Hi, (mainly) AoE 2 player that kinda fell in love with AoE 3 last year here - I just want to say that I absolutely feel and share the frustration. AoE 3 essentially became my 2nd favourite game right after AoE 2.
I want to suggest, instead of review bombing games (that will have minimal impact as Valve still reserves the right to exclude excessive negative/positive reviews from the overall score), you should instead campaign players and especially content creators from other Age games to pick up AoE 3 in solidarity and bring content for it, even if it’s just for a couple of videos or streams.
Tbf, this is a weird comparison, but back in 2021 when MS announced that they’ll take away ranked Deathmatch in AoE 2, people that normally would only play the standard ranked mode picked up Deathmatch as well. They even came up with a couple of Hashtags such as #SaveDM or #SlideIntoDM
The result: Deathmatch was initially taken away but returned some months later although only in ranked lobbies.
If you show WE that there is still a lot of interest in AoE 3 + you can bring in new players, they can’t ignore you.
Looking for scapegoats to put the blame on and blindly flaming won’t help, unfortunately.
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The latest AoE2DE DLC Chronicles of Greece was made by a former modding team that was hired by Capture Age.
AoE3DE could also get new content by them hiring a new studio to work on new content since they don’t have enough capacities to make AoE3DE and AoMR content at the same time.
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This. This needs to make rounds, its concerning. It isnt just the cancellation of the DLC which saddens me, what really worries me is the following: The last 2 years they clearly prioritized 2 things:
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Diversification of audience: This isnt a bad thing in itself, but at this point it looks like it was done at the expense of new content for all Age Games. Age 4 hasnt received a DLC in over a Year, Age 3 the same, and while they could have developed new content, they decided to pour ressources into an abysmal bad mobile ripoff of Age of Empires and prioritize Console Releases for Age of Empires
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The bad Quality and poor Effort: The last DLCs, with excemption the newest one, for Age 2 have been abysmal and overall bad in Quality. They seem to be made with low effort, with as little ressources as possible. Then, there is the mobile game and I think I dont need to elaborate why it is bad in Quality.
Combined, this gives me the creeps, because it looks like they arent really interested in keeping the games alive anymore. They want to reduce their playerbase to one or two games, in order to make as much money as fast as possible with as little ressources as possible. Currently, this seems to be Age 2 and Age Mobile, and they are gonna keep that till Age 5 releases. The other games just arent relevant to them it seems anymore, it seems they are just obstacles in the way of business to them. They were means to and end: That was reviving the Franchise itself to gain audience. It seems they never intended to really supply the players of the corresponding games with more content.
I am experienced with Business Administration, as i studied this field and work in this field for a living. They are outsorcing development in most cases to just manage the existing products. This, and many other things, like them saying not a word on the Chinese DLC On Lunar new year, no info to the new Age 4 DLC, the increasing outsourcing smells a lot like a complete restrucutring of the pipeline and business model, which in any case doesnt mean anything good for us players.
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Community would always contribute to the game. That of course is important, and we should have better plans. I pretty much agree with that part.
But are you saying the burden is on US to prove to them there is still interest in this game?
Do we have complete player data and sales data? All we can do is to speculate everything by peeking at steamdb. We have no information about which civs, maps, modes, regions, time, elo range, etc. has more players or fewer. Yet we have the responsibility to demonstrate how many people would be willing to play the game?
Are we bidding for World’sEdge’s investments or sth? Are they going to pay us? Or, maybe, we paid them?
We’ve already paid them money to do the bug testing, sometimes even debugging, for them. Now we also need to pay them money to do outreach, advertising and data analysis?
The thing is, those could happen because of the strong aoe2 content creation community that already exists. They didn’t hire CaptureAge on a whim, or publish those previous DLC’s campaigns from nowhere. These were all people already working in the AoE2 space to do stuff.
Does aoe3 have groups who could do that? I’d love it if they did, but I don’t know that they do.
That’s probably the problem.
They hired some former Napoleonic Era devs into their team but didn’t make a new team.
It would be cool to have a viral event to break the activity record for the game. AoE3 has a peak of concurrently active players ~20k, sometime around release.
If an event was organized where all interested players log into the game at a specific time, not to play, but to temporarily increase the number of active players, just to create a noticeable spikes that would beat AoE2 numbers at that moment, as a form of expression of their dissapointment, showing the number of such players and being a newsworthy material that could be picked up by the gaming media to write about “player protests” etc.
However, I am afraid that organizing such a big event, even using all available media (such as reddit, discord, steam community, youtube/twitch streamers etc.) would be a very daunting task to reach and mobilize all players disappointed with the decision to abandon further development of AoE3 and organize them at a specific time, so the initiative would fail, even though there is no doubt that there are more than 20k such disappointed players in total.
Nevertheless, I think that such action would certainly have a greater chance of changing anything than actions such as mass review bombing, calls for a boycott or online petitions proposed by some.
The best thing to do in this situation with the Baltic DLC scam is to go to competitors. Make online AoE 3 = 0. Instead of nostalgically burying the game and moving on, they arranged a deception. This cannot be encouraged. The deceived audience should completely fall away from the scammer.
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I’m not talking about existing AoE 3 players, I’m rather talking about bringing in players fromthe other games. Technically, it would be just enough to look into the Trial Version.
The trial version already peaked the player number to 10k+. Did they do anything?
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