Speculating who’s going to move onto whatever new RTS comes out, whenever one comes out, is just that - speculation.
We were talking about the stability of the playerbase. IV’s is stable, and was 2 - 3x that of IIII: DE prior to that game going semi-F2P. It’s been nearly two years since release. There have been many folks claiming an “AoE killer” is around the corner. Settlers was championed by a bunch of folks, it came out, and life went on just fine (for AoE IV).
The intersection of “new RTS game”, “game does well”, and “is similiar enough to AoE to scratch the same itch” is narrower than I think folks realise.
or it could be they got nothing and theres nothing to say, once said it’d be over promise and they’d have to commit to it. better to say nothing at all is most likely their tactic for the foreseeable future
As I said before if it wasn’t for the console release coming for AoEIV, I’d be much more worried right now but that has to mean something. I’ve a hard time believing that they will end all future development for the game, with a console version coming so close to Gamescom.
This is a perfect opportunity to announce future content, for example new civs and/or roadmap with the console release date announcement. And, I also believe that if AoEIV would be cancelled and turn in to maintenance mode they would officially announce it or with this logic the other AoE games are dead as well.
AoE 2, 3 and 4 all have strong player base and AoEIV has Very positive reviews on Steam.
I disagree with this notion. Of course it could mean what you are suggesting.
But, think about what it actually is. They are not recreating the game. They are porting it to console, which also has a gamepass subscription service. Compared to recreating a whole new AAA game for their gamepass, porting their own IP into it is an incredibly cheap way to add more fluff and value to said pass.
Only few days til we get to see what they have actually been up to however, so I am not saying you are wrong per se, nor is my point that it means nothing. I am just noting that it isn’t as indicative as you may think, when you consider the advantages of porting such a game. For the amount of work involved, they get a lot out of it. Afterall, it’d be a waste for them to not port a big game like that, right?
Let’s for a second assume that it’s not a lot of work for them to port it over to console, at the end of the day it’s still business and they want to make future profit with this or else why bother at all?
So with this said, I want to believe that they don’t just port it to console just for fun, because that’s not a smart business plan from Relic/Microsoft. If you however, want to build up your player base and community, and allow perhaps crossplay in the future and then announce future content on both, now that’s a smart business move.
And, I’m not sure we will hear something at Gamescom, perhaps they aren’t ready to reveal anything yet? Time will tell! The only thing that’s 100% true is if they chose not to reveal anything at Gamescom, then that will be a big mistake. Also, there are those people who believe that Beastyqt knows something about upcoming civs but acts as if he doesn’t know but don’t think that’s something to put too much faith in right now.
And one last thing, when reading Relics official statement about been impacted by layoffs, they write that this decision was made to restructure their organization to ensure maximum focus is placed on their core franchises, and one of those are Age of Empire franchise. I don’t read this as AoEIV is dead, but that it might take time before we see new content due to them having to reorganize their company first.
I want to see what Relic can do with civ design and landmarks now that they started to expand upon it with Ottomans and Malians which have AoE3 all over them. I think AoEIV has a lot of potential in this area and can produce some interesting mechanics and landmarks. So hopefully, we’ll see this come to fruition in the coming years, not only for the sake of AoEIV players but for those waiting to perhaps try the game again.
Stormgate
Tempest Rising
Zero Space
Godsworn
Immortal : gates of pyre
This games and more are coming.
If they want this game to have a future, they have to release hell of a patches before even one of this got released. After that I think will be too late, since all of this games looks awesome.
Please cite your authority for suggesting that Relic, who has been a hired independent third party contractor tasked with making AoE4 for Microsoft and is a studio owned by Sega, considers AoE4 one of their core franchises.
I read that statement completely opposite as you and interpret it to essentially tell us they are focusing on their own games and not AoE4.
My hypothesis is that relic hired a ton of people to beef up their labor force to develop aoe4 and then, once it was determined that AoE4’s numbers no longer supported future development, MS yoinked the contract and Relic thus laid off a bunch of people.
Edit: I’m aware others at relic were sadly impacted. I worded this wrong above to imply I think aoe4’s performance was the sole cause of the layoffs. I don’t think that.
We don’t know yet. We’ll see but personally franchise Is dead with Dow3, the worst game in the series.
No, AOE Is not their franchise. There’s big difference between “to have the property of IP” and developing a game of a famous IP in collaboration with other studio (in this case World’s Edge).
Quoting IGN
“Relic and SEGA remain fully committed to supporting and investing in our titles, including the recently released Company of Heroes 3”
Relic simply has an agreement with MS to develop and support Aoe4 as long as MS Will give them funds to do It.
But there’s a big problem. According IGN,
"
The newly announced layoffs affect a significant proportion of the studio’s workforce, spanning from concept artists to audio and VFX designers".
There are not enough people to work on future big updates for AOE4 and the only solution to invest into this Saga would be change Developers or buying Relic!
So we can back to the orignal statement about Future of Aoe4
“In the light of the unfortunate news from Relic, we wanted to confirm that the development of Age of Empires IV will continue as planned. We’ll be delivering everything we’ve announced”
This Is the risk when a third party studio develop your IP. There are different cases wich this solution have been really really good: for example, ASOBO studio done a incredibile work with Flight Simulator and MS continues to invest on them due the incredible success of this game. During the Xbox Showcase have been announced Flight Simulator 2.
About AOE4 i think there were different mistakes during the development process.
If i should make a predictions, Relic Will not develop future titles.
I can understand this point of view, because I am a Chinese, in the psychology of ordinary players in China, or the psychology of history enthusiasts, a game with the Qing Dynasty as its main background, it is certainly not as popular as the Tang, Song and Ming Dynasties. Apart from the fact that the Manchurians were “Barbarian” relative to the Han people(I don’t agree with this view, but I’m just stating a factual idea in the minds of ordinary Chinese people), and that the people who had been ruled by us ruled us, another important reason was that the Qing Dynasty was invaded by the major European colonial powers at the end of the Qing Dynasty.
In fact, in the china, the player community is not small, but China has the Great Firewall of the Internet, most of us can not connect to the external Internet, so you can not see us, and there is a language barrier, which also leads to the fact that Chinese players basically communicate within their own player community.
I don’t get why people always try and invent this theory for IV, when III: DE was doing 3x worse by player numbers and still got development.
Concurrent numbers are important in judging whether or not a game has a sustainable playerbase. Relic mentioned this in the public DoW III postmortem. If III: DE had them, IV has them several times over.
(and III: DE was released less than 12 months before IV)
Anyhow, to put your hypothesis to rest; Relic lost a ton of staff across a bunch of departments and both of their current games. If the layoffs were due to beefing up for IV specifically, and some kind of contract has now ended, they wouldn’t have taken the axe to the CoH 3 team as well.
imo, assuming the layoffs have an effect on relic’s ability to deliver with aoe4, i can see WE shifting more and more of aoe4 development over to FE eventually reducing relic’s involvement to a minimum
but there a p´roblem with that oen and its the developm,ent of aom retold which explain why this game has poor content in those recent updates and no announcements yet