A real time strategy video game is a subgenre of the strategy games and is opposed to the turn-based strategy video games. The phrase "real-time" contributes in distinguishing those two genres. Indeed, in a real-time strategy game the action is continuous and the players have to make quick decisions in order to succeed his missions.

Those games need some thinking and reactivity and sometimes even some reflexes for the hardest of the genre. This genre was launched in the early 90's with the release of Dune II in 1992 by Westwood. Little by little, real time strategy video games gained a more important popularity than turn based strategy with the mainstream, thanks to franchises as the Warcraft series, or the Age of Empire series. This video game genre is mostly developed on PC and the keyboard / mouse gameplay makes it funnier on PC than on console.