‘Age Of Empires Online’ Content Development Comes To A Close

Age of Empires Online has been out on PC for over a year and a half, and developer Gas Powered Games has released a fair amount of downloadable content since then, but that’s all the game will be getting.

In a blog post on the Age of Empires Online website (via Massively), the developer said that a small amount of content is still due for release in the next few weeks, but, after that, all content production will come to a halt. No more new features, no more new civilizations.

So why is the developer halting all content development for the Microsoft-published free-to-play RTS after under two years? In short, it comes down to expenses.

“Why no more content? Because 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,” the developer explains in the post.

“We can no longer afford to keep creating it. AOEO already has a very large amount of high-quality, hand-crafted entertainment, and adding more is no longer cost-effective.”

The news doesn’t sound particularly good, but the developer is quick to point out that this doesn’t mean that Age of Empires Online is coming to an end: All of the content will still be there, and there isn’t any threat of it being shut down.

Developer AOEO Trajan writes:

“This is a bittersweet announcement for me to make. While I wish that we had been able to add everything that we had wanted (especially a Roman civilization), I am very proud of the work that has been done to get to this point. Over the past year specifically we have made a significant amount of changes to the service, including highly complex changes like altering the business model entirely, while still adding a steady stream of high-quality content to the game itself. We have come a long way since August 2011. But now we have finished building the world of AOEO. We hope that you will join us in playing there for a long time to come.”