Seems like the C&C series is dead indeed. Mostly because of the three C&C titles that have been totally botched up during the last painful spasm of the franchise.
1) Tiberium: suffered huge delays; the development team took the money but never delivered anything except a demo; its management team had to be at fault, some rumours were circulating talking about e.g. how artists were playing web games instead of working on new assets.
2) C&C4: well, everyone knows its story. C&C4 is hardly a C&C title - it is merely an RTT game set in the tiberium universe, with exceedingly awful DRM (thank you EA for punishing your legitimate customers /sarcasm); perhaps failed due to community management and bad polls conveyed = extremely bad communication between developers and the community.
3) Yes, excruciatingly disappointing Free To Play C&C which most likely would turn out to be yet another Pay To Win (or DLC bonanza) game anyway. This one could be (and was supposed to be) a proper retail-style Generals 2 with one nice polished x-pack, not FTP(P2W/DLC) pseudo-marketing trickster's crap.
So sadly, the old era of C&C came to a horrifying end. Whether there is hope for the series or not... it remains to be seen.
Well, there are still some hopes and rumours around Gospelherald.com (newer) Gamerant.com (old) Uk.ign.com (older) that it may be only dormant and the franchise can be revived sooner or later, but knowing EA (and how the EA team deals with titles that cannot be sufficiently milked and developers easily left disgraced), would not keep high hopes for that. Not soon at any rate...
* * *
PS By the way, not sure if WarCraft 4 or Age of Empires IV ever sees the light of day. One of the Microsoft's studios was rumoured to work on an RTS title (which turned out to be Halo Wars 2) so not expecting AoE IV anytime soon either. WarCraft 4... may be likely, but Blizzard was worryingly quiet about this one.
So sad... such a modding powerhouse and so well loved.
I'd say RTS in general is really struggling these days :(
Yes it is struggling indeed...
For example one of the recently released RTS games, Grey Goo, has a map editor but no modding SDK: Moddb.com others like Act of Aggression do not even have those editors available, which is a shame.
The only major series (with full modding support) currently cared for & about is StarCraft and its newest expansion LotV Moddb.com At least Blizzard kept the good old RTS tradition up and appeased wild expectations of both gamers and critics... and modders as well.
That may be in part because the mainstream industry's current target audience is much younger, which 'cant be bothered' with thinking too much in games.
Fortunately, we can still mod many of those games that won't spawn any decent sequels to keep them alive. We can still recreate, expand and even enhance that experience that we cherished so much.
I have already said this here on ModDB: I have no hopes for anything EA could do with C&C. I believe that we, the community, are the only ones that can keep C&C alive.
My other hope is that a decent company will buy C&C from EA. Maybe even a company created by modders/fans (I constantly think about this). The fact everything EA tried to do with C&C failed and that the franchise seems dead should lower the price they can charge for it (I hope).
C&C lives in death!
Indeed, INtense!. Unfortunately, that appears to be true. :(
Yeah RTS seems to be a dead genre. I mean there's basically Starcraft and that's it. I haven't played it but there was also that game, 'Grey Goo' that came out recently, as Feillyne said.
Seems to me that 4x strategy games are much more popular, as well as TBS. Endless Space, Endless Legend, the Civilization games seem to be at the forefront. As well as Grand strategy like Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, etc. And i'm really looking forward to Stellaris.
I don't think that Blizzard will really make Warcraft 4 into reality. Since the Warcraft universe are actually under the big title of their franchise: World of Warcraft saga. Most comic or novel followed WoW saga as well. But if they really make it happens, it should be good. Who knows if the story (or above all, the gameplay) is way better than predecessor title.
And everything is true about StarCraft with its modding community ...
Blizzard was not bragging about total SC2 sales which really calls even mere possibility of development of WC4 into question. SC2 itself was excellent in most (if not all) aspects.
After the Legacy of the Void is out (and Overwatch, and Heroes of the Storm), there is a slim chance Blizzard would secretly start working either on a new RTS ( Forbes.com ), or WoW-inspired WC4 or WC4 in some alternate timeline or changed universe (e.g. Orcs before invading Azeroth).
Well I would be glad if they are really about to make it comes true, to be honest.
Storywise, it would be amazing. As long as they don't take the "timeline intervention" part which I considered the major flaw in Warcraft universe (if you play the game and follow the "cavern of time" thingy). And Blizzard had tendency to reuse this idea in the latest patch (Warlord of Draenor).
Would be better if it's just orc invasion or some kind of prequel from WoW lore.
Oops a bit off topic since your article tells about the CnC and we talked about Warcraft. Well, as the comments told above, RTS genre is really struggling if we talked about mainstream game genre in general.
Westwood was a developer team of idealists that believed in pushing themselves further into delivering innovative, next-gen gameplay.
The original C&C3; (the one developed by WW) known as 'tiberian incursion' was surely going to be a revolution in RTS, judging by its demos and concept art which all looked amazing. Unfortunately as we all know, it never saw most of its dev cycle complete; little time after WW perished.
EA 'recycled' some concepts from it and tried to deliver an acceptable title that became TW, which wasn't a bad RTS per-se yet a mediocre in the standards of a true Command and Conquer game.
C&C4; was an absolute joke of a title that we all want to forget, just like the blight so called 'successor' to C&C Generals which never made it past open beta, supposed to be an unbalanced, 'freemium', microtransaction plagued mess that nobody played.
Regarding AoE and WC it would be very unlikely to see sequels to them in the future, seeing as neither Microsoft nor Blizzard would be interested in delivering more than money-milking freemium/p2w minigames. And Blizzard has WoW so why would they bother?
C&C's future is uncertain, though we can hope to see a true spiritual successor to it in the future, same goes for AoE and WC. (besides GG if it is to be considered as such)