Here are the kind of things they keep doing in their marketing materials:
AOE3 Inca has garrison and conversion → AOE2 players will play it
AOE4 looks like AOE2 in the settings and some names → AOE2 players will play it
AOMR Atlanteans do not need dropoff (and it was in fact an earlier design) → AOE3 players will play it
And I had a strong feeling that they tried to brand AOE4 then AOMR as a “rally call” that “unites” all AOE players under one game (“it has all the features you like!”)
What they don’t see is:
RTS is a niche. You rally all RTS players in one game, it is still niche
Their games are fundamentally different, and it is not just one or two features or one or two visuals. It is a combination of a lot of things: the overall feeling, the pacing, the setting, the core game mechanics, the visual style, etc. You cannot take a core mechanics from one game and then place it as a niche bonus of one faction or unit in another game, and think those two playerbase would “merge”. I won’t play AOE3 Inca because I want to play conversion. I have a whole game with that.
More importantly, “uniting” is already a lost cause. Most players play more than one games casually, and expecting different experience when playing different games.Pitting those games in a “competition” or “succession” relationship (like the yearly COD games or sth——and even COD’s transition is not always smooth) is a terrible marketing direction.
And we have literal devs on this very forum who parrot the " just play this game instead" line, which always seems to be aimed at the 3DE community. Just a coincidence? I think not. Blatent disrespect.
Try urging the 2DE community to play AoMR. The Age community has always been divided, very interesting to see WE get involved in the shit flinging. This is what happens when you inherit something you didn’t create.
It really wouldn’t be, that would make a game with like 100k average players depending exactly on what you include in the “RTS” genre. IDK if i can call that niche.
The real big issue RTS faces is that there is only really a couple of big companies doing them, Creative assembly and WE+its partners, Relic is in like 3rd place and is basically as small as AAA studios get. Everything beyond these are basically indie and B studios like Eugen etc.
EA and Blizzard gave up on making compelling RTS games years ago, most of the other studios i mentioned also kind of seem like they have given up on making truly new stuff that will propel the genre forward.
Even funnier is that those series that really have such a relationship still do WAY better than WE
Civ, Paradox games and COD are the real series where a new game means end of support of it predecessor. Yet they always nod to their earlier games and show basic respect (imagine that). Not “oh look at that AK47 (pointing at an WW2 COD)”. And they never explicitly say “new game is here, time to move”.
Total War has one or two parallel products supported simultaneously and they don’t compete with each other. When they drop one they simply dropped it quietly, after a decent wind-up. The only time they messed up with the transition is they suddenly cancelled the support of TW3K with a few promised DLCs that never delivered (sounds familiar?)
WE took a bunch of decent games that do not overlap, pitch them as overlapping and competing, and put that entire mindset all on the table (“we are working on another game so F off”)
Well, there are exceptions to the rule in CoD…for example, when they add weapons even though the next CoD has already come out, or when the Zombie Chronicles DLC for BO3 came out when Infinite Warfare was already around in 2017…