Were we meant to get any non-DLC new content at all?

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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I’m not going to get much into the whole “The devs don’t give us news” because that’s on another topic, this topic is about a question on game development.

Were we meant to get new content for free??

Since the game released, we had been receiving free updated every other month at least until mid 2023, and that’s awesome, but how did they finance it? We paid for the DLCs which carried tons of extra content, but not for the updates, we just paid the base game.

What I mean is, on most games, the updates and patches only tweak the base game in terms of balance, bug fixes, and only slightly, in a bit of new content, but from what I’ve seen, combining all the new content from all of the updates and patches that we got without paying for them since release, we got roughly the ammount of 2 DLCs worth of content.

So… is that why we are out of patches/updates?

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We are not exactly the cash-cow of the franchise, we are numer 3 currently, at least until AoM kicks us out of the rank, so that’s probably why the updates stopped coming up, they can’t pay the developers with a stagnated income (The ones in charge of promoting the game are the ones to blame btw, since they didn’t shine any lights on it to gather more sales, but what ya gonna do…).

All sales are at a balance, the hype has settled, and the income won’t get higher than it is now, not without DLCs.

I imagine that by January 2024 the plan was to just leave the game as “neat and tidy” as it could’ve been before ONLY focusing on updates revolving around DLCs, because that is the only way to finance new content…

The only players left, are the loyal ones, so a trickle of updates will still be around, but only in the form of DLCs, because developers can’t keep stretching the original budget more than these many years only on the whim of us fanatics.

That’s the money business :man_shrugging:

Or at least that’s what I imagine to be the future of the game, idk, I’m not a game developer.
What do you guys think?

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I’m fine with these circumstances honestly.

If I want more content I can just make it myself.

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Being the change you want to see

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I would totally understand if they were to stop adding content in updates, but we still need small balance updates. Just cost/stat/card modifications focused around things that are over or under preforming too much. Some civs are too strong or too weak.

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Guess I better start learning to mod :sweat_smile:

It’s impressive to see that they abandoned all work for the game before balancing it…
AoM better be worth it hahah

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In fact we have got far more free contents than any other game in the series.

AOE4 got one round of 3-4 unique units. AOE2DE maybe just one or two model updates. All the rest are number tweaks. We’ve got plenty.

I sometimes think they should really commercialize some of these works.

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I know right?

I would’ve gladly paid for all past and future new content that we got, because I lack self-control, shame that they didn’t see that in the loyal fan base they have.

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At this point i am pretty sure there is just one team working on all age games, including aomr. None of the games are cashcows, none of them produce a steady income.

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They just sold the best selling expansion ever in this series what are you talking about.

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Wasn’t it like the only expansion the game had?

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Es cierto, nos dieron contenido gratis equivalente a 2 DLC . Cumplieron con la promesa de hacer a los europeos más únicos y que todas las metropolis tuvieran cosméticos, incluso le agregaron skins para los exploradores.

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Probably opportunity cost. The RTS genre isn’t super lucrative or demanded and so money spend on other genres and games, especially live services have a higher return on investment.

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I remember they said it was the best selling expansion of the entire AOE series.

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