Call me a skeptic if you must, but I think most would agree that there are fewer players enjoying RTS games and as a result fewer games being developed for the genre.

Currently the last champions of RTS have been reduced to a few significant names, Starcraft 2 that has seen a decline with its e-sports centric audience (most likely mobbing towards the ever popular MOBA genre) and Command & Conquer which had its last official released game panned by Critics and abandoned by fans(Company of Heroes 2 is the other other recent RTS example). The attempt to make a Free to Play C&C apparently failed as well, it’s pretty damning to see the two biggest names in a once popular genre fail to keep a foot hold as they once had.

In a competitive environment they can be quite difficult to play, and quite stressful at times due to how unforgiving they are. More so than team games. This can scare a lot of people away in the long term. The thing to keep in mind is that because there is no reliance on a team, all losses and any mistakes are 100% the fault of the player. This leads to a lot of bruised egos. Also because of this difficulty, it is very difficult to play 1v1 in a casual way, especially right now. Most of the lowest level players have dropped out so anyone just starting is going to be facing some fairly tough competition compared to if they started even a year back.

Most of the people I know who switched from SC2 to DOTA/League did so because they like the team atmosphere and find it less stressful to play.

For non-competitive RTS, it seems like many of the developers have been stuck in a bit of a rut. The Creative Assembly games have been all kinda bland for the last couple, and CnC is basically dead. AoE Online was a bit of a bust so whether or not we will see something new from that series I don't know.

I'm a huge fan for innovation in the genre such as the RPG elements introduced in Warcraft 3 or the focus on capturing bases/checkpoints in Dawn of War / Z and wish to see more of this as I believe it's one of the things to draw players back into the scene. That and perhaps innovating the multiplayer experience to more social for the more casual market that's available.

While small it appears that the tournament funding for the SC2 scene has been diminishing slowly since 2012 before the expansion was even released while it is also being "out-popularized" by MOBA games in which the funding has increased exponentially.

http://www.esportsearnings.com/history/2014/games

Although an incomplete list this article shows that the quantity of quality titles coming out has diminished over recent years. Granted it takes more money and time to create AAA titles now so that must still be taken into consideration I suppose. As for the actual number of players playing these games it's entirely my speculation that they're decreasing. I don't see much hype or discussion about the genre (even though someone just recently started a hype thread about C&C on this board!)

I still believe over time investors will continue getting less confident with the genre opting instead to continue producing FPS titles and MOBA games in the already over saturated market.

Has it?

Do you happen to have figures?

I don't have any figures either, but I got the same feeling. I think that , compared to other genres, RTS games are really unpopular, there are only the really big names (Warhammer/Starcraft).

In my personal opinion the reason is the PC. Large publishers do not really target the PC market (hi-rate of piracy), other then producing sequel after sequel of an already successful brand. The console market is by far more interesting for publishers and RTS games are notorious hard to play with a controller.

Maybe some indie studios will provide more RTS games.

When it comes to building a multiplayer community, free to play MOBAs definitely have a lower barrier to entry, in terms of both price and the skills necessary to be decent at the game. RTS really isn’t suited for F2P monetization, as evidenced by the cancellation of the new C&C game, and it doesn’t have the mainstream appeal of other competitive genres like FPS.

Most of the people I know who switched from SC2 to DOTA/League did so because they like the team atmosphere and find it less stressful to play.

I also get the sense that that’s probably the majority opinion, but for me it’s actually the opposite. I don’t play MOBAs because I feel more stressed about letting the rest of the team down, whereas when it’s a 1v1 I’m more relaxed because I’m just playing for myself.

There are a few approaches that I think RTS can take to keep the genre fresh. There is a lot of relatively unused genre blending that I think would be engaging, and I think there are a lot of good ways to blend for instance, RTS and RPG gameplay in an interesting way. With the project I'm working on, I'm actually more interested in the RTS/4X combination, which I think is one of the other obvious evolutions of the RTS genre. I'd say that Sins of a Solar Empire and Divinity Dragon Commander were both good recent examples of that sub-genre of RTS, where you have the slow paced, big picture strategic element, but you also have direct control of real time battles. Unfortunately, I do think that Sins and especially Divinity suffered from less than stellar implementations of the core action-RTS mechanics and micromanagement elements that players have come to expect from these kinds of games.

When WC3 was announced that it would be in 3D, I was excited because now I thought I could zoom out to see the entire map. No. They didn't do it.

I disliked other things about the game, but this is one thing that Supreme Commander does pretty well -- you can actually zoom out until the entire map is visible, and when you zoom out far enough to make visual identification of units difficult they are abstracted as icons representing the type of unit -- I'd like to see that functionality expanded upon (to more capably handle groups of units and display other information) and included in more games.

(Note that Supreme Commander is the most recent RTS I have played by quite a long shot, so it's entirely possible I've missed this feature in other newer games.)