True top-down (allowing software rotation) is as cheap art-wise as side view is, but the only indie hit I can think of that used it was Hotline Miami. It's a ve

True top-down (allowing software rotation) is as cheap art-wise as side view is, but the only indie hit I can think of that used it was Hotline Miami. It's a very unpopular art style. Isometric views take wildly more art assets than side view. Notice how there are far fewer indie overhead adventure games than there are indie platformers. The engines for these are nearly identical, and Zelda is just as much of a cultural touchstone as Mario. I attribute this to these games taking 3x or 5x the art assets. Needing multiplayer and pathfinding are good points. I don't think RTS multiplayer is particularly hard (the hundreds of units hardly matter if you're doing it right), but the fact that everyone expects the genre to have multiplayer at all is still a significant barrier to entry. Mass pathfinding is definitely a problem - the discussions I've seen online about it are mostly people confidently telling each other to use A*, which really isn't sufficient in an RTS. I don't think design problems are that important for indie games. If the barrier to entry is low enough, there will be enough games to brute force the design.