Not to mention the laughable new discounts they’re offering across all Age of Empires content during sales.
1 Like
It’s shockingly bad. The last chieftains DLC was cheaper in June than now!
1 Like
Stellaris is a good example for a game with the same business model. Payed release plus payed DLC but no battle pass, no loot boxes and no micro transactions (unless you count small DLC).
The game has massively changed since release even if you didn’t buy any DLC, some core features have completely been removed, reworked and new ones added.
Other similar games like Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron did similar things. Less changes then Stellaris but more then AoE2DE. Strategy games seem to be kinda suited for that kinda release strategy. I mean even the original Dawn of War got 4 expansions of a relatively long time span, not that different from AoE2DE. And all those new releases changed the base game. You could play against the new factions without owning the Expansions. But the details were a little more complicated, since it was still a disk based game you could of course choose to just play the none updated version.
Of course most games don’t get much more support when the successor releases. I think that was the plan for AoE2DE too but it turned out to be too popular while AoE4 was never able to surpass it.
Of course, RTS expansions (or expansions for games in general) usually bring new things and change the way you play a little…AoE 2DE had regional DLCs, but AoE 3DE had continental DLCs that add entire continents with new civs, maps, and units (the African DLC plus the two European ones)…
Stellaris is a different story, as it is designed to have more DLCs. In this terms the original AoE2 and DoW wasn’t altered with expansions, as you could still play original/vanilla or the expansion. And back in the days you didn’t need to download patches to play the game. So technically people can still play the game, they did buy over 20 years ago. It would be nice, if today’s developers could have more product preservation and fans expectations in mind, that what ever is the cheapest way to handle a franchise.
1 Like
its even worse, according to this article
like by blizzard its a “reverse acquisition,”
Joost van Dreunen, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and games industry analyst, posts on Substack about the changes, describing it as a “reverse acquisition of Xbox.” Van Dreunen says “folding Halo, one of Xbox’s prized IPs, into Activision, the firm it acquired in 2023, is surprising at best. At worst, it’s evidence of how poorly Xbox was running its studios.”
Van Dreunen likens Xbox’s recent acquisitions to Disney’s 2006 purchase of Pixar, in which senior Pixar members were put in charge of Disney’s then-struggling in-house animation studio while Pixar was in the midst of a generational run. He adds, “It’s becoming evident that Microsoft’s acquisitions were less about the IP and more about the managerial talent.”
Activision being in charge of gaming by Xbox is the worst possible scenario for the whole gaming department.
It’s just filing bankruptcy with extra steps, like make games nobody wants, to give them a good reason to fire people from their jobs, till company is no more.
Xbox had already made a statement on it, the point of the layoffs was to slim down the org chart by cutting out levels of middle management, which kinda fits what that says. I wouldn’t be suprised if the last round of layoffs hits Activision themselves for that same purpose. Activision isn’t going to be in charge of the entire games division, they’re just getting a bigger slice of the pie for administrative purposes. Again if they were deleting WE (Worlds Edge) entirely and putting FE directly under Activision i’d be much more worried, but given that WE still exists as a business unit just slimmed down, i’m still not going to worry until I actively see actions taken that are bad.
But to the “at worst, its evidence of how poorly Xbox was running its studios” part, yeah, AoE was insulated from it some because of the existence of WE, but Xbox Studios was horribly managed with Minecraft and one other game basically financing the rest of the studios because nothing else directly under the Xbox label was profitable. It’s a shame WE got caught in the crossfire of the reorg, but there’s no sense in worrying about things that can’t be changed. We just have to wait and see, and hope for the best.
Stellaris had huge reworks of pretty much all core gameplay aspects. If you compare release Stellaris to what it is now it’s basically a totally different game.
Planets are completely differently managed now, ships move completely differently (they removed 2 of the 3 faster then light technologies you could originally choose between) and the economy works completely differently now. It would be as is AoE2 had 8 resources and a moral system now.
Those were made in a very different time.
But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t allow us to access older version of AoE2DE, because you can do that with Stellaris too, no excuse for AoE2DE, just disable multiplayer in that version.
We can just hope that Microsoft realises that Xbox was actually profitable when the AI bubble bursts and all their other investments give them no return.
Doesn’t Stellaris allow multi on older patches? I recall that CK3 from the same company does.
(ofc, in AoE case, ranked should be disabled)
yes but it’s generally entirely a peer to peer multiplayer. No lobby browser, no ranked and so on. AoE would have to entirely rework their system to allow that while for Stellaris they can just allow infinit versions to exist since they don’t connect to a server.
Of course they could change their system to allow peer to peer on older version but that would be work. Just putting up older version with multiplayer disabled would be trivially easy so there is no excuse to not do that.
1 Like
Sure, kind of like a classic version of AoE 2 but for playing without ranked in the old-fashioned way…
The issue isn’t technology; it’s the management.
Just out of context, is any of their upcoming project even profitable? Fallout 5 , The new Starcraft that is just another shooter , State of Decay 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, dont sound ground breaking.
Activision did enforce Blizzard to make games like Heroes of the Storm, which didn’t make money, and then it was used to establish even more of their control over the company, till Blizzard wasn’t able to make games at all.
You don’t make an egg farm more efficient by removing the chickens.
And that is in large scale happening right now by Xbox.
It seems making games the gaming market actually wants, isn’t for them an option.
1 Like
It’s a lot more complicated but the tldr is that there used to be a lot of money flowing into games because they used to be a good investment, now all the money flows into AI while at the same time there is less money to be invested (for all kinds of global economic reasons like Saudi Arabia having less money and therefor invest less into games). So there is double less money for games. Microsoft is the most extreme example because they were the biggest over spender on video games studios a few years ago when they bought up everyone and now they are one of the biggest spenders on AI instead.
So Microsoft ist trying to fix a mistake by making an even bigger mistake.
Nah, they’re just sequels to established sagas…
So Microsoft ist trying to fix a mistake by making an even bigger mistake.
Yes, and it should be the job of managers to prevent and avoid mistakes, instead of doing and enforcing them, like we see in the recent Gears game. It launched this week and has 3 times smaller peak player numbers than Age of Empires 4.
So according to AI. Gears of War: E-Day. Analysts estimate the game needs roughly 5.7 million to 9 million copies sold at full price to break even. The reported development budget for Gears of War: E-Day is upwards of $400 million
The game sold roughly 120,000 units on Steam, generating about $7 million in revenue
So even if we halve the production cost and say it sells 10 times more. It’s still like at least 100 million dollars lost per produced game. Of course, it’s going to affect the Age of Empires Series; we sit in the same boat after all.
The Issue is not AI, despite the very clear issue of them making too many shooters, we still see them making shooters, even if the IP is for RPGs like Fallout or RTS like Starcraft.
But due to bad management and money pressure, we won’t see them do the right things, like make more different games, like RTS for example, that would bring in way more money.
Tell me, is Gears of War historically a console game, or a PC-first game? What platforms were 4 and 5 released on?
RTS is not a genre that historically makes a lot of money. AoE IV is a success story for a modern RTS in a successful franchise that still has many active players (as much as its detractors like to try and paint it otherwise).
What other successful RTS games have there been? Tempest Rising looks very good, and is currently at under 1,000 players on Steam (right now - about 860 playing). SoaSE 2? Around 500 on Steam.
These are titles that have, of course, launched on multiple storefronts (SoaSE is on Epic I believe, if not others as well). So the Steam numbers aren’t everything.
But the fact remains that RTS games do not drive profit margins. They can sustain an independent studio, yes (look at Relic). But they’re not going to drive something like Microsoft or (ugh) Activision’s strategy in 2026. Fable has more of a chance of doing that. Forza has more of a chance of doing that.
Neither is a prequel like GoW: E-Day. Assuming GoW isn’t tapped out as a franchise, a mainline entry would be what they bank on. And they certainly wouldn’t rely on PC-only numbers as a measure of success.
Of course, we live in an era where people get upset about LGBTQ cosmetics in video games and demand that the developers censor these things. So the cultural angle isn’t irrelevant either. Large companies are risk-averse. This does not incentivise good decisions. It incentivises safe decisions. On that we can agree.
But what is a “good” decision? Investing in AoE as a franchise? I would say yes. But AoE isn’t going to be the lynchpin around which the future of Microsoft’s PC games revolves around. It might be a decent contributor, but it won’t be much more than that.
Shooters, on average, sell way more. Sorry, that’s just how it goes.
1 Just out of curiosity, I did ask ChatGPT AI how much it did cost to make AoE4 and how much money it did bring in. The AI did say between $40 million and $80 million USD. So its already 5 times cheaper to make. The AI thinks its had gross revenue of $250 to $300 million USD.
This means they earned back at least 100 million.
So instead of 1 Shooter, they could make 5 RTS instead and easy earn profits of 500 million USD.
2 You are not wrong, but looking at the gaming market, the pressure on AAA shooters is much higher, while there is none for AAA RTS. The only AAA RTS after AoE4 is probably Dawn of War 4, everything else is kind of between indie and small teams. RTS gaming market is a free real estate right now
3 So why not, for example, for same money instead of funding 1 Starcraft Schooter,
give the money to Relic and let them make 5 RTS games instead?
4 Again, I don’t say they should make RTS only. But stop making Schooters only.
It doesn’t mean that, no. It’s made-up. The best human-created estimates we have are still estimates. An LLM is trained on what data it’s been able to scrape from across the Internet. Which has been created by humans. There isn’t a cache of accurate sales and development costs data to draw from.
I’m not convinced by this maths.
A better comparison would be GoW: E-Day to AoM: Retold. The numbers for Retold are much lower (and I like Retold, personally. I wish I had more time to play it). Retold is an order of magnitude less played than E-Day, and both are comparatively new titles (vs. AoE IV, which has been around for, wow, nearly half a decade now)
Does that mean it’s free real estate, or that there isn’t appetite to translate into sales?
We know how much Activision-Blizzard are motivated by profits. If Starcraft 3 or Warcraft 4 were viable, why haven’t they made them already?
(Warcraft is a special case, I believe they’ve said they already have WoW which is building that universe, so a standalone RTS is difficult to fit in with WoW’s longterm plans - but Starcraft 3 in theory should be an option)
I mean, I’m guessing too, of course. But the reality is shooters sell more. To what extent this translates into profit is a lot harder to define. People are currently arguing over Civilisation VII, which is a very lukewarm entry in the franchise in terms of fan popularity (I love it, but that doesn’t mean anything at all statistically). And Civilisation sells. As the pre-eminent entry in the 4x genre, it reliably does bigger numbers than any of its competitors by a large margin.
But does the reception of VII mean they should pivot from Civilisation? Should they resurrect X-COM (that would also be popular, imo). I’m not sure. Abandoning their core franchise is unlikely to go over well with consumers. The games development industry is very fragile right now. Again, this is about playing it safe.
If they could make 5 RTS games for the price of 1 FPS / TPS game, the studio would then also need to support those five games. Even if you spread it out across five studios, you then have five studios supporting products with post-launch content. All of this launching at once would cannabalise their own player demographics (because of the extreme overlap of RTS communities given how niche the genre is respective to the industry overall). This is a lot riskier than you might think it is. It’s not a safe bet. Shooters are a safe bet (even if they only do moderately well).
tl;dr: I respect your opinion, but I don’t agree with it.
3 Likes
A console game (although it had a PC version)…then GoW 2 and 3 were only released on XB360 and only with Gears 4 did they return to PC…
Yes, that’s true… I was hoping it would be a success (even though I wasn’t a big fan of going back to the Middle Ages)…
Yes, I miss the 90s and 2000s when we had dozens of RTS games a year… MOBAs and mobile MMORTS games literally killed the genre in the 2010s…
Yes, I’m still waiting for them to release Warcraft 4 starting from Battle for Azeroth onwards (2017-present).
The stated (by Microsoft/Xbox) goal of all of the changes is to remove levels of middle management to be able to invest more into the developers, remove some extra farmers to invest more in the chickens to use your example.
I’m still optimistic that will be the end state of this, though honestly its mainly because I can’t change anything so for my own mental health I might as well be optimistic.