I got your point. But think with me: How many hours are needed to finish the campaign? (Considering that the achievements are for completing the campaign).
I’d guess around 10 hours, roughly. Maybe more, or less, depending.
How many hours of gameplay do you think are needed for a multiplayer player to reach a consistent skill level? I personally have over 400 hours just in AoM: Extended Edition, not counting the countless hours in AoM: The Titans.
But let’s ignore the learning curve or the player’s skill, because what I truly want to point out here is that a person can spend huge hours playing a game in multiplayer without getting tired, whereas it’s not the same in single player.
So let’s take 1% of players who play the campaign in terms of hours vs. 1% of players who play multiplayer, which group do you think plays for longer?
We can’t ignore this if we want to know ‘who plays more.’ If 10 people play the campaign for 10 hours, that’s 100 hours. But 1 player needs much more than 100 hours if they want to become a minimally consistent multiplayer player. Therefore, even though the concrete number of multiplayer players is lower, it doesn’t mean that multiplayer players play the game less. These daily player numbers would be very low if we only relied on single-player players. They finish the game and then leave.
And the company is ignoring exactly those who stay.
Do you think, based on this idea, it is right for them to ignore the multiplayer community? can bet that a lot of the game’s exposure has the multiplayer community’s influence.
Based on this, it’s better to conclude that we should abandon the forums and let them release the game as single player only. They already ignore the community’s feedback anyway.
If they want to have a game that is profitable in the long run, they need ‘‘both sides of the community’’ anyway. That’s why AoE2DE is such a success over years. They need the casual and singleplayers to jump regulary back to make big sales for dlcs. And they need the multiplayer scene to keep the game in public and to keep discussions about the game alive and to have relevant balancing data. In the end they need to make a good game and good marketing and WE don’t need to discuss who the more important consumer is. Just my two cents. Have a nice weekend with the new DLC everyone
No, the multiplayer community are usually the hardest fans of the game, they should not ignore them.
But they should focus content on the largest playerbase that finance the game, otherwise we get another AoE3. And both single player and multiplayer crowd don’t want another AoE3.
What? Why? Single player needs forums and feedback too. Look at Paradox games how the players feedback are important, and their games are basically 100% single player.
I meant to say here, because it doesn’t seem like the devs care much about our feedback, proof of that is that I was banned exactly for giving feedback.
And you think they need to specify it (even after turning the game into Free to Play)? You really think they thought “This game is selling very well, lets stop making money with it”?
It’s still top 10 daily most played RTS game on Steam. So, not “selling very well” to which parameter? Its sell less than AOE2 and 4, and AOM is the new game, but it doenst make AOE3 a bad selling game, just not as profitable as its siblings to self-called small team.
Probably one or more people in high places don’t like the game at Microsoft, sometimes that’s all it comes down to.
Or maybe they realised that it would take too long to release the DLC planned for AOM, and that they didn’t want to increase the development budget for the other games.
From a purely selfish point of view, I don’t mind, it means more dev for AOM, AOE3 may fall by the wayside but it’ll stay online so there’s no need to make a fuss about it.
Very unlikely. The influential people usually just look at the money. They can see how well the DLC for each game sold and they don’t care about how much they “like” the game because they likely play none of them themselves.
In every publishers it’s the passionate developers trying to convince the money people that their game idea will sell well, not management liking of disliking a game for whatever reason.
There is very likely some financial or technical reason behind the decision.
You don’t just have to calculate the costs of making new content but also the lost costs of not making content for other games.
They likely calculated that moving people from AoM back to AoE3 would delay the already promised and AoM DLC that people already payed for. It’s much easier to cancel a DLC that was not being sold yet.
Many hours of being played per week doesn’t translate to many moneys going to the Studio.
To the studio, it is exacty the same if 1000 people buy the game, play it ten minutes, forget they have it in their library, play different games, and never look at it again, vs the same 1000 people buy the game and play it ten hours a week for the next 40 years.
The only way those ten hours a week for 40 weeks would translate into a stream of income would be if the game was based on a subscription service or something. Something you pay monthly for, to continue having access to it. That is not the case with any of those titles. The only way the studio can pull more money out of our wallets, after we bought the game, is with merchandise and DLC.
This essentially means that, for the studio, 1000 people that buy the game, play for a day, then move on to different games and forget about the game, until a DLC releases they also only play for about a day, are better than 10 people that buy the game and play for hundreds of hours and won’t stop playing daily for years to come.
Even if less total hours are played in the first example.
It is already a controversial game within the community itself…
True, but it is still a pain in the ass and another stab at the AoE 3 community… if you look at the comments on AoE social media you still see people complaining and asking for the Baltic DLC that was announced a year ago… AoM and AoE 3 can easily coexist and the FE devs can alternate between DLCs for both games while Capture Age takes care of the DLCs for 2 and Chronicles… if you want to keep an entire saga going, it comes down to hiring more people… you have the devs for the Wars of Liberty mod and Project Celeste who could also help in the development of both AoM and AoE 3…
The numbers haven’t gone up much since the release of the DLC. They peaked massively in the hour after the release but didn’t go up that much in the weekend right after.
The most interesting and unfortunate thing we can read from that graph is that Immortal Pillars didn’t manage to capture a significant Asian player base. AoE3DE is still more popular in Asia.
We can read that from the peaks in the graph because of time zones. Asians play before Europeans and they play before Americans.
AoE3 has 2 noticeably peaks with a small one following up while AoMR practically only has that 2nd end smaller 3rd peak.
There is only a very small bump before the main European playing hours.
But other then the missing Asian peak my guess is that the fact that the campaign is relatively short (I finished it on Thursday) and that there are a bunch of bigger balance issues in multiplayer lowers the player count significantly.
We can only guess what the Xbox and PS5 numbers are though. Maybe the PS5 version is doing big numbers, who knows.
The PS5 has like twice the install base of the Xbox Series consoles.
Not sure how much fun it is to play a game like this on console in general though.
The parameter of “this game is not selling DLC enough to justify the dev costs and we had to make it free to play and it still was not enough”
Unless you guys are saying that AoE3 was cancelled for other reasons, and after all the changes and censorship in campaign and content and boycot on microsoft events, I can give you its possible.
They didnt cancelled the DLC, they cancelled the entire game, its different.
No they didn’t cancel the game. It’s there in my steam library and I can play it.
Name me any remastered game that got more post release support then AoE3DE that isn’t AoE2DE or AoMR (even that is not at the same level yet). Especially any RTS game.
Warcraft 3 Remastered was a disaster. Almost no Remaster of no game gets any new DLC after release. Most get little to no new content in the game in general.
AoE3DE just got less compared to AoE2DE but if you compare it to anything else it got a lot of support. It got more support then most new releases.
Obviously I wish there was more AoE3DE content and more support and more DLC. It’s my favourite game.
But I don’t want to insult the developers for not supporting it more. I appreciate what they did.
