Fair enough, agree to disagree. The best-performing AoE game since AoE II is pretty good in my books. I’m not sure any future AoE game is going to top II (especially with DE) - the range of hardware it can be played on combined with its pricing means any competitor will always have an uphill struggle.
Certainly, these layoffs aren’t going to make any future AoE game any better, and they aren’t going to improve the content for the existing titles, either.
Live service games are games with a constant stream of new content, the new content is usually free and people are paying for other things (battle pass, cosmetics, loot boxes (gacha mechanics) and so on).
AoE2DE (or AoE3DE, AoE4 and AoMR) are getting 1-2 DLC a year and only a tiny bit of new free content. That is very different.
The time limited unlocks are definitely a thing live service games love to do but AoE only used it very little and has reduced it a lot already.
The core aspect of cosmetics is not you being able to see skins, but instead being able to show off your skins. It’s a form of expression and not about making the game look nice for you. So the only thing it that regard are the profile picture DLCs and the Explorer skins in AoE3 that other players also see. A regional skins DLC would be a local thing and not something you can show off to others.
RTS games are generally not really suited for that show of thing, especially ones without heroes. Dota 2 makes all the money with hero skins. Starcraft 2 had some unit skins later in its life time but that game only has 2 races and most people just main on of them, not really comparable with AoE2.
You can of corse choose to not like the current DLC model, but it is not really comparable with a live service game. I generally don’t think AoE2DE is suited of any kind of live service model so I don’t think Activision will try to force it onto the game. They are too busy with ruining Call of Duty.
that’s exaclty aoe2.
wow is one of the most popular live service games, but you need to pay for expansions.
Deep Rock Galactic is live service, it had 6 seasons in 5 years. New content in aoe2de is more frequent than that.
A regional skins DLC would be a step away from live service, compared to the current slop.
does aoe2 make most of its money from the base game, or from expansions? that’s the deciding factor imo. Considering that the base game is 30 eur, but the expansions are over 100 at this point, the answer should be clear.
When publishers and marketing people talk about live service games they don’t mean 1-2 DLC per year plus a few balance patches. Balance patches are not new content.
They mean something like monthly new slop.
A lot of genre definitions overlap because many games are doing the same things now like almost every game having RPG mechanics. Even AoE2 has a tiny bit of them in the latest campaigns where you can make permanent decision.
If you look a the “victory with X civ” Achievements you notice that most people didn’t buy any of the DLC. There is a pretty low ceiling of how much money you can spend on AoE2DE because there is only a hand full DLC and that’s it. No infinite money skin like all those other games have where there is at least one new skin pack every week and you can buy infinite loot boxes and so on.
of course you can narrowly define “live service” so it excludes aoe2, but your claim isn’t backed up by reality. There are plenty of games, that are generally accepted to be live service, but only have infrequent major content updates:
Deep Rock Galactic (somewhere between 6-12 months between seasons)
Diablo IV (usually 3 months)
Grand Theft Auto Online (twice per year)
yes, many games do receive updates more frequently, but that’s not what defines a live service game. What defines live service games is that the content updates come indefinitely.
if you look at steam sale charts, the revenue for aoe2 always spikes around DLC releases. so unless people are buying the base game en masse when DLC releases, we don’t need to look at less trustworthy data like steam achievements.
over 5x the base price of the game or 3x the current price is not a low ceiling to me.
lots of live service games don’t have ways to spend infinite amounts of money. it’s not required to be a live service game. eg Hell Divers 2, Marvel Rivals, DRG
some live service games even provide all additional content for free. No Man’s Sky comes to mind
What about civ reworks? In the past four and a half years, we’ve had I think six base game civs reworked, some of them so significantly that this was basically removing base game content and replacing it with something else. That isn’t what I’d expect at all in a game with a buy-to-play model, and back when it was released in 2019 I don’t think anyone could have anticipated that it would experience such significant changes over time. “Live service” might not be a perfect term to describe the model, but making out that AoE2’s model is an essentially static base game + content added through DLCs is just false.
Are those service games? Maybe Diablo 4 is a failed service game. They want to remove the shared hub world stuff in Diablo 5 after all.
This one has a lot of micro transactions (mostly buying money) and generally a lot more online features. I mean it’s called “GTA Online” after all.
But that is true for every game so is every game a service game?
Then Flight Simulator was a service game in the base version because all DLC content was already more then the base game cost.
Service games generally don’t make you pay for the content itself. Paying for content is the traditional “old school” way of making money with games. It’s the same as buying The Conquerors on CD.
You can buy a lot of different skins and therefor spend a lot of money. Most if not all of those also have weekly rotating items in their stores and stuff like that. Not sure for Deep Rock Galactic though since I haven’t heard anything about the monetisation in that game.
I would definitely not call that a live service game. This game is a huge exception in the grand scheme of things. It’s hard to find another game that adds so much free content post release without any micro transactions. Maybe Minecraft but they have so many other ways to make money including realms but also physical merchandise and even a theme park.
hmm not really. Maybe a little bit. Depends on the scope. The Viking rework is not “free content” in my opinion. The Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean rework more so.
But that was already false the the Conquerors which added new units and technologies to all existing civs. All DLC since were smaller shake ups for the old civs than that.
Sure, and you were claiming that it’s true now when you described AoE2’s model as
Your description completely ignores the fact that base game content gets changed, sometimes significantly, for players who don’t buy DLCs, and there is no way for players to avoid those changes. This is something I’d expect to be a feature of live service games, not buy-to-play games.
The big difference between The Conquerors and recent DLCs for DE is that someone who wants to play AoK without the changes from The Conquerors still can.
Games have been patched, often significantly, for decades.
Changing the definition of “live service game” to “a game that gets post-release support” is honestly just weird. Why do you need the games to be defined as “live service”? What does it help you achieve?
So if they simply added the option to play older version of the game then it would suddenly be totally different?
Counter Strike 1.6 is definitely a live service game because it got a patch recently.
So literally every game that is not entirely abandoned is live service now.
yes, both are live service games. Diablo IV being “failed” according to you (despite have twice the active player base of aoe2), doesn’t change that it’s a live service game. (I also don’t see how changing one feature for the sequel means that the original failed)
no denying that. but your argument was that “when people talk about live service games […] they mean something like monthly new slop”, yet GTA Online is undeniably a live service game, that doesn’t have “monthly new slop”.
So every condition you have tried to use to argue that aoe2DE is not live service has counter examples of other live service games also not fulfilling these conditions.
no it isn’t. There are tons of games that either don’t have DLC, have a pre-determined amount of DLC (eg episodic games), or simply have one or two expansions and then stop.
I don’t buy games that are constantly changing, i buy finished games, so i can know what I’m buying into.
Aoe2 advertised itself as a “definitve edition”. They even stated publicly that they were done adding civs. Then they did a 180 and started adding a constant stream of civs, with no end in sight.
If you disagree with the labelling of “live service”, fine. I don’t care to split hairs, the point is that it’s deceptive marketing to offer one experience and replace it with something else.
I don’t know enough about it, but sounds like live service to me, if that content is integrated in large parts of the existing game. (but it was probably in an era before the term “live service” was invented, so people probably didn’t call it that)
this is a rule you made up, i have provided multiple counter-examples already. World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 also come to mind.
I think, the big difference between an expansion and live service is how the content in integrated: expansions like Sktrim’s Dawngard or Solstheim DLC move you to an entirely separate area, but change basically nothing about the base game.
Live serivce changes the base game, even for those who don’t buy into the expansion.
you can call it gobbledegook for all I care, but when the rest of the world calls it a live service game, then you will sturggle to communicate.
this link gives me a 403 error when I try to post it:
https://www.xd a-developers.com/live-service-games-that-are-doing-it-right/
remove the space in xd a
Maybe we need to rewind to define “live service game” or maybe better “games as a service”.
Back in the day you bought Photoshop Version X and then when Version X+1 came out you had to pay for it again. That is not software as a service, right? The old version might still be getting bug fixes and maybe support for new codecs or something but no new features.
At some point Adobe designed to remove the option to buy Photoshop, now you can only pay monthly to get access. That is software as a service.
The AoE2DE business model is clearly like old Photoshop. You buy a DLC and then you get access to it. But because the developers don’t want to split the player base into people that have a DLC and people that don’t they give everyone the data for the new civs but lock the access to them behind the purchase. Back in the old AoE3 day the game had 2 Expansions so the online player base was split into 4 groups (Base game, TWC, TAD and TWC+TAD) you could enter lobbies that didn’t have the Expansions but then you couldn’t play with civs from that expansion or use new units added in the Expansion. That was of course really annoying to players so they decided not to do it like that for AoE2HD and all future releases.
AoMR has had 1 season pass so far but it seems like a one time thing. Usually most games have the next season pass right after the first one ends. So they are certainly dipping their toes into trying live service game things but so far those tests have been limited to AoE3DE and AoMR and they don’t seem to be happy about them because they never did a 2nd explorer pack or a 2nd season pass. At least for now.
MMOs like WoW did games as a service long before the rest of the industry caught up to the idea so they are still doing some thing the traditional way like selling expansions despite of having a paid subscription. But there is a reason why modern games don’t do that anymore.
So AoE2DE would not be a live service game anymore if they gave you the ability to play older versions of the game?
People use terms wrong all the time. The fact that people think No Man Sky is doing “live service game” right kinda proves that it isn’t one. Because live service games are designed to drain our money. It’s something you do to make investors happy, not players.
I don’t, I even said “live service” isn’t the perfect term to describe AoE2’s model. I just think what @Skadidesu said about that model is misleading.
Yes, if they added an option to play using old data sets – especially if it was built into the game in a user-friendly way, rather than literally downloading old versions of the game client – I would feel much more positive about making major changes like civ reworks.
I’m totally in favour of them doing that too. Not much work for them but it would add a huge benefit to the game for some people.
You said the following:
I pointed out that “buy-to-play” games have had post-release support for decades. On top of that, this has changed gameplay, sometimes significantly.
We have seen an increase in content being released in patches, post-release, for sure. But this matches consumer expectations - post-release support is now seen as a necessity by consumers. Games that do not state ahead of time they’re going to add more content post-release tend to get negative pushback.
It would still be a live service game. Minecraft allows rollback and rollforward to different versions, and it’s still a live service game. All its updates even come for free!
I’ve never come across a buy-to-play game that changed existing content as significantly as AoE2DE has done. Maybe there are lots of games doing it that I just happen not to have played – that’s perfectly plausible.
I’m not talking about new content being added. I’m talking about existing content being significantly reworked, sometimes to the point that the previously existing content has effectively been removed.
Not sure what the point is here. Minecraft clearly has a very different model.
Dawn of War redesigned the Chaos faction and didn’t preserve it outside of the original campaign module (which you couldn’t even play as Chaos for). This was back in 2004-2005. Expansions came alongside patches that radically changed the general game mechanics.
Civilisation reworked game mechanics in free updates alongside paid expansions (see: Gathering Storm for Civ VI). Intention was to pay for content but uplift the core gameplay for all players free of charge.
It’s not an uncommon pattern. AoE IV has done similar things in its seasonal updates.
You can not like it, don’t want to give you the impression you can’t. But it’s not unique to AoE II: DE, and is rather an inevitable reality of any game that gets post-release support for a moderate period of time. Games can often be improved on in this way.
I don’t!
Thanks for the examples. I used to play Dawn of War but evidently didn’t stick with it long enough to experience that.
First impact of Activision: seeing aoe4, there will be no more discounts for pre order and no regional pricing. Everybody needs to pay 20 bucks.