Red Bull and Micro$oft are not your friend

Red Bull Wololo is just one part of a coordinated push on Microsoft’s part to permanently do away with the dark age and turn Age of Empires 2 into a broad appeal esport like Overwatch and League of Legends (Read: Terrible). Corporations are not your friends, Microsoft’s support of AOE as of now is a simple extra squeeze on a 20 year old IP for some extra cash and an experiment to see if they can get the cash flowing in even harder. If Microsoft cared about you all, matchmaking wouldn’t be 2/3rds trend chasing with a dark age-less mode and a literal battle royale. If Microsoft cared about you Castle Blood Automatic, Diplo, Regicide, etc would be the other matchmaking modes.

Do not watch Red Bull’s Wololo
Do not play Empire Wars
Do not play Death Match
DO NOT trust M$
Corporations are not your friends and corporations encroaching on grassroots competitive scenes is inherently, and wholly bad.

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Ok Deathcountheory? 11
AOE 2 is more than active thanks to these tournaments so…

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It’s kind of weird to say MS doesn’t care about the classic game modes, and then encourage the playerbase to stop playing DM.

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You realize Microsoft sponsors many tournaments right? Not just Wololo.

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I’m happy to contibute to MS wealth in exchange for DE. If you aren’t, no one forces you to spend your money on MS. Please stop your proselytism and enjoy whatever you care to buy. Cheers

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Well the statement is obvious tbh. No corporation ever is your friend. A corporation exists to make profit for its owners/shareholders. That is it. If MS feels like throwing some money at some competitions will mean profit in the end, then it will do that. While I don’t disagree with the OP’s statement, I also don’t see what it’s trying to achieve.

As a personal thought, I don’t like that the pace of the game seems to be increasing, but I suppose that’s a whole other topic.

This is post makes no sense at all . . .

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Hahahaha.
I wish. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

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Highly doubt this is a coordinated effort. Red bull just tries to find a niche in the game that fits the company’s profile and with enough monetary resources it’s apparently not to difficult to do so. MS on the other hand just supports whatever they think will profit from long-term no matter what game mode that actually is.

I mean there is certainly good reason to assume that when it comes to red bull as a company since their ceo and major shareholder is a highly problematic personality that supports right wing populist structures all across europe so against that background imo it makes perfect sense not to watch it. Sadly, this won’t really matter to most people but you can’t blame them since the tourney provides good games and tbh I didn’t stick to that either for the same reason.

As to the game itself it don’t see why promoting empire ways would be a bad thing. Rm has been established so firmly as the standard and people played that for a very long time. EW might continue to grow and will have spikes every now and then with new rb wololos but I don’t think it will become the dominant game mode or supplant rm.

If they are not my friends then why they adding polish civ?

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First of all, corporations are not your friends is exactly right. They can’t be your friends because they’re not people but entities with a stated purpose which is to make profit. You’re putting a dollar sign in “Microsoft” like it’s a bad thing to make profit - it’s really not, quite the opposite.

Microsoft and Red Bull make money by selling products and services that consumers want. They’re not holding anyone at gun point. This is especially the case when it comes to things like video games and esport tournaments.

It seems to me that you have qualms with the content of the game or the tournaments, which is fair criticism but has nothing to do with how much profit they’re making off of it. If anything, the only way a game developer can make real profit is by making a popular game that many people want to play and watch.

If you look at popular esport games like Dota 2 , League of Legends, CS:GO - these actually have a very high production quality. They run efficiently, have a great user experience and don’t tend to crash or suffer from annoying and game breaking bugs. It would be a good thing if DE could approach that level of quality which is possible only with a talented and dedicated staff which requires a lot of resources, usually in the form of money.

DE doesn’t suffer from “profiteering” or trying to milk a 20 year old “IP”, by the way, what intellectual property? Game design isn’t copyrighted and the assets for DE are fresh. If you’re talking about the game engine then it’s something that suffers from a lot of problems - it would be great if they had top quality developers who could revamp it.

As for “encroaching on grassroot competitive scenes”, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. What competitive scene? 10 years ago no one could live off of playing or streaming the game. The only way this is possible is through individual contributions from viewers or through sponsorships, usually product marketing campaigns like Redbull. This is true in esports as it is true in any sport.

On a final note: I’d love to see a better matchmaking system with more options in it. The bitter truth is that the system as it is right now is a result of underdevelopment and low quality tradeoffs, and not an attempt to milk profit like you’re trying to paint it. Say what you will about AAA esport games like LoL, but you can’t take away the fact that they’ve come up with good matchmaking systems that aim to serve an extremely large and diverse player base. Age prior to DE had only a lobby system. DE still does and nobody is stopping you from manually making the matches you enjoy.

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Let’s do a quick math

assume Microsoft sold 10million units which is double of the steamspy estimate and lets be lazy, we assume a price of $15. It sums up to 150mio overall.

The revenue last quarter, not since the release of AoE 2DE, which is almost 2 years ago, has been $41 billion.

And You are seriously telling us it is about making money? For sure economics need to be right, as other posts pointed out, but I truly believe that you can’t create such a game without a passionate team, that really wants to make the best out of it.

PS I do work for Microsoft and all of the above information is public.

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You added in DE and LotW including HD and all of its expansions?
I’m not agreeing with him, in fact I disagree with him but your math is quite a ways off

This guy is speaking truth, he’s a brave man.

AoE II DE is just a cash grab of Microsoft and a promotion for AoE 4 (Even it wont be as good as AoE 2 DE). Not sure what Redbull has to do with this. It isnt related to Microsoft in any way. Redbull just wants to promote their bad energy drank and therefore sponsors lots of these kind of tournaments of different games.

But MSFT stock then, so you can profit from their profits :smiley:

■■■■ you talking about? Microsoft and Red bull are my best friends.
I meet up with them every other day. (we play football together or go for a walk)

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That’s hilarious. :laughing:

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