No I’m not talking about future plans. I’ve already (sadly) worked up to accepting the official end of support that may come in the future, thanks to your mistreatment over the years.
I’m talking about a DLC that you have already paid people to make, that you should have planned months ago, that is likely to be almost finished and that will be released in THREE MONTHS (if things go as planned). And all we’ve ever got is 
. Why on earth would you spend money and efforts making it and pretend it does not exist?
No release date. Fine. No screenshots. Fine. No news. Fine. No updates to the base game. Fine.
We have become fine for so many things that we shouldn’t over the years. So now you award us with literally nothing at all? Even the existence of the game itself receives near zero acknowledgement?
Not a single person to say a single word on anything?
Is the entire company so focused on the other games that literally nobody has a few spare minutes to type a few sentences?
Hasn’t anyone from the company felt this is not right?
Do you see any other company do this kind of marketing? Do yourself do this kind of marketing to your other games?
Do you really fear that AOE3 contents sell well? Will that stain your hands? Or turn your world upside down?
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Aoe3 is my favorite game, but the game doesnt sell well because its too different from other games, the card deck system is too complex for anyone to really invest in it.
That’s not the point I’m trying to make.
If the company sees the game as not profitable enough, they can stop supporting it. Fine.
The reality here is we have a DLC under work, meaning they at least plan to sell it, but in the meantime they don’t say a single word or do any marketing about it at all, as if they don’t really want it to sell well.
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We have a privileged brain
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Thank you my brother, blessings and kisses to you and your family
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I think they are preparing a big suprise for AOE3 fans.
Just wait for another 4 months.
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In case the company misinterprets this, this is not a demand for more content every two months.
The treatment received by the 3DE community is utter neglect, followed by desperate damage control. We don’t want damage control. It’s better for us if they just call it and move on from AoE3DE, instead of teasing future content and then not interacting with the community in any other way.
We can’t have our own redbull even if it’s a gaping hole in the entire competition, prompting people to say “3DE really is THAT bad huh?”. I can’t believe, for decency’s sake, the company couldn’t even have an AoE3 showmatch. But who has a care?
3DE outperforms Stormgate. But who has a care? 6000 players at any given time on weekends. Oh the other games have more, so who cares that 6000 is a very impressive number.
But then again, when a monitor is called a cannon galleon in a widely streamed event, it begs the question, “Do they even know their own game?” It looks like between our beloved devs and the publisher, there’s a huge chasm, because we have repeatedly gotten the most high quality content, but no attempt at trying to sell it.
The publisher can’t sell something they are convinced is not worth the time, even the few seconds needed to correct “cannon galleon” to “monitor”.
Don’t worry 3DE community, be prepared to send your 2 mangonels in Age III, and ughhh… where is the archery range in this ConFuSINg game?
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I was thinking about this the other day in relation too redbull wololo. WE and FE just hate aoe3.
Literally every single age of empires game is being showcased but aoe 3. Despite aoe 3 performing better then aoe1 and aom forever. (even rivalled aoe 4 despite millions of dollars being spent on that game).
They couldn’t even host a showmatch which they are doing for aoe1, aoe4, aom.
Aoe3 is the only aoe game not at redbull. too just completely exclude us like that is simply not fair. Hence why I think they hate the game.
My supporting evidence is one of my favourite pictures ever posted on official aoe insta. Can’t even be bothered to play the game even once a month. (I would mention cannon galleon but I see that has already been mentioned lol. Pathetic)
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Im going to keep rambling about rebull but how good would it be if they showcased the new civs at rebull so it brought the single player and multiplayer communities together and also brought a lot of hype and marketing for the new civs. Like this is such basic stuff I learnt in like yr10 business studies of how to market a product that this company still seems to not be able to comprehend.
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Yes, they could at least show the trailer for the new civs in RBW, but it seems like it’s a lot of work for them…
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Something wrong with the picture. It shows 42min remaining but such a low level on the thermometer.
Its probably some photo on a dev’s computer. But yeah I agree, having a photo with 3 big crosses isn’t really optimal.
AoE 3 de could sell a lot more content and grow if it was marketed better. I’m basically convinced they ignore it because AoE 2 is the most popular and always has been so they focus on that. And AoE 4 is the newest one they try desperately to convince everyone is actually cool and innovative when in reality it is drab, soulless and boring. Basically AoE 3 makes AoE 4 look like trash to be honest.
That being said the devs who work one AoE 3 are greet and I think AoE 3 has the best dev team. Also it’s a 4 year old game that’s a remake of a game from 2005 so the fact it still gets support is pretty good.
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Apart from the actual devs, you can hardly find anyone in the company who cares about the game, let alone play it. That’s why we got this and cannon galleons.
Say if I were to present something on a public event, and there is a short, 5min video that I’m not familiar with (sidenote: the holder of the event not familiar with their own product is already ridiculous enough). I’d go over it and look up what I’m not sure about. How long will it take? 15min?
Not to mention this game has great and detailed wikis created by the COMMUNITY (not you, WE). I can literally get this done in my restroom.
And nobody did. 15 min of reading. Nobody. And we have “cannon galleon”. Just like how they couldn’t find (or don’t bother to find) a single person around that plays the game once in a month.
I’m not even talking about full dedication or enthusiasm. It’s this lack of basic basic care and minimal minimal effort that makes their marketing feels more like intentional humiliation.
These are competent people. They have demonstrated they know how to make their other products look better in front of the public. They just don’t care about AOE3 in the slightest. They know their treatment of AOE3 could be massively improved with tiny efforts and they don’t bother.
Well nobody cares. Drop another regular update for the other games and announce the announcement of the announcement three weeks ahead and WE will again be the greatest RTS developer of all time.
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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by apathy.
The focus has always been on AOE2 and AOE4 (and now AOM since it has a good chance to become big). Many at World’s Edge likely simply do not care about AOE3, sadly including a (former?) community manager. It wasn’t that they couldn’t find one person who played it, it’s that the person who was assigned the job to respond to the community about the bug didn’t even notice that their apathy would be blatantly apparent when those three red xs showed up. AOE3 just isn’t a big money-maker and there is no corporate pressure to push for it.
Microsoft has good reasons not to work to include AOE3 in RBW. Our community cannibalizes itself at a drop of a hat, revels in manufactured drama, and uses every minor inconvenience to castigate the devs. Do they really want to host a tourney or showmatch for a small game where the #1 player is a known cheater who attacks tourney organizers as scammers, or where many of the most popular casters openly attack the developers?
We are getting DLC and we know our dev time was focused on AOM, so we are neither hated nor forgotten. All this pot-stiring and ranting accomplishes is making it more likely that we will never see inclusion in RBW.
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First of all I think we should always talk about devs, community manager, and higher-up management separately. This thread is not talking about devs, but the marketing and communication.
This is my exact point. Nobody cares or even knows about the game. And they don’t have anyone in the social media management who even knows how to pretend they do.
The oddity here is that the works on this game has been of great quality. Many free updates were huge, far more than the other games.
If the game is really not making money, there are usually two approaches:
- Drop it and forget about it. Example: a lot.
- Try to make big updates and advertise it hard so the investment pays off. Example: COH3 and Total War Pharaoh
What we see here is the combination of big updates with near zero advertising. It makes no sense. Either it is real malice, or the incompetence of their marketing department is holding the others back. But in any case the results look like malice.
Also, I would 100% agree with you if we’re asking for some sort of premium treatment or privilege. But we are not. All things mentioned here are so basic that every gaming company would never have any problem doing to even their underdog products. And AOE3 is far from being such a product. It still performs much better than most other games never dream of.
It’s not something you’ll take additional efforts doing. None of these take more than 10min. And they don’t even bother.
Accepting everything they feed us does not help either. It only lowers the standard more and more. And here we are.
Also they promised better communication a year ago.
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You say it’s not a big money maker.
But that’s exactly the point. If there is no money being made, why still make so much content for it?
I’m talking the RG upgrade with all those assets, all the new content in revolutions.
The question is: do they hate money? It simply makes no sense. If it doesn’t make money and doesn’t take priority in tournaments, why make a dlc for it all of a sudden? It costs money and you say that it apparently doesn’t make it back.
Something isn’t adding up.
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The main problem is our game is not big enough to get a lot of attention like 2 and 4, but also not small enough to be dropped like aoe1. So actually we are a bit stuck in nobody’s land.
Although I must say. Maybe the crosses are due to the server reset?
I wouldn’t use particular picture against them. Unless you think that the server reset didn’t reset the ticks.
Yet they pay people to make huge updates and don’t seem to expect a single additional penny of profit from these investments.
I get it. This is charity.
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