Age of Empires Online

» see ageofempiresonline.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

age of empires online's peak years overlap with the broadband era of my late twenties, but i was not part of the audience it was actually built for. by 2011 the people who had grown up with aoe ii at lan parties were thirty, paying rent, and either still playing aoe ii on local servers or quitting rts entirely for league of legends. aoeo arrived at the gap between those two groups and tried to drag both into a free-to-play live-service framework that worked for neither.

the game shipped august 16, 2011, developed first by robot entertainment (the studio forty-five ex-ensemble staff started after microsoft shut ensemble down in 2009) and then handed to gas powered games in early 2011. you played one of seven civilizations across three pay tiers, with greeks and egyptians free while the rest sat behind 20-dollar premium or pro packs. there was an mmo-style quest map, vault drops, persistent character progression. the combat was classic aoe but the economy was built for monthly retention.

it did not retain. new content stopped january 3, 2013, roughly seventeen months in. microsoft kept servers running on minimal maintenance until games for windows live itself was being sunsetted. in september 2013 microsoft studios announced the july 1, 2014 server shutdown. one developer summed up the postmortem on the way out: the content was too expensive to maintain for the size of the player base actually paying for it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it tried to be ~

aoeo was microsoft testing whether the boxed-rts crowd would convert to live-service. the answer was no. rts players were not free-to-play players. the people who would pay 60 dollars for a finished campaign and another 30 for an expansion were not the same people who would spend 5 dollars a month on a vanity helmet. nine years later age of empires ii: definitive edition would sell the boxed version at full price on steam and prove the original instinct correct.

~ the games for windows live problem ~

aoeo was also a victim of its launcher. games for windows live was microsoft's xbox-live-for-pc experiment, required for the game, hated by everyone who used it. you had to make a microsoft gamertag to play. patches went through gfwl. friends lists went through gfwl. when microsoft started winding gfwl down in 2013, every gfwl game became a slowly dying object whether or not its servers were technically still up. aoeo died one of the loudest deaths inside that wind-down because it was the only major first-party live-service title built on top of it.

~ what replaced it ~

aoeo sits as the missing middle entry in the franchise's timeline: aoe iii in 2005, then aoeo in 2011 as the dead branch before aoe iv in 2021 brought the boxed format back. robot entertainment moved on to orcs must die and stayed alive as a studio. gas powered games did not. chris taylor's company laid off most of its staff in 2013 and was sold to wargaming. aoeo was the project both studios passed through on their way somewhere else.

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