As the title says, Microsoft has over a trillion dollars net worth, but they can’t hire more people to code and improve the games, and instead would rather just add new DLCs, occasional fixes and generally just try to make more money out of the series. It’s not like they need it. Surely they can hire enough people to double to size of the teams making some of these games and fix a ton of basic bugs, as well as adding all the cool things like civ specific unit and building graphics. They should also hire a small team just to interact with the community, because it is rare that the devs actually give us updates and it is incredibly annoying. I’m not trying to insult people, but I do think Microsoft should be investing into these games a bit more. What do people say?
Uhhh, do AOE have a trillion dollar net worth?
I don’t know. Microsoft owns AoE though, at least it did last I checked.
Payig people to listen to every tom dick and harry dont seem like a good way to make a trillion $
Microsoft are a company that are required to appease their stakeholders. This is, generally, how big companies work.
It’s not that they don’t have the money, it’s that they can’t spend more than they see a return. I mean, they could, but it would alienate their shareholders and ultimately damage the company.
Now, do I think this is good? No, I personally don’t. But that’s how it works.
So basically we need a ton of AoE2 stakeholders? Then if they don’t improve the game it will not be good for them. 
This is a lot like saying “Toyota has a net worth of over 500 billion dollars, and they still won’t fix my car for free!” It’s simply not profitable for Toyota to fix my car for free. Even if they wanted to help me, I did not pay them enough money to give me more than the standard factory warrantee. They would be losing money on the project “my car”. Microsoft’s net worth is almost entirely irrelevant for discussions about AoE2, it’s the value of the property AoE2, in particular the further value that can be gained from it going forward (also to some extend the value of the AoE franchise as a whole) that you want to base these sorts of arguments on.
Ones you do you will probably find expenses you disagree with, too large a profit margin for your liking or perceived incompetence in one department or the other, but by that point those will be specific arguments for people to debate and maybe agree with. We can’t do a lot with the broad statement “this giant company has lots of money, why aren’t they spending more of it on this smallish project?”
I know, I just don’t care about Microsoft very much. I do care about AoE2 however, and if they make a net loss in improving the game, that is perfectly fine as far as I’m concerned. I might try and rebuild the argument later, but I probably won’t bother.
Throwing money at a problem will not necessarily solve it, but it’s probably also not where they want to put their money right now I believe.
You are dealing with a 20 year old code base probably written in spaghetti C that very few people have intimate knowledge of and are able to navigate. Sometimes a seemingly small bug can lead you down a rabbit hole of sadness and despair that often require a sizable rewrite of code to fix.
Throwing more developers on this probably would result in even more problems as they would bump heads and lead to more unintended bugs. 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month. Some things take time unfortunately, not man power.
Agree that more time could be spent refactoring the code and optimizing it. Sometimes looking at very old school cowboy code with literally no documentation you literally need to tidy it up just to understand what the hell it was written for (Sometimes for nothing btw, just delete it) which makes fixing bugs a nightmare and is probably a battle the devs are facing, but tell any product owner we won’t bring anything new for the next 3 to 6 months. No new features or content, just improved stability and a better code base we can maintain better and you get told… But how does that make money or draw in more players? To be fair this is a reasonable question and pragmatism is sometimes required.
With AOE4 on the horizon I also see all definitive editions slowly going the way of AOE1 DE in terms of support sadly. I think game pass will extend the support for a while. Lots of players like to try out a classic and you can’t try it out if it catches fire when your try to start it up, but that’s the only long term appeal from a business perspective I can see.
AOE4 is the new shiny that they want to take the center fold. After all they have invested a lot into it.
AOE2 becoming a proper e-sport however would flip this narrative. It hasn’t done badly, but it isn’t setting the world on fire either.
Great to know you have full insight into their business motif, what position do you hold at FE?
I assume you have tangible evidence to assure us that this is actually a good thing and not a horrendous waste of precious time and money? These forums make a quality argument against this premise multiple times a day.
“Why are the game designers for the game I play money-grubbing jerks, and then, as a follow-up question, why won’t they actively put time into listening to my concerns about the game they’re clearly too busy counting money to pay attention to?”
I don’t see a good motivation here.
I’d flag this thread if I didn’t think it’d give you reason to believe the corporation is out to silence you because you’re literally just flaming a company based off your ill-conceived notions of what they are/aren’t doing with no real foundation for doing so.
Ok, I admit, my point is irrational and based on flawed logic for the most part. Allow me to enlighten you into how I view this stuff. Basically, I don’t care about Microsoft. I don’t care about most other video games or genres of games. I do however care about AoE2 DE. To improve the game, I don’t care what the cost is for anything else. Flawed yes, but I would like to see AoE2 become one of the top games in the world.
It’s not about responding to posts like this one. Its more about keeping the community updated on what they are planning on doing, what they are working on, why they do or don’t do certain things. I feel the lack of communication from the Devs on these forums annoy a lot of people.
That’s a bit of an explanation about why I feel this way, its not really based on logic, just personal opinion.