Yes, that's really the problem with the "$60 games". I often find $10 indie games more enjoyable and more fun to play than those $60 games. The $60 games are keeping costs too high for assets, realistic graphics and other expensive stuff that eat up a lot of a game development's cost, and then there's not as much focus put on the gameplay.

It's like hollywood and their summer tentpole blockbusters. The need to make a huge movie that appeals worldwide discourages studios from straying from the most formulaic pattern available, because anything new is unlikely to have the same kind of broad appeal. Meanwhile, the huge budget (and high expected revenue) of those films makes the upside of making something better (because everyone's going to go see "Godzilla" or "Xmen" anyway.)

But people making lower budget films can take more risks, because if they do come up with a new type of hit they'll see huge returns.

I used to work on a site that covered the movie industries and one of our views was that fixed ticket prices were hurting the movie industry. A dumb, low-risk summer movie makes the same per viewer as an intelligent but niche film. Things would be a lot more interesting if some films targeted at smaller markets could charge $20 or more per ticket; and you might see declining returns on dumb tentpoles if they had to compete on price with each other (e.g. "How to die in the west" for $5 vs "Godzilla" for $15 ... ?)

Speaking of RTS, I really miss the 90's/early-2000's. It was basically like a golden era of RTS's lol. But they don't really work on consoles (needed for AAA these days), and with mid-sized developers vanishing, the RTS genre has kind of slumped. Blizzard can still do it and maybe other companies here and there, but there's very little going on in that genre I feel now. The new freemium C&C will be interesting though for sure.

You'd think tablets/mobile would have an amazing plethora of RTS's, but it kind of seems like the simulation/Facebook games took over (Clash of Clans etc).

You might find folks to help you with that project, but lets work the business mechanics a bit to see if you could get it funded.

$10/month - So how much load does the game put on a server? And what sized server? That's important because if you have a bunch of dedicated AWS instances they can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, if you put them on demand you will have to figure out the latency issues.

The game is going to change quickly, and as you said its multiplayer and 'persistent maps' so lots of memory? Recovery if you lose a machine in the middle of the game? And a staff of Game Masters who can help angry 11 yr olds trying to get their 'Mom's crappy Dell' to play the game with a decent frame rate.

To put it a different way, I would love to play that game too, and I would pay $10 a month, but could I run it at $10 a month in at least a cash flow break-even mode? Turn based games are easier with their arbitrary latency allowance, RTS gets to be less easy. Especially if one player lagging out freezes the map for everyone? So perhaps the game engine isn't the challenging part, perhaps the backend stack is a harder challenge, or the support infrastructure. I don't know but I wonder about that some times.

Continuous value could be added from a few game mechanics:

1. Games could have a true end. One faction wins, game over, server reset. 2. Different maps. Could be worked in the "game over" scenario or could be running concurrently. 3. Different "ages": the game code could adequately work with past, present and futuristic units, giving users different experiences when they play.

As for AWS costs, I really have no idea the kind of load you would get from that game, but given a C3.xlarge is about $175 a month (or less for reserved), I'd be shocked to hear that you cannot serve at least 175 concurrent users from that server-- giving about $1500 a month profit per server utilized. IMO dev costs, engineer time etc will far far outstrip the infrastructure costs.

Of course you could. Only need 100,000 to be making a million a month and in RTS you use deterministic simulations which require little juice to run. It's completely different to a FPS.

The reason you probably won't get funded is that it's hard to make a fun game which lasts.