Here is a suggestion for adding recurring revenue without relying on frequent releases of new civilizations or campaigns.
The idea is to introduce an optional official system of custom leagues with an annual subscription, aimed mainly at competitive players and groups that regularly play together.
Example subscription model:
$10 per year gives access to 1 league
$20 per year gives access to 3 leagues
$30 per year gives access to 6 leagues
To create a league, an admin would purchase a one-time pass (for example $10) and gain access to the following tools:
Add players and set their initial rating
Choose which modes are allowed (1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4)
Define how many points each mode awards (for example, 2v2 awarding fewer points than 4v4 due to higher rating variance)
Configure the K factor and the win probability model (for team games, a much lower value (maybe 64) than 400 would likely be more appropriate)
Select the league map pool
Remove games that one player crashed or violated the rules
An important feature would be automatic team balancing, where the league system itself creates the most balanced teams possible based on player ratings at that game.
A similar system already exists in Brazil at a community level. Around 20 players started playing together frequently using a parallel ranking system, but everything is done outside the game and the ranking is updated manually. Even with these limitations, the league community has been growing quickly and now includes more than 100 players in its ranking system.
The main goal of an official version is to allow players from the same country, server, or community to play against each other, coordinate matches via Discord, and maintain their own ladder independent from the official rating. This would naturally create sub-communities within the game and make organizing leagues and tournaments significantly easier.
This system would be entirely optional, with no impact on players who prefer the current experience, while offering a clear value proposition for competitive and group-oriented players.
Mandate certain mods (eg for scenarios like BBC dodge ball, or special modes like 10x tech etc)
restricted set of civs (only classic civs, or a tournament with just the civs from a recently added DLC, or custom civ bans (eg if the map pool contains lots of maps with a lot of hunt/berries, ban Mongols/Franks)
Really inspiring story to hear. I always hope the community tournament scene grows more prominent and accessible. If official support is added this would be a win-win.
A purely cosmetic monetisation makes the most sense, as I think.
If done right, it’s completely optional, has no impact on competitive game balance, and is easily scalable.
Em guys, those all are bad idea, those features should be available at default.
cosmetic monetisation is even worse in long run, as you could have instead new factions.
To the game continues with updates, the game must have recurring income. For the game to receive recurring updates from its developers, they need to be paid; therefore, the game needs a recurring source of revenue. What I am suggesting is something that would not require new civilizations or campaigns, so it would not negatively affect the game in the future due to an excess of content.
I dont really think people will pay for $10 if there is existing solution tbf - most people love free stuff but will turn their back the moment they need to pay
(I am not good at marketing so take it with a grain of salt!)
How about keeping this game as a single player game first with a pvp scene second as it should be from the beginning? You guys have been conditioned to think the exact way that mega corpo want to normalize, you own nothing and be happy with subscription.
I’d prefer to pay a little extra so that my Aztec warriors don’t look like European mercenaries than to have a fifth Han Chinese or ducal French faction
aoe2 is constantly one of the most played games, and makes it into the best sellers on steam (let alone xbox and ps5) every time there’s a sale. If this game isn’t making them a massive profit, no game is.
Tbh, even as a loss leader aoe2 would make sense for microsoft, as keeping some servers running on their own infrastructure would be cheap and garner them some much needed goodwill.
This narrative of “they need to shovel out low-quality DLC at increasingly higher cost” is absurd.
Nah, they’ll never do that. AoE 2 is the goose that lays the golden eggs… they’re more likely to cancel support for AoM and AoE 4 first, and only around 2035 will they even consider stopping support for AoE 2, but that’s because the game will have like 200 civilizations from all of history and there won’t be any more historical civilizations to add…
Yes, but they’ll definitely include it in a season pass like Fortnite or Warzone…
As we already have the handicap system. This could be extendet to 10 % => 200 % (or even higher (?))
Who subscribes to this league can chose their handycap, though he will get a recommedation from the game what ballpark it should be around, based on elo (and/or other indicators). And you should not be able to go too high above the recommendet handycap aswell (like maximum 10 % or so). Who tries to circumvent this with alts would be permanently excluded from future leagues.
In the leage players will be matched randomly against each other, basically like the random matchmaking, but wihtout any elo restrictions. Every player has to make a minimum amount of games to be counted (like 10 or so).
Then finally the standings will be made, taking into account winrate and handycap. Needs to be figured out exactly how but possibly something like this:
Eval = Winrate / exp100(handycap)
This would naturally mean that in order to get a good eval in the end, you have to be somewhat bold with your handycap, otherwise you will might win all the games yet still have a bad eval. But if you are too bold you lose all the games and be on the bottom of the rankings.
The main selling feature of this league would be that you would be able to have “even matches” with the top players in the world. And those would have the chance to interact more with the community - ofc getting a free invitation to participate in that league. Ofc it’s clear that in most cases you won’t get a match against one of them, however you might still have enjoyable matches with other players you normally wouldn’t be able to face on the ladder in an enjoayble way.
(oh and if you can’t find a match against a human opponent fast, the scripted AIs could participate in this tourney too, to make fast matchmaking for everybody)
Vaurion organized a tournament a few years back called “Handicup”. The core idea was similar: open to everyone and weaker players get handicap proportional to the elo difference (iirc it was 5% handicap for every 150 difference in elo).
Nice, so devs have someone to ask for expertise about the handicap systen involved.
Ofc this would eb an embedded league wiht automated matchmaking, not an organized tournament. Also the high elo players would actually be below 100 % handicap, though it needs to be figured out how low we can practically go before it will become unplayable.
