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Chazore said:

So I'm still watching this vid, but so far it's been quite a good and informative watch:

The author behind it runs a community for RTS players, has a team working on two unreleased/unannounced games and has played RTS games for 20+ yrs, so he knows the genre pretty well.

The thing that's caught my eye so far in his video, is that he goes on to mention that the biggest part of the genre isn't the dedicated hardcore PVP players, but the casual players, the ones who play the campaign/skirmish and co-op modes, and while I knew this for other RTS games, I didn't actually know it to be the case for Starcraft II (he even includes a 2016 clip with a staff member from Blizz specifically stating the percentage of players who played the campaign vs those that played the multiplayer).

I do strongly believe that devs should stop putting too much focus on making RTS games just for PVP'ers, because that always involves and endless cycle of balance changes and trying to please everyone, while also losing players over time, and let's face it, all PVP based games have a finite lifespan (even the private hosted servers only last for so long). Instead devs should focus on making a well rounded RTS, a good campaign and a story to tell, units that really stand out and battles that feel alive, of course you can add in PVP, but don't make that your main focus, don't try to make your game an esport, because that time has pretty much come and gone since 2010.

Also, he nails it on the head with games like Grey Gooo and AoE IV, and why I'm still not touching AoE IV.

As a person that has played Starcraft 2's single player, competitively played multiplayer and these days, casually play multiplayer for Starcraft 2 still, I think there needs to be a good mix of both. The Single player of RTS games is important for a lot of casual people but once that ends, the multiplayer is what keeps people talking and on going as seen by his very own charts of the starcraft 2's ladder matches. Age of Empires IV certainly made the mistake of focusing too much into the esports style especially for it's single player but the irony for AoE IV is that it's multiplayer is also pretty bad in comparison to AoE2 Definitive Edition as well.

AoE IV gives you like 8 civs vs AoE2DE gives you 39 civs after all the DLCs and such. AoEIV has a ton of balance issues. The minimap is a joke when it comes to readability. There is no ranked seasons and no user generated maps/mods. There's also no patrol move which is very essential for online. On top of that many of the basic functionality such as hotkeys and etc haven't even been implemented yet on AoEIV. And there's also lots of other issues while AoE2DE has all that and still getting updates. AoEIV still has a goodish roadmap that will fix many issues but it will be a while before it can ironically compete against AoE2DE.

But overall, I do think they need a good mix of both. What makes Starcraft 2, AoE2DE and such still relevant today is they both have a strong single player and a strong multiplayer on top of getting the basics right. AoEIV did both single player and multiplayer wrong not to mention it's visual style is pretty meh. Maybe one day they will fix it but from what I have tried and seen, it will be a long ways away.