GamesIndustry International has an interview up with Dan Baker and Brad Wardell about the Nitrous engine and Oxide Games.
"I've known some of the Oxide guys for a long time and we've been making strategy games for a long time," said Wardell. "Every time we go and do a strategy game, we have to roll our own engine. It's gotten tougher and tougher for strategy games to be competitive with say, a first-person shooter, in terms of fidelity, because FPSs can just license Unreal. It was getting more and more difficult for us to compete visually as strategy games, and as a result they were becoming more and more niche. Or in the case of role-playing games, they just became first-person shooters."
The full interview is here.