Not really. It’s just the people looking back 20 years are 20 years older, and find it harder to relate.
I’m not being critical, it’s just a thing that plays out as folks get older. We have 30+ year old adults criticising franchises like Pokemon being “made for kids”, despite forgetting how old they were when they got into the franchise.
Now, RTS games are designed pretty differently, but RTS has always been pretty niche. I first got into RTS games in my mid teens, nearly 20 years ago (and I was late to video gaming for various IRL reasons). So to sell a modern RTS and for it to succeed, you need to think of younger gamers.
This is a problem older RTS games simply didn’t have. The problem isn’t “kids”, it’s how much games need to sell to be perceived as successful.
Yes. Most of them like it simple, in a sense that they like games with extremely low entry bar. BUT they love extremely high skill ceiling as well. If you think about LoL, there SEEMS to be an unnerving variety. But, if you dissect each character, they all boil down to certain types of skillsets. Once you get hit once or twice during the match, you know what you’re gonna be up against even if you are unfamiliar with the opponent’s character. This is what newer generation of gamers want. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Modern lifestyle compels you to juggle multiple things, and, when you start a game, you want to get it intuitively. AoE2 is one of the most unintuitive RTS out there, if you ask me (like, killing a boar with TC but doesn’t let you gather it & cataphracts countering spears, Genoese crossbows countering horses, Etc.). People don’t want to spend 30 minutes of their time feeling like they wasted it.
AoE4 for the most part achieves what LoL does. Its entry is quite simple: If you learn the simple mechanics, you will get on your feet pretty quickly. There shouldn’t be anything that will “shock” you in terms of unit counters. At the same time, AoE4 has an incredible skill ceiling, same with AoE2. I would say more so than AoE2. If you consider the people who are top players, they are for the most part former SC2 pros. I think there’s a reason for that. How did established AoE2 pros get outcompeted by newcomer SC2 players in the early stages of the game? Shouldn’t AoE2 pros have had this intuitive advantage over newcomer SC2 players? How did SC2 players get up to speed with the likes of Viper and Hera so quickly? The reason is very simple: they were able to pick up the game quickly because the game is more intuitive than AoE2 by more than an order of magnitude.
And that’s what matters to gain and retain a new playerbase.
They didn’t get outcompeted due to the reasons you mentioned. The AoE 2 pros mostly just kept their focus on AoE 2 as you simply don’t throw away your top spot in one game which is why players such as Mista tho not being active also kept playing their “old” game (in his case AoM) or why players were not moving over at all such as AoE 3’s Kaiserklein.
Most pros that switched over from a previous Age game seemed to be from AoE 3 tho as price pools in 3 are rather small.
that does explain a lot. younger players tend not to care about the tiny details and more into the mainstream content, hence they made those skins bright colorful like fortnite. surely they think attracting newer younger players which are the majority of gamers would outweigh older players.
I remember in one vid on his channel Viper said he is not a AoE gamer, he is a AoE content creator. Jumping between AoE4 and AoE2 would not bring more viewer to his channel. In fact, AoE4 content is the least view on his channel.
Time is a factor, aoe4 will continue to attract new players and aoe2 will slowly overtime lose it’s older player base. Aoe4 will need continued content, especially single player content not just civs and of course continued support and tournaments. They should also prioritize aoe4 over other games in the series if they want that to happen. I’m not suggesting ignore the other games as there’s still plenty of money to be made in dlc but 4 could be prioritized.
As a youtuber myself albeit not gaming related this is very understandable. He earns money from views and that is all that matters in the end. In terms of microsoft they care most about revenue and despite aoe2 de having a considerably larger player base currently aoe4 still has generated more revenue, they can also charge a lot more for a new aoe4 campaign/dlc than they can for the same content in aoe2 de though aoe2 content is probably cheaper to make.
But does it sell better proportionally speaking?
The price of AOE-2 DE is much cheaper than AOE-4, so the profit seems to be less, but maybe the sales are more.
In 2016 in “Age of Mythology Extended Edition” you could see the number of villagers on each resource, in aoe2 they had it in 2019, because they were enjoying the depth of counting the number of villagers on each resource manually I guess
Because AOE2 was built on a much older engine and HD was a lazy remake with few QoL improvements. Unlike the fans of some shiny new game, a lot of players would agree on this and do not consider it as an insult.
What about some shiny new game released in 2020s that took 1 year to get color selection? People were clearly enjoying the “simplicity” of not needing to pick a color before the game.
EDIT: BTW villager count next to resources was a feature in AOE3 (2005) so spend a little more time on google next time.
Even this game could send any villagers, especially the inactive ones to any resource from the panel of each resource, very convenient, but it is something that I have not requested and I will not request either
AoE 2 - 1999, also counts villagers, also counts military units.
The resource distribution in EE2 btw is very similar to AoE 2 as on the “normal” UI during a match you also don’t see the distribution (had to make a screenshot from YT):
Rise of Nations from 2003 did something similar. Idle villagers automatically looked for work.
AoE 1 and 2 (+ Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds) on the other hand use Genie, an engine that was made during a time when visible vill distribution was not the standard in the genre. The first Genie engine game to use that ‘feature’ was AoE 1 DE in 2018.
How so? They didn’t sweep prize earnings as you would expect. That’s a fact. The game is mechanically similar to AoE 2 and the meta carried over. Yet they did not absolutely dominate. Within just a few months this game’s release, AoE2 players did not have top spots in earnings.
I’m sure if they did, they would have stuck around. Again, as I mentioned at the very top, competitive prize pools available to established pros per competition are larger for AoE4.
AoE2 had $714,515.66 From 188 Events in 2022. 23.48% of Total Prize Money Awarded. $730,319.28 From 89 Events. 81.76% of Total Prize Money Awarded
(AoE2 has a lot of smaller competitions in developing countries as expected)
