alt Hacker NewsHalo Wars sold 16.7% of Halo 3’s first week sales according to Wikipedia.
It was commercially successful but not in a mainstream mass audience kind of way.
Yes, it proved that RTS can be done on a controller (arguably, StarCraft 64 kind of sort of proved that, too), but if you’ve ever played StarCraft 2 I think you’d agree that particular style of RTS is really not possible without a keyboard and mouse. The game is almost entirely revolving around maximizing your actions per minute.
I also think the RTS genre is very much less popular today and then it was at that time.
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Halo Wars is also not much of an RTS. While it does have base building, the SP campaigns are full of RTT-like missions. It is actually a very fun game that stands way above compared to a more “by the numbers” implementation of, for example, Command & Conquer 3. Halo Wars found a much better balance and is a much more polished console experience.
> The game is almost entirely revolving around maximizing your actions per minute.
Maybe for top tier play, but apm wasn’t really needed for regular play.
Just to debunk this myth, it used to be possible to get to diamond with 80-100 apm (which is very easy to achieve), efficient builds, fundamental rush defense, and a-move.
Not sure about now, but it was doable for many years.