Bruno remembered how, during a meeting with a certain famous holding company, his plan to make a new RTS game met with moans.

"Maybe two years ago, I had a meeting with the Embracer group that kind of felt us for the acquisition," Bruno said. "I honestly wasn't really interested because I don't want to work for anyone else in any capacity, but it's often educational.

"So I go to meetings to see what I have to hear. And they asked what we were working on, and when I mentioned RTS, people moaned visibly, "Oh, why are you working on RTS?""You know, they said, "RTS is like a pc - only by nature, why have you ever made something multi-platform and another genre?" And the fact that you don't want to make RTS is exactly why it's a great opportunity for us.

(Bruno answered with a laugh about the state of the Embracer group today, "I think I dodged the bullet there.

The biggest companies are leaving genre gaps for smaller developers like Crate Entertainment to fill. Bruno thinks that's because major publishers want a lightning hit that returns 10 times the investment - "When you're operating on that scale, you want to build something that could sell 3000 million copies," he said - and he doesn't think the RTS genre will ever produce such success. I think. If so, as he defines it, I'm skeptical that the game in question is really going to be RTS.

"I've now seen interviews with people working on RTS games at these other companies and a lot of them are trying to find ways to make RTS more mainstream," Bruno said."And for me, I feel like RTS will never be mainstream. I'm sorry to say that, but as long as I love it, it's a geek genre, you're not saying it's no longer the kind of RTS I want to play"

That's not to say RTSes can't be any kind of hit: Starcraft 2 has hundreds of hits. Selling a million copies, Bruno noted, Crate Entertainment only needs to sell a million to make an "OK return," he said. The series was also an esports phenomenon. But for a company like Blizzard, he doesn't think that's enough anymore, so the developers have either stopped creating a new Rtse, or at least they'll have it for now.

Crate Entertainment's upcoming RTS hasn't been announced in a formal way — they just let people know they're working on it — and it's not a good idea. And contrary to speculation that Bruno has encountered in certain Steam reviews, its development has not pulled resources away from town builder Farthest Frontier.Town builder Farthest Frontier is set to get optimization improvements, new technology trees, and other changes before it's released later this year.

In our broad discussion, Bruno also stated that he had run into a misunderstanding about the size of Farthest Frontier's development team - which is not a big team and of course why Crate doesn't have to aim for tens of millions of sales — and expressed some dissatisfaction with what he compared to Manor Lords, which was "developed alone." It was.