Yes, you release a DLC for AoE 2 and it sells itself… the issue is to see how to release DLCs quickly for the other games so that their communities don’t suffer…
Well, with the new selection feature now you can
Like AOE4 or not, the likelihood of Relic surviving losing over half it’s employees through two mass layoffs and being being sold off by Sega after their most recent game (CoH3) flopped while having no announced games they are working on is really low.
Updating AOE4 seems to be Relic’s only revenue stream right now. Relic had ~300 employees and fired 160 of them; I doubt 140 of them are working on AOE4 and I really doubt Big Daddy Microsoft is interested in paying 100 people’s salaries just to keep the studio afloat.
Compare it to Forgotten Empires, the main dev studio for AOE2, AOE3, and AOM, which is entirely supported by Microsoft funding. It only has 80 people but actively supports 3 games, which have a combined player base almost 3x larger than AOE4.
Relic could support AOE4 into the future and additional DLCs (looks like they are planning for one next year) are possible, but it does not seem likely that Relic survives very long.
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I play and enjoy both AoE 2 and AoE 4. However, I have to say that if I had to pick one, it would be AoE 2. Since I play it often, I suppose I strongly disagree with the op. 
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no, I am still forced to play with Romans, Geogrian, Gujaras and other janky civs. A game consists of my civ and that of my opponent.
Do not divide, please. We all are a franchise not just one game. Every AoE title has its audience, even if is a smaller one.
Pretty rough though
I hope things will get better for all the studios
And Relic gets the love, care and funding it deserves!
Even though the online player base is smaller, AOE-3 is a profitable game. The last DLC was a sales success.
It is also a very played RTS considering the huge amount of RTS on the market.
AOE-3 has more online players than many RTS considered successful, such as Company of Heroes, Red Alert, among others. Right now it has similar numbers to AOM-R, a more recent game. You would have to consider those games as failures too.
AOM-R (Green)
AOE-3 DE (Blue)
COH-2 (Orange)
COH-3 (White)
I also don’t understand why AOE-3 is not allowed to participate in official tournaments, but now I have started to believe in a new theory, and it is that it may be a matter of sensitivity. Microsoft does not want to popularize a game set in a relatively recent era where there was slavery and genocide.
It’s not a waste. Except for AOE-1 DE, all the games have been profitable. I guess the game sold well, but it apparently wasn’t profitable to expand and support it.
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Exactly!
The Ban of AoE III has to be with political reasons too, beneath the obvious and known lower playerbase and viewership, “Esports lack of appeal” (a statement that as a loyal player and fan of AoE III do not agree at all I must say)
AoE III spans from 15th Century to 19th Century.
In this time frame, there were Colonial Empires, Human Trafficking at large Scale mostly for slavery purposes, Multiple Genocides (Telling about the nowadays Indian Reservations. p. g.), and so
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Yes, for that AoE 3 is an uncomfortable game for Microsoft and World Edge, for some reason in the trailers they only show AoE 1 DE, AoE 2 DE and AoE 4…
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What is a shame!
Is their game, its our game for the sake of God
And its about history, their history, our history as humankind
Do not forget that denying history condemn us to repeat it again!
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Well, you see… today a game like AoE 3 couldn’t be made… Cossacks 3 is something else because it only focuses on Europe… if we were to see an American Conquest 2 after Stalker 2 it would be a miracle…
But American Conquest depicts the same themes and even worse starting with the title name
Basically an AoE III with a classic AoE II base gameplay but at a much larger scale
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Of course, American Conquest is saved because it is from Eastern Europe studio and there they are not so “soft” with these issues…
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I can only imagine how successful it would be if everyone played the same Age of Empires and the developers only updated that game. It would be by far the best thing that could happen.
Yes, but it’s difficult since many people play the AoE games they like… MS’s idea is that eventually everyone will move on to AoE 4 and leave the DE trilogy as a site to revisit every so often… I think that at some point they will stop making AoE 2 civ DLCs and will focus on Chronicles to include civs from Antiquity (something that Return of Rome lacked quite a bit and Lac Viet doesn’t count, since you’re missing the Celts, the Goths, the Scythians, the Mauryas, the Kushites, the Aksumites, etc etc etc)…
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What ban are you talking about?
He’s most likely talking about how Aoe3 is continually being shadow-banned in both an advertisement and promotional sense; it hasn’t been shown on tournaments, it hasn’t been shown anywhere by the devs, really just been pigeonholed continuously in every event.
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Hard to advertise a game that hasn’t received an update in like a year.
All the AoE3 devs moved to AoMR, even AoE2 only got DLC made by 3rd party developers in the last year.
Only AoE4 has some devs that just work on that game since Relic is not working for other Age of Titles.
My theory is that they originally planned to release Immortal Pillars in October or September even so they would have had time to make an AoE3 DLC before the end of the year, but then Immortal Pillars or base AoMR needed more work then they planned.
Generally everything always need more work then you’d think, that’s why they don’t announce things ahead of time.
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For political reasons too…
Yes, I think they were planning to release both DLCs in December… but since the IP took longer (maybe because of the campaign) they delayed the Baltic DLC for AoE 3 (which we already know won’t bring new royal houses and will reuse the ones that already come in KotM)…