Feneq: How a Two-Man Team Wants to Shake up the RTS Genre

With the courage to create a game in the supposedly dead RTS genre and combine it with contemporary roguelike and deck-building mechanics, feneq released Rogue Command in November 2024. For the two-person team, this has been a journey of over five years. They are fully behind the concept, and so is their community.

Martin Reichard and Mario Imhof are feneq, a two-person studio based in Wölfersheim (north of Frankfurt am Main). Both have been working together for almost ten years, before founding feneq in 2019. "Martin was one of the owners of Lotum, my employer at the time," says Mario Imhof. With almost 50 employees, Lotum designs, develops and operates mobile games and apps for iOS, Android and the Facebook Messenger platform - with more than 900 million downloads in total. "Martin [Reichard] and me continued to grow closer and discovered a shared love for many more or less obscure topics, like games, procedural generation, electronic music and also had a very similar view as to how a company would be run most efficiently while also allowing the employees to share real responsibility and participation in the products they worked on", Imhof said.

At that time he was responsible for the processes at Lotum and very involved as Scrum Master in several teams, while Martin Reichard as CTO built up the development team. "Because he loves programming and could not find a way to do this at Lotum full-time and in a satisfying way (without being manager at the same time and working on a (niche-)product made up by himself) he finally decided to leave Lotum and start something new," Imhof continues. When the break came, Martin Reichard asked Mario Imhof if he would be interested in starting a new company. For him, the question came out of the blue. "It was a really hard decision. Because I loved the people I worked with at Lotum. But it was also the easiest and it only took me one day to say yes in the end. There were a lot of ideas we could start working on but we decided to go into Indie Gaming relatively quickly," Imhof recalls.

Their first game, Rogue Command, which blends classic RTS à la Command & Conquer with roguelike and deck-building mechanics, was inspired by Slay the Spire, which had particularly fascinated Martin Reichard at the time. "He loved the control over the roguelike typical randomness it provided. He realized that this opened up the roguelike meta game to new genres and soon fell in love with the idea of a roguelike rts (because real-time strategy was his favourite genre back in the days)," Mario said. Despite the fact that even then most people were of the opinion that the genre was a 'dead genre'. Imhof: "I was a little resistant to the idea at first, working on a mock up for a VR-Synthesizer app at the time, but he kept bringing it up and eventually it really clicked for me as well. That was around early fall of 2019. The market for indies (and everyone?) has become a lot rougher since we started working on Rogue Command. And at the same time it really seems like the genre has taken off again in a major way with amazing titles being in production from huge projects to at this point an overwhelming amount of indies of varying sizes."

Although titles like Homeworld 3 and Stormgate had a tough time in the end, so did Company of Heroes 3 and Empire of the Ants, if you only look at classic RTS titles and not 4X games or city builders. Only the Age of Empires franchise did very well and smaller games like Thronefall from Berlin-based GrizzlyGames. Tempest Rising could also give the genre a boost in April 2025, as could ZeroSpace. While all these games were slowly but surely fighting for the attention of RTS players, feneq continued to work on the launch of the title. Feneq did not receive any funding; the project was privately funded for more than five years. "When we started working on the game we only took a little time to find a kind of grant or support out there and there was nothing that clicked. But we are in a wildly privileged position to be able to weather the rough market on our own."

"Since we took so long to get the game ready for launch, it is also less than guaranteed it will be a financial success." - Mario Imhof, Managing Director feneq

On 18 November 2024, the game was finally released in Early Access on Steam - without the support of a publisher. They decided to self-publish, especially since they already had a lot of launch experience from their previous job. Mario Imhof: "The launch went well overall, the big drawback being a high return rate, which is fair since we launched without any kind of real tutorial. It now all depends on our and the games capability to build some momentum throughout Early Access. The ranges of success for a 1.0 launch after an Early Access phase are crazy, ranging from basically nothing to having an impact that is many times that of the Early Access launch. So while there is a lot of benchmarking data out there to judge your "normal" launch on Steam, Early Access adds more variability to the equation. And while this might be naive. The amazing reception of the game so far gives us a good amount of hope, that we can make a real banger of a game and hopefully find ourselves above the average."

And the feedback from players has been extremely positive, with 95 per cent of user reviews (n=241) on Steam being 'positive'. The success of the game is also due to the "great" community on Discord. Together with interested players, they have been able to continuously expand the game since its beta, before Early Access, which took almost a year. "The exact shape of how we will involve the community even more throughout Early Access has yet to take shape, but both of us are just incredibly excited right now, to absorb all the feedback and make the game better and better."

But above all, the duo draw a great deal of optimism and confidence from the fact that their own opinions and those of the community overlap to a large extent. "So the direction in which we need to take action is very very clear. That even extends to most of the reviews on Steam and a lot of the things that streamers or YouTubers say, when they have played the game for a bit. So in that sense, even while there is a lot of uncertainty with the final outcome, we do have some legs to tackle meaningful things throughout Early Access and have a great clarity as to what those things need to be." And with this support and confidence, Rogue Command will hopefully find many more buyers who want to play a classic RTS with a twist.