Aug 21 2010
Age of Empires Online
Just to see what the old Ensemble guys were up to nowadays I decided to check out Bonfire Studios and Robot Entertainment and I was surprised to learn that Age of Empires Online was announced just this past week.
I’m definitely intrigued. I miss the ’90s. There were some great strategy games. Whatever happened to them? Sigh…
Wow, that’s interesting. Seems like it will be similar to what EA is doing with some free-to-play games. Microsoft is going to do the same thing now?
I’m a bit surprised that they’re making free-to-play games, since they shut down the game studios they bought because they didn’t make enough money. Very unexpected move by them.
They’re accepting Beta applications, so I’ll give it a shot. We’ll see what happens.
This won’t be entirely free. I don’t know what EA is doing. I suspect there will be either a subscription fee or they’ll nickle and dime you for new quests, new civilizations, new territories to conquer, etc. They’ll make money.
You’re right. They will make money somehow. Most subscription-based games don’t do so well, though, with the exception of World of Warcraft. I did notice that in the game info, they only list a few units, but there are more shown in the screenshots. Possibly some civilizations, technologies, or certain units might be paid for. A clue to that could be that they’re tying the Games for Windows Live platform with it.
EA has Battlefield Heroes and Need for Speed World, for example. You can play for free, but there are some limitations.