I have been told that Halo Wars was a great start, personally I played a ton of AoE back in the day on PC, so i hope they can make a good transisiton to consoles. In addition to Halo Wars 2 there is supposedly another fan favorite RTS being developed for XB1. We shall see.

i have AoE2 for the ps2 and its meh at best, the game is realy great on pc and the port is good, but it still doesnt work right.

i dont have so high hopes, if one of the greates RTS series couldnt make a good transition in its prime, how should lesser games do it?

all great rts series tried console, and it never worked realy great.

the port wasnt bad, but the game just doesnt fit console controlls. 

halo wars is a realy well made console RTS, but its still not realy good if compared to the big PC rts.   BfME2 was just crap.  the IP is just poorly used and Wc3 and Total war mods use the IP a lot better.

i dont think there is a market for core RTS on console, its a tiny market, that doesnt buy much of games, but wants a lot, like modsupport and good working servers.   casuals may buy some RTS, but i dont think it will be a big market, casual RTS arent a thing because you cant dumb don the concept enough to make it interesting for more than 2 hours...

The PS4 also has tons of F2P games. It has nothing to do with "countering" Sony.

To be fair there is no counter for PS4... it won the generation in early 2013 already after that the sales showed that this generation competition won't happen.

Xbone will do fine and MS will try to hold this "fine" even losing some money.

And for last PS4 have a lot of F2P game already... it is look more a policy issue on MS side than a counter.

smite on consoles is very interesting.
I think it's very fun and addictive to play on consoles

There is no way they could make a RTS crossplay.  they dont dare to make a fps crossplay, and FPS is much bigger on console.

It's not really a counter to PS4 when the PS4 already had a crap ton of F2P MP games already and since launch. Me personally not a fan of F2P games.

F2P games are becoming more popular and with improving models, more games will adopt this. No countering involved, it is just becoming popular.

Even if smite came to PS4 I wouldn't get it because playing it on PC is vastly superior. Unless they offer kb+m for consoles it will be a more second rate experience than multiplayer fps IMO. That said I have heard that smite may come to PS4.
And while smite is ftp, it takes an absolute age to collect all the gods using just favour, so I expect the majority of people to pick up the ultimate god pack.
I also think that the console version could be made significantly more popular if they introduced skins from iconic characters associated with the console. To increase global popularity of smite it should be on all consoles, including PSV And 3DS. The pc version runs on pretty low power PCs and laptops so porting to all 8th gen consoles should not technically be a challenge.