threesls

Congrats guys, Steam reports 11,099 people in-game right now.

Out of curiosity, how much were your team expecting?

11k for a decade-old game is impressive, at least to me...

Insofar as sales go...

Microsoft sold Age of Empires III for ten cents to promote GFWL back in 2010, and it barely made a ripple. I'm sure a lot of people bought it, but who stayed on GFWL to play it?

Yet Age3 went to Steam for $40 in 2012 and it's still selling (it's a Midweek Madness deal right now, in fact). It sold enough to make Age2HD a prospect; that Steamwork'd retrofit now sells for $20, even though Age2 is easily pirated and HD is (currently) less feature-rich than the freely available community mod made by the team which recently joined Skybox.

Even indie titles can expensively flop over bad tech choices - Skulls of the Shogun was in the news relatively recently.

It's very unusual to see the same composers change their styles so much between games of the same franchise - there's a huge leap between Age of Empires and Rise of Rome, and then another huge leap between Conquerors and Mythology. Props to them.

How did Age3 do relative to AoM?

That aside, there's also been some discussion over why Age3 was... relatively poorly received? Bruce Shelley during his 2011 Kotaku interview, for instance.

AoEO seems to have panned out badly as well, and may fare even worse if GFWL's rumoured shutdown goes through.

Any thoughts as to what went wrong? In the early 2000s there was a lot of experimentation with the RTS genre - Warcraft III, CNC Generals, Dawn of War, etc. Warcraft III was a bestseller but CNC Generals sold badly, as I recall. Do you think tastes just shifted, or is there still a niche with new audiences for a game with Age2-like gameplay?