The majority of the players are on windows store /xbox.
The past week the player numbers were higher, the decrease is only noticeable this week.
Even AOE4 is new the player numbers have decreased already significantly, so personally I am not to worried about the numbers. When the new civ comes out the numbers will increase again a bit.
Regarding the streamers/youtubers it’s all about the views and the money, I mean what do they care which game their playing it’s all about the reveneu. If an AOM 2 or DE comes out next year they probably migrate to that game.
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These youtubers and streamers will stream the game that more people are watching/ will be watching, so that kinda makes sense.
I do feel that the game will have some support in 2022. My feeling was that you don’t add so many new things in a game and then stop supporting it within a year. Like if they are not going to support it for long, then why spend so much time and effort on the QoL changes, map selector, new maps, historical battles, new civ, a new never ever ever ever seen before game mode etc …
I think we’ll have support.
The AoE2 community has some of the most rigid people in the world, who are very actively AoE4-phobic and are already very unhappy that a lot of their favorite streamers are playing AoE4 instead of AoE2, and I feel like the message on their patch notes was an attempt to pacify them. These people are too quick to reject new games but bring in revenue so…
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I agree with your view and opinions, look at AOE DE, the only thing they have received were a few patches and then they let it die a slow and painful death.
We as a the 3 DE community are pretty spoiled with new stuff, qol changes, events, etc. If the new civ comes, we are already at the same amount of civs (6) ES added in legacy and that in a 1 year timespan.
Regarding the AOE 2 community, they think AOE franchise is all about their game. AOE2 is the most popular but the same cannot be said about the fanbase.
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I think many people compared AR to the old expansions. In fact, calling TAR an “expansion” seems disingenuous in the first place. Both of the legacy expansions featured 3 new civs and 15 new missions. TAR had 2 civs and a mere 3 missions. I completely understand people on the Steam reviews being upset about it. I sure was.
its also a 3rd the price of the old expansions so.
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There are a lot of things in AOE-4 that are significantly better than previous games. AOE-4 has a lot of potential. Although I like AOE-3 more, I will play AOE-4 when possible.
… And yes, many AOE-2 players criticize anything new, even if it improves the gaming experience.
We all (I think) would have liked complete campaigns about Africa, but the negative reviews are not fair because it is actually a lot of content at a very low price.
The old model were expansions and not DLC, and these cost almost as much as the base game.
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Weren’t both old expansions $29.99?
Even if a new expansion was priced at $15 people would complain since the base game is $20. How would they figure out how to price it. Playing it relatively safe with the amount of content African Royals provided makes sense.
Most steam reviews are worthless imo. People don’t account for a number of factors regarding new campaigns and whatnot and how they would effect the price.
And like what has been stated before, AoEIIDE DLC’s don’t require as much work as AoEIIIDE’s. The campaigns are fundamentally different and costly.
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I care more about quality than price. The lower price is appropriate considering the lack of content, but it doesn’t make the content itself any better.
Edit: To be fair to the devs, I’ll add that they should’ve made it apparent from the get go that TAR wouldn’t be a regular expansion but rather a budget DLC civ 2-pack. I think it is fair that people had certain expectations for something labelled an “expansion” based on the previous AOE3 and even AOE2DE expansions.
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I think there are already plenty of civs. Would prefer devs focused on balance of what exists already.
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I’d prefer one or two new civs but more campaigns/historical battles, maps and natives.
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The question raised by the original poster is a question I have myself too. It’s all about money though. Idk how much a dev team costs, but as long as the game keeps selling, I’d say we’ll see updates coming.
I’m also not a fan of more civs. It makes the game so complex. Especially for new players.
An interesting topic about this can be found here: What would we accept as maximum complexity in this game? - ESOCommunity
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idk the exact details of FE and Tantalus but a Professional game dev cost about a 100k USD a year in salary, since they operate as contractors this is almost the only expense for all of the guys.
my guess however is that the salary is probably a bit lower since AFAIK a lot of the FE guys are “amatures” as in not having a master in programming etc. so idk 70-80k per employee a year and the dev team is probably somewhere between 15 and 20, should give you a rough estimate.
oh btw these are western figures, in brazil etc. the salary is probably lower.
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Then let’s say we take 20 devs who make 80k a year. That’s 1.600.000 a year for Microsoft. Divided by $15 (price one DE copy) = 106.666 copies.
Every year.
That seems a lot.
where i live its 20 euros, but taxes steam etc. probably reduce the income to around 12-15 euros, depending on microsofts deal with steam for example (obviously keep more on microsoft store)
as for the length of development, it is kind of unknown but good guess is 3ish years by now maybe a little more.
as for sales we are probably looking at around a million+ at this point through both platforms.
oh also keep in mind there is a chance the team was bigger around release, tho that is speculation.
regardless this is a long term investment for microsoft, AOE3 (2007) rerelease on steam sold afaik over 2 million copies and i guess they expect the game to have long term success similarly to that. also microsoft is trying to build their gamepass roster, and AOE fits into that.