Just got a ‘win a skirmish or multiplayer as Templar’ achievement and it says 3.4% of players ‘have this achievement’.
What on earth? Nearly no one is playing with Knights Templar? Do people actually play this game?
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I broke 2k hours played this year, and…
Yeah… I just don’t like playing as them…
Many people never even try a civ. More than you’d think based off of the ladder!
The better question is: do people actually buy variants DLC? And the answer is clearly no. I don’t know anyone in the AOE community who buys a dlc and doesn’t at least try out one of the factions. So 3.4% for templars and 3.1% for lancaster is a pretty bad showing.
To put that in perspective, in AOE3, the lowest achievement rates for “win with a civ” are 2.7% for Ethiopia and 2.4% for Hausa. What that community has datamined has shown that these are the least played civs in the entire game (that lines up). It’s also estimated that of the approximately 4.5 million owners on steam, 2-3M of them are F2P, so they can’t play the African civs at all, so the true achievement rate of people who bought the game and played those civs (and therefore bought TAR) is between 6-9%. AOE4 has approximately 3.5M owners on steam (out of 4 M estimated in total) and yet Templar and Lancaster barely beat the achievement rates for the least played civs in AOE3 when at least half of the population isn’t even eligible.
Alternatively, the lowest achievement rate in AOE2 for a pre-V&V dlc (meaning the last standard dlc) is the Armenians and Georgians at 3.1% each. The Mountain Royals is widely viewed as a rather poor dlc (although now that V&V and 3K exist it’s no longer considered the worst) and wide swathes of the community didn’t buy it.
All this means that, per capita, the Knights DLC sold proportionally to AOE2’s The Mountain Royals and significantly worse than AOE3’s The African Royals, and globally sold ~ half as many copies as TMR and approximately the same number of copies as TAR.
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I did try them but I never won a match with them, so no achievement.
I don’t know, Knights of Cross and Rose wasn’t so interesting after all.
What’s interesting is that way more people have won at least a match with the Japanese (9,6%) or the Byzantine (7,6%) but that still isn’t a huge percentage at all. The Sultans Ascend campaign was completed only by 2,5% of the players and yet that DLC was the best selling one in AoE history, the Devs say.
Numbers will be pretty low, also because of GamePass.
I don’t have the DLC…but I’ll buy it for Christmas along with the DotE one…
And with good reason… Ethiopia is horrible to play… very weak troops and you have to depend on European mercenaries to do anything… that’s why I moved to Italy as soon as I could…
That’s not necessarily what the data says. The low numbers of people getting these achievements don’t mean that similar amounts of people bought the DLC, as reasonable as that conclusion seems. People can buy something and not play that particular civ for many reasons. For instance, I own the Return of Rome DLC for AoE2 and I’ve never touched the Romans because I’ve been busy with other games that held my attention.
So while the answer to your question is “probably no”, I can guarantee you that it isn’t “clearly no”.
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Also, those percentages aren’t based on players that currently play, but on ALL players.
So what about the hundreds of thousands of people that bought the game (it sold over 4 million copies) when it came out but haven’t played in ages? They’re still part of the 100%.
Remove all of them and suddenly those numbers are much higher than 3ish%.
3% of 4 million is 120,000 people.
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So what? All the games have that behavior. The numbers still stubbornly remain. Using that same formula, for AOE2 3.1% of 7.9M is 245,000. For AOE3, 2.7% of 4.5M is 120,000.
AOE2 has twice the active player base of AOE4 and by this estimate sold twice the number of copies as AOE4 for its least popular normal DLC. AOE3 has half that of AOE4, and yet AOE3 sold the same number of copies as AOE4 for its least popular DLC.
No matter which way you cut it, the sales are poor. The why is up for debate.
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It’s the only proxy we have since Microsoft refuses to make numbers public. While there are certainly flaws in the approximation, we can assume similar behavior exists across all the games in the franchise. I agree it’s hardly a perfect methodology but it’s the only one we have that can rely on objective data. I’d love to use more holistic data if it existed in the public sphere.
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The API that tracks players by the games they play through quick match, ranked, and custom is public.
And likewise you’ll find that many many games will have seemingly simple achievements with only a tiny percent of players completing them (especially DLC).
My point is this is not something special with AoE4, or indicative of poor sales. We have no idea what the expected number of sales were or the actual.
It’s silly to try and draw any meainginful conclusions from this limited piece of data. You are making all these assumptions about the DLC sales for each game without really having any idea what the numbers are. We just don’t know.
AoE 4 achievements are known to be bugged and reset every time you switch between PUP and live build. Last year when I launched the game for checking out its PUP for the then upcoming siege updates, I unlocked a couple of achievements I had before at the same time:
As a Ethiopean main, I disagree. 
You just need to make them work.
I’d say that those who enjoy the game buy the DLCs, often to play the Campaigns or to have new enemies and maps/biomes to play… but that doesn’t mean they want to play with the new variants or civilizations, but just having new enemies and new content is worth the purchase.
For example: Here at home, my wife has her own gaming PC and plays almost every day… but she doesn’t like switching civilizations/variants. Since launch, she only plays with the Mongol civilization, lol. The other civilizations didn’t interest her. But she bought ALL the DLCs to have more enemies and different maps/biomes to play against the AI.
Nowadays, she no longer plays with the Mongols. She’s replaced them with the Lancaster variant, and by the way, she loves Lancaster enough to give up her Mongols. lol.l
So I’d say it’s a matter of personal taste.
In my case, I make a point of playing through all the variants and civilizations at least once… but I don’t repeat most of them. I like elephants, so my options are quite limited.
Another example from an old friend of mine… in Age of Empires 2, he only played Aztecs. He didn’t care about new civilizations; for them, DLCs meant new enemies for his Aztecs to fight. LOL
That’s life. =D
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As far as I know, some people buy DLC for the New maps, Single-player content, and other things, like Editor objects, or IA enemies for Skirmishes.
But when it comes to playing “All Civs,” only a few of us do.
In fact, the numbers for other civs played at least one time in achievements, aren’t that high either:
Number of Buyers vs. Number of Players
On the other hand, consider that there are a lot of players who just “buy” the game and don’t play it, or who play it for a while and then abandon it, temporarily or permanently.
If we consider the people who bought Age IV when it was hype in 2021, what percentage of players who bought it actually play the game today? Probably less than half, maybe a third or a fifth.
If we compare it to other franchises, especially if they completed the game to the end, it’s not always everyone:
Only 20.5% of buyers “beat the game” in Blasphemous.
Only 11.2% of buyers completed the first campaign in Northgard. Of those, at least 68.9% played the tutorial or a skirmish. Only 50% played the first level of the campaign.
Only 3% of players have completed the Dragon Age Inquistion campaign on Hard.
And that’s despite at least 65.9% having played the tutorial. The other 34.1% of players have never played the game, they only have it in their librarries, because was at discount and don´t have enough time to try it.
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Let’s extend this logic.
“A First for the Emperor” is still under 10%, for a civilisation that’s nearly two years old. A third of that for something that’s been around what . . . a quarter as long? Doesn’t seem that bad at all.
How about Chivalry? I’m by no means a good player, and it’s very easy to get up to 45 Knights in that campaign mission (in one of the original campaigns, available since launch). That achievement is sitting at 4.9%, now.
Do people actually play the campaigns? Should the devs bother making any more? What would your answer be? 
I think the consensus is that only people who have at least launched the game are considered in the game achievement statistics. so 34% of people launched the game but stopped playing before they finished the tutorial (or went straight into free play/campaigns)
I agree with everything else you wrote
There are also things that disable achievements, such as playing in offline mode, or things that prevent a user from sharing their achievement status with the tracker, like privacy settings.
As a sidenote, one of the most earned achievements is building your first landmark, which is done in the intro scenario when first launching the game. That has a completion rate of 94.7%, while actually finishing the scenario is 60.5%:
To explain this by saying that ~35% of players start the game but never make it past the tutorial is certainly one way to go about it. To infer that it was because they were dissatisfied ignores a whole slew of viable explanations, such as quitting the tutorial, or a glitch occurring.
I think there might be a bit of confirmation bias happening when assuming that because the achievement total is low that means sales are low. There’s virtually no correlation, and many other more reasonable things explain it.
I have been having fun playing as Ethiopians in Comp Stomps in AoE III DE on a custom map I have been hosting. They are very different from European civs making them harder to get used to but once you find a good spot with them they are fun to play. I have been using them doing a ff then making ranged cavalry and skirms before eventually mixing in some other units once in a while.
Regular units, natives from age ups choices and mercenaries are all usable military for them