This is because people with experience normally avoid companies like Microsoft.
There was a time (like 2018-2020) when MS aggressively bought a lot of studios and pushed the release of multiple games. People were praising MS because they poured money into gaming and didn’t interfere with the studio’s works (or it seemed), compared to the companies that dropped 
s at the time like Blizzard. That was also when AOE “revived”.
But it seems that these investments did not turn out profitable enough so they are now closing studios and cutting projects again like how ES was disbanded in 2009.
Hope I’m wrong 
3 Likes
Last year in one of the patch notes, they mentioned they want to do dev blogs… well, those haven’t happened yet.
2 Likes
I think the reason is more sinister than that.
By buying all those studios, Microsoft also bought their IPs. So now when they are done with the studios, they keep the IP but fire everyone. This makes little sense from a financial perspective, because the studios could have bought themselves out or could have been bought by others if Microsoft really was after cash.
They are after the IP. They don’t want the studios creating games that would rival what gamepass has to offer. So they are trying to create a monopoly of IPs to not only stomp out rivals, but also prevent others from creating similar games. If any of the devs previously working on those studios would try to create something similar, Microsoft will bully them out of business with lawyers and IP crap (which is funny seeing how Microsoft & others gave 0 #### about IP when they trained their useless AI models). Have you seen any game that would rival AOE in terms of setting and quality? No, because the devs of that game would be sued into oblivion (chinese copycats excluded - it is almost funny if you think about it, China offering a more open market LOL).
Activision-Blizzard was the cherry on top of game pass. With WoW, CoD and Diablo plus all the Activision yearly game spam on board, the game pass will be a proposition too strong for many to ignore.
I think the Age of Empires series (2DE, 3DE, and 4) have run its course. They are now doing AoM again for pro players because Aoe4 failed for esports (too many limitations in the game engine - just check the current state of the ranked ladder being infested with map hackers). 2DE and 3DE existed to prop 4 and game pass sales, nothing more. This is why we barely get any content. It literally depends how many game pass subscribers play these games, that decides if content comes or goes. My guess is that we have a stable number to warrant 2 new civs every 3 years. One of the things to note about pro player friendly games is that they tend to not get too much new content.
1 Like
And yet, the past couple of WotHs for 2DE have been multiple paragraphs long. Sure, much of it is just fluff bordering on outright coddling, but it demonstrates they can communicate when they want to. There’s even a semblance of a roadmap within, which is far more than what 3DE and even IV get.
They somewhat do it already, but there is definitively room for putting more love into it and making the screenshots more interesting.
I believe that we could start sending cool screenshots directly to their Instagram DMs page in hopes that they upload some of them. The community screenshot contest winners pics are great candidates for that.
Maybe doing the same in Twitter/X and using their @AgeOfEmpires to tag them could help for visibility too
9 Likes
Funny how that community contest has existed +2 years, yet none of the awesome pictures from it has been used, at all.
You mean spam? 
Lol, just for the record I don’t mean spam. I mean meeting them where they want us to engage as well.
If you look closely, they use some hashtags that members of this community could also use to give more visibility to this game. The DMs was just an idea, but there are definitively other ways too. We should avoid being annoying, rude or demanding in the process…
2 Likes
Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
-Jonah Orion, Chief Librarian of the Blood Ravens chapter
3 Likes
Yes, the AoE 3 Baltic DLC will come out after AoM Retold in November (since AoM Retold comes out in September around there)…
Yes, now it is Microsoft Gaming, not Xbox… no company does anything without approval from Xbox and Xbox does nothing without approval from Microsoft…
Luckily that never happened to me; they always left me first for someone else xd…
Yes, at most they will show Retold gameplay and that’s it…
Yes, of course…next year is the 20th anniversary of AoE 3 so they will put dlcs there to die taking advantage of the anniversary…
Na, the dlcs are not going to stop (although they will come out slower due to the Retold dlcs)… you still have to complete Asia, Africa, America and so on until at least 2030…
A few years ago they bought Zenimax (and also Bethesda with them) and last year Activision-Blizzard…
Yes, it’s a good idea…
Could we at least have anything like a hint of pre-announcement of the announcement of a tentative plan?
4 Likes
You have flags, why do we need names for these civs? X D
2 Likes
Lol, I forgot that. Even after 4 months we still don’t have the official names of the new civs.
I seriously don’t understand the marketing strategy (if there is such thing) for the aoe games.
5 Likes
After the recall PR nightmare, I think it is best they shut up lol.
1 Like
Yeah, also that, the only time the say something, they usually mess it up badly. Their words are usually create more confusion than their silence.
But still leads to my original point, what do they even have in mind? Is it really that difficult to say the names of the new civs?
Or was it really that difficult to originally announce V&V as historical battles DLC rather than a “campaign” one?
Was it really that difficult to say RoR was going to be a port of aoe1 into aoe 2 instead that 4-5 month radio silence period that led people to speculate it was going a Late Antiquity DLC instead?
And it goes on.
At this point I think the youtubers or even us, the forum users, do a far better job in the marketing department.
2 Likes
They are trying to create hype, keep us guessing. The fact that this thread exists shows it is somewhat working.
I’m not really really sure. We’re the more hardcore fans and we are so desperate for new content that we even have to speculate when they upload random images of bushes or berries or whatever into their social media. 
But beyond this forum people don’t talk much about this. Heck, some friends of mine even forgot we are supposed to have a DLC this year
4 Likes
If I am to guess, they are playing it safe by shutting up. Microsoft has been in quite a few PR disaster lately, and one of them is gaming related, by shutting down several studios, and laying off thousands of people.
On top of that there’s the disastrous //build keynote with AI recall and many shady things they are doing with windows 10 and windows 11. It will only get worse in 2025, as many windows 10 PCs that are perfectly good will not be eligible for updates nor windows 11. It will be an interesting year for Microsoft, no doubt.
I think they are simply don’t want to draw too much worldwide attention, because frankly anything they will do will be bashed, even if they do it half correctly (which would be a first for microsoft this 12 months so far). Their PR sessions so far have been targeted at us, they don’t really want to increase awareness to the age series, for some reason. Even their stars, aoe2 and aoe4 have seen quiet reduction in activity (one evil person might say the people working there got fired).
1 Like
What’s wrong guys, you don’t have enough flags, don’t you have flags in your countries?
According to the AoE wikia it is Poles/Polish and Danes/Danish…
It doesn’t exist xd…
That’s true, they better keep quiet before MS comes by with the scythe…
Yeah, that’s the problem. There’s at least two options for each flag.