30 March 2026
Greg Foertsch spent 22 years at Firaxis making strategy games. He was art director on the modern XCOM titles. When he left to start his own studio, Bit Reactor, the game he wanted to make was a turn-based tactics title — the kind of complex, layered, PC-first experience that the industry had quietly decided wasn’t worth the bother for about fifteen years.
That game is now Star Wars Zero Company, one of the most anticipated releases of 2026. In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Foertsch gave a sharp diagnosis of why genres like turn-based tactics, CRPGs, and RTS went quiet for so long — and why they’re suddenly everywhere again.
“Early on in the 2000s, we got enamoured with consoles,” he said, “and I think certain games didn’t make the leap right.”
That’s a polite way of putting it. What actually happened was more brutal — and more interesting.
The Console Decade
From roughly 2001 to 2012, the games industry went through a sustained period of console infatuation. The PS2 was the best-selling console of all time. The Xbox 360 and PS3 defined a generation. Publishers followed the money, developers followed the publishers, and the games that couldn’t survive the transition — the ones that needed a keyboard, a mouse, forty hours, and a tolerance for reading — got quietly shelved.
Turn-based tactics games required interfaces that didn’t translate to a controller. Real-time strategy games needed mouse precision that a thumbstick couldn’t replicate. CRPGs demanded text-heavy systems that looked wrong on a television screen. Grand strategy games were essentially incomprehensible without a keyboard shortcut reference card.
These weren’t bad games. Many of them were extraordinary. But they were PC games in a way that meant something specific — they were designed around a particular relationship between a person, a desk, and a machine. When the industry decided that relationship wasn’t where the money was, the genres that depended on it nearly disappeared.
What we got instead was a decade of streamlined console ports, simplified interfaces, and the gradual dumbing-down of complexity in the name of accessibility. Some of those games were brilliant. But something was lost.
What Brought Them Back
Foertsch’s theory is that the comeback is largely a UX story. The genres didn’t change — the tools for presenting them did. Camera technology improved. Interface design matured. Developers figured out how to make complex systems feel approachable without gutting the depth that made them interesting in the first place.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown in 2012 is the obvious inflection point. Firaxis took a notoriously obtuse series — the original X-COM from 1994 was brilliant and almost deliberately hostile to new players — and rebuilt it with a camera language borrowed from action games, a streamlined two-action system, and a presentation that made tactical decisions feel cinematic rather than bureaucratic. It was still hard. It still punished mistakes. But it looked and felt like a modern game.
What followed was a decade of rediscovery. Into the Breach. Disco Elysium. Baldur’s Gate 3. Divinity: Original Sin 2. Hades. Slay the Spire. Age of Empires IV. Humankind. Games that would have been considered niche PC curios in 2008 became mainstream hits — not because the audiences changed, but because the games finally met those audiences where they were.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is perhaps the most striking example. Larian Studios made a 100-hour CRPG with deep systems, complex choices, and absolutely no concessions to players who didn’t want to engage with its complexity — and it became one of the best-selling games of 2023. It won Game of the Year. It got a PlayStation release. People who had never played a CRPG in their lives played it to completion and wanted more.
This Is a Retro Story Too
Here’s the thing that the Star Wars Zero Company press cycle hasn’t quite said out loud: this comeback isn’t separate from the retro gaming revival. It’s the same story told from a different angle.
The games that didn’t survive the console transition of the 2000s are the same games that people who grew up with PCs in the 90s remember most fondly. Syndicate. Dungeon Keeper. Transport Tycoon. Baldur’s Gate. Command & Conquer. Jagged Alliance. Theme Hospital. Dune II. These weren’t just good games — for a lot of people, they were the reason computers existed.
When those genres went away, it wasn’t just a commercial story. It was a cultural one. An entire way of playing games — patient, complex, demanding, deeply personal — got pushed to the margins. The people who loved those games didn’t stop loving them. They just stopped being catered to.
The retro gaming revival and the PC genre comeback are both expressions of the same thing: the recognition that games built around depth, mastery, and genuine challenge have an audience that never went away. It just took the industry a while to remember it was there.
What It Means for What Gets Made Next
Foertsch made a point that stuck with me. He talked about the “explosion of turn-based tactics since 2012” not just as a commercial trend but as a creative one — developers learning from each other, seeing what works, building on each other’s solutions. The genre isn’t being revived in museum form. It’s being actively developed, pushed forward, experimented with.
Star Wars Zero Company is an example of that. It’s not XCOM with a Star Wars skin. By all accounts it combines tactical combat with third-person exploration in a way that feels closer to Mass Effect than to the games it’s nominally descended from. It’s using the return of these genres as permission to innovate rather than just recreate.
That’s an important distinction. Nostalgia is a starting point, not a destination. The SNES Mini is wonderful precisely because it preserves those games exactly as they were — but the reason we still play them is that the underlying design was so good it holds up thirty years later. The best argument for old-school PC genres isn’t that they deserve preservation. It’s that they were right about what made games interesting, and the rest of the industry is finally catching up.
Star Wars Zero Company is due for release in 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. If you want to go deeper into the games this piece is really about, our Best Retro Games on PC guide covers the classics still worth playing right now — and our Best Mini Consoles piece is for anyone who wants that 90s experience in the most frictionless form possible.
Sources: PC Gamer (Greg Foertsch interview, March 2026).