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Why Age of Empires Online failed
Since the beginning of this year, Age of Empires Online has shifted into stagnation and decline -- and done so intentionally. So why did Microsoft Studios decide to all but abandon the future of this game? In short, the title launched with far too little content, a bad business model, and couldn't crank out the goods fast enough to retain an audience. This resulted in a sharp drop-off from 100,000 players to 15,000 in a few months. Executive Producer Kevin Perry criticized the game's launch at GDC Europe, pointing at its skimpy features (including only two civilizations at launch) and bad public perception: "You don't get a soft launch for a branded title. Players come there for your brand. You only get word-of-mouth once. Whenever we got new players, they always came in with the overhead, 'but I heard this game sucks.' That hill was extremely difficult to climb." Even after tinkering with the game's cost, adding in more content, and figuring out ways to allow players to spend more money, the company ultimately realized that the players were mostly demanding new content which couldn't be generated to make a profit. "The content itself was too expensive to create," Perry admitted. "We did do a lot of things right, but they weren't enough to actually save the game."
Age of Empires Online ceases content development
What you see right now in Age of Empires Online is what you'll get... forever. Microsoft Studios announced that it's ceasing any further development on the title effective immediately due to finances. The studio will release a "small amount of content" in the near future, but following that, the game's features and civilizations will be set in stone as it moves into a support phase. That doesn't mean the game's getting cancelled, however. The announcement emphatically states that Age of Empires Online will continue to operate as is, will have future community events, and it is not "dying." The move from development to support was explained as follows: "Creating top-tier content, as we have been for the last year and a half, is very expensive -- too expensive to maintain for long, as it turns out. We can no longer afford to keep creating it. Age of Empires Online already has a very large amount of high-quality, hand-crafted entertainment, and adding more is no longer cost-effective."
The Daily Grind: Would you still play if you had to start over?
In their struggle to save their game from sunset in November, City of Heroes fans are faced with a dilemma: What if their heroic measures work but only halfway? What if they manage to save the game but not the team and the game stays on life support? Or what if they save the game and the team but not the servers and everything on them -- would people still play? That exact situation has already hit Ryzom players, whose servers are set to be wiped and consolidated in an effort to keep the game online. So suppose your favorite game lost all of its data for some reason. Your characters are gone, with no hope of retrieval. No levels. No currency. No twinking gear. No achievements. No vet rewards. No guilds. No resources. All of it, gone. Would you start over? If not, would you take it as a sign to play another game? And if so, what would you do differently the second time around? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: A full MMO or an MM-No?
Last night while talking about some of the recent news, we hit upon an interesting question in regards to smaller MMOs and sunsetted (or currently being sunsetted titles) Smaller MMOs sadly don't often get a lot of investment in terms of money or developer time, so many times they wind up locked into near-stasis, with perhaps one large content patch per year, if that.This morning we thought we'd ask - if presented the choice of seeing your MMO which was in heavy development change, which would you prefer? Would you rather it just be shut down altogether; going out at its peak, as it were? Or would you prefer your game to essentially land on life support with only the occasional update and very long development times between them?
Annoyed, hospitalized teen unplugs neighbor's life support
It should probably go without saying that anything connected to a power source within the confines of a hospital has a fair shot at being pertinent to the livelihood of at least one individual, but obviously a 17-year old teenager in Germany needed the memo. After the perpetual noise of what would prove to be his neighbor's life support machine "got on his nerves," he proceeded to simply unplug the device without precaution in order to ensure that "he got his peace and quiet." Of course, we can only assume that the sirens and squeals that were emitted due to his misreckoning were immensely louder than the prior hum, but some folks just love to learn the hard way. Thankfully, medical personnel stepped in and saved the man from perishing, but the teen at fault lost a lot more sleep after that whilst being questioned by police.[Via El Reg, image courtesy of NAIAD]
Space station computers pass final test, Atlantis to come home
It's been a rocky few days in space, but it looks like the crashed Russian computers aboard the International Space Station are back up and running to spec, allowing the crew of Atlantis to depart tomorrow. There's still no word on what caused the computers -- which control vital life support systems, as well as the station's stabilizers and directional thrusters -- to fail, but the leading theory involves a surge from the new solar power array the shuttle astronauts installed. We're glad everything's okay -- but also we're totally curious as to what OS / processor combo they're running up there.
