Of course, we have to wait for the DLC to come out and then we’ll see if it’s good or not… for now we’re just discussing speculations and names…
An awful “solution” really.
There are plenty of people that want to be able to play as them and it is still good ol’ Age of Empires. Having a few variants won’t change that, also your complaining about stuff you haven’t played or seen that much of.
Company of Heros 3 goes Age of Heros 4
So when presented with facts you deflect with nonsense? 
I rest my case.
What am I deflecting?
You’re trying to claim that the numbers dropping on a remaster is meant to be comparable to the numbers dropping on a new release. Which is why I asked how the original is doing.
Obviously, a lot of folks have moved into the remaster. The same is true for III (Classic) and III: DE.
It’s difficult to measure the drop-off of pre-Steam games, and remasters don’t follow the same rules as new releases. You’re the one who tried to raise II: DE as evidence that IV is some kind of failure.
It’s not. They’re not comparable releases.
How many physical copies of II and III were sold? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? How many are still playing?
Your “facts” are a single game’s player retention, and when I raise other games, you attempt to accuse me of “deflection”.
AoE 2 sold at the time about 2 million physical games in 2001 and AoE 3 sold at the time about 3 million in 2008… the DEs were all sold digitally…
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It hilarious how he shoots himself in the foot.
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Where are those millions now? What’s the drop-off? The retention?
Or does retention only matter when discussing IV and a remaster of II (which appeals to a pre-existing audience, hence the higher retention)?
Do we discuss the remaster of III? How’s that doing?
They selected data to make this point:
It was never about facts because everything isn’t on the table. Civ 6, AoE 4, CoH 3, what they have in common is tangential. This person’s argument is based around proving the game is a failure, I really don’t think you’re going to be able to get them to prove it… because it isn’t a failure. They just see it that way.
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AOE II CDs are plenty around that’s why its measured and IIRC its offline multiplayer for those games since they were on Gamespy which doesn’t exist anymore, AOE II HD which was first licensed to be sold on Steam and its network first came out in 2013 Age of Empires II (2013) - Steam Charts had 27k players and latest 24 hr peak was 3k is a -99.98% loss of player base.
If that’s your bar to compare a 10 year old, 2013 game to a 2020 one? Then yeah by that standard its a complete wild success…
They laid of half the dev team and half of world’s edge that’s in my book a failure commercially and factually.
Age Of Empires 4 Co-Dev Suffers Significant Layoffs Prior To Upcoming Xbox Release | Pure Xbox.
Earlier in the year they laid of 10k from their gaming division and marketing teams, but mostly engineers: Microsoft laying off 10,000 | GamesIndustry.biz
Microsoft just spent a year acquiring a large number of studios, layoffs happening across the board after being acquired is what you are looking at, not some kind of sign the game itself is a commercial failure. Those are being done to cut costs for operations, it’s been phrased as a “restructuring”.
Many games have failed commercially and factually… they have far less than 10k concurrent players. Just a weird thing to assert when it is very much the contrary.
The 30 day average for aoe iv is 8k Search - Steam Charts vs the 14k AOE II DE does have. We don’t know how many players MS has on Gamepass, how many keep their subscription and how many on game pass play AOE IV at all.
If you can provide evidence or if MS at least updates its AOE IV multiplayer room to reflect how many people are online right now you can just subtract the total number from the steamcharts one and get a rough estimate of how many people are on gamepass playing AOE IV. (update IIRC AOM had a total lobby player number don’t know why they took that away).
so both AoE 4 and AoE 2 are doing well…
I guess if that’s what you consider it sure.
We can see the total number of players on the ranked leaderboard for this season, 47k for 1v1 and 77k for team ranked. Source: Age of Empires IV: Ranked Seasons - Age of Empires
From these data points we can extrapolate that the steam player count is an inaccurate method for understanding the full population of the game, as even without including custom only players or singleplayer/skirmish only players, it far exceeds this estimate of 8k average players. If we are talking about commercial success then we are talking about overall sales. If we are talking about relative success (this is a comparison to competing rts titles) or overall health of the multiplayer population I can understand looking at current player counts. I am not understanding how any of these points demonstrate failure.
When the game launched it had a fairly positive reception from reviewers. The game had its share of growing pains and ultimately had many bugs that fundamentally broke civs (delhi comes to mind). However, the game has received a great number of adjustments and bug fixes and is in a relatively healthy state at the moment. It has stabilized and shows a tremendous amount of potential for rapid growth. If you are a fan of the battlefield series you may see a parallel with the release of 2042 and that teams efforts to completely overhaul the game, they have broken every player count record and that is a game at the end of its development cycle. All of that is to say, a lot of times game development ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.
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But that’s the point I made Sure AOE II DE by no means is the identical game of AOE II from 1999, my contention is such a rapid drop off on a brand new iteration while sharing the same time period and the lack of community is.
A better way to see it is in this article where the author compares, steams, tournament and playerbase. He starts off with AOE IV being the deathblow to the AOE II franchise and ends with maybe not time will tell. (it was written prematurely obviously 2 months after release but he expresses better my point and your point).
AoE 2 is a classic 20+ year old game that never died with a lot of single player content older, and newer campaigns a robust AI etc.
AoE 4 is a game that had a bad launch with a lot of bugs and missing features the game has gone a long way and improved a lot. Given its trajectory it will most likely keep improving in the coming years.
Both games play very differently although they share core concepts, and both games are very fun to play. I don’t think either game will eclipse the other.
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I guess in any case one will be 40 while the other will complete just 8 at the same period.
I’m not comparing the games like that, I’m demonstrating the concept of player retention. Which is pretty consistent across most games with a multiplayer component (purely single-player games are different, modding support / community size also skews longevity in a positive way, etc).
All I’m doing is arguing against the claim that IV is doing badly because it lost X% of its players. Nothing more, nothing less.