After 25 Years, Age of Empires II Still Rules
push to talk #2 // feat. "the most committed fanbase" Microsoft has ever seen
Scuttlebutt and Slackery
The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.
Investor funds dry up… - These stats were unmissable on social this week, and Dmitriy Byshonkov has the cleanest breakdown. Investment volume was down 79% globally, and the situation was even worse in the US, where total funding decreased from $6.86 billion in 2022 to $0.93 billion in 2023, an 86% drop. (GameDev Reports)
…except for Marvel Snap Devs Second Dinner - It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for Second Dinner, of Marvel Snap fame, who this week announced a $100M Series B round led by Griffin Gaming Partners. For those keeping score, that’s bigger than any deal logged in all of 2023. They might have the Marvel IP, but they’re eatin’ like hobbits. Is a rebrand to Seven Course Meal in the cards? (Business Wire)
Layoff Apocalypse - This was a brutal week for layoffs in games and games-adjacent companies. The biggest headline-grabbers among gaming-focused companies were Unity (25% of workforce / 1,800 jobs), Twitch (35% / 500 jobs), and Discord (17% / 170 jobs). As if to underscore just how much this is a “broad tech sector” trend vs. purely a gaming one, Google this week also laid off somewhere around 1,000 employees.
27th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards Finalists Announced - Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 leads the pack in this year’s D.I.C.E. Awards with 9 nominations across all categories. Alan Wake 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and COCOON each have over half a dozen nods as well. But the real reason we’re all here is, of course, for the Omega Strikers nomination in the Online Game of the Year category. It feels unexpected and sort of baffling to see my own team’s game next to titanic franchises like Call of Duty and Street Fighter. See y’all in Vegas? (AIAS)
After 25 Years, Age of Empires II Still Rules
This week, the world’s most-skilled Age of Empires II players are gathered in an apartment in Berlin. Players and commentators have flown in from over 10 countries—representing North and South America, Europe, and Asia—to compete for a growing prize pool which now exceeds $60,000.
On Twitch alone, over 30,000 people are watching live.
This is a remarkable amount of attention for a game that was released 25 years ago. But thanks to a dedicated community of players and remarkable support from Microsoft, these players say, AoE2 has never had a brighter future.
Nili, the host for this week’s event, which is aptly called “Nili’s Apartment Cup V,” credits Microsoft’s “quite unique” approach to supporting AoE2, which includes releasing five new expansion packs in just the last few years. “If it wasn’t for them,” he tells me, “the game would be way smaller now.”
“I’ve worked on a lot of games… this was easily the most committed fanbase I’ve ever seen.” - Microsoft’s Will McCahill
“Microsoft has been amazing,” says Hera, one of the most decorated competitive AoE2 players in recent years. “Microsoft is essential for the game, without them we would be without major funding for events, and we wouldn’t have all the amazing changes and updates that are coming our way.”
If you’ve ever worked on video games—particularly competitive games—you know how hard it is to earn praise like this from players.
So what’s the deal? Why is the world’s most valuable corporation releasing new content for a game released last millennium? And more importantly, why is it working?
To find out, I spoke with Microsoft.
Microsoft Greenlights a Passion Project
Age of Empires series Director of Business (and self-described “glorified accountant”) Will McCahill has been an Age superfan for majority of his life. “I’ve been playing Age 2 since Christmas 1999, so obviously this is a dream job,” he says.
“Growing up I thought I was pretty good at the game. I used to wake up early before school to get in some singleplayer practice, regularly stomped my cousins and friends at LAN parties, and was pretty sure I was the best Age 2 player around. When the HD version came out in 2013, I got my first taste of ranked multiplayer and a healthy dose of humility.”
As McCahill tells it, there were a few dark years for Age of Empires II, when Microsoft didn’t support the game directly. Zone, its multiplayer service, was shut down. Players, including McCahill, had to find new ways to play.
“Most of us retreated to LAN parties and single-player,” McCahill says, “but a few went off and built replacement services which are responsible for a lot of the success, especially eSports success, that we have today. Gameranger, Voobly, Garena, most of the pros at NAC, and even Forgotten Empires carried the torch in that era.”
About eight years ago, says McCahill, a team at Microsoft got the greenlight to investigate rebuilding the Age of Empires franchise.
“We knew there were fan-supported versions of the game, but after some research we found about 20 different platforms, mostly LAN emulators, being used for AoE2 multiplayer,” he says. “I’ve worked on a lot of games… this was easily the most committed fanbase I’ve ever seen.”
The strategy from there, McCahill says, seemed simple: “Build the best version of Age of Empires II, unite the community, and get the word out. But there were thousands of quality-of-life updates that different AoE2 communities had built for themselves. Just to be at feature parity for launch took multiple dev teams a few years and we ended up hiring a lot of the community developers because they were so good. One team that is now our dev partner, CaptureAge, built their own game renderer just to have a better spectator mode for eSports.”
This week’s tournament in Berlin, NAC5, is using that same tech right now to stream to around 30,000 people.
An Admittedly Convoluted History of Age
Let’s talk about how we got to this point. If you only count mainline series releases and expansion packs (not ports), there have been 39 major releases in the Age of Empires series over the last 25 years.
To make more sense of the timeline, here are the key moments:
October 13, 1997 - The original Age of Empires game is released, with an expansion pack following a year later.
September 27, 1999 - Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings is released. It is developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft.
August 25, 2000 - Age of Empires II: The Conquerors expansion pack is released. The expansion pack nearly doubles the number of single-player campaigns and playable civilizations.
October 18, 2005 - Age of Empires III is released. Two expansion packs followed.
August 16, 2011 - Age of Empires Online is released. It’s a free-to-play game developed by Robot Entertainment and Gas Powered Games.
January 3, 2013 - Microsoft announces that development on Age of Empires Online will cease. Servers are closed the following year.
April 9, 2013 - Age of Empires II: HD Edition is released. It features higher-resolution graphics, support for widescreen, and multiplayer support via Steam. Three official expansion packs followed, concluding with Age of Empires II: Rise of the Rajas in 2016.
February 19, 2018 - The original Age of Empires game is re-released with a “Definitive Edition,” first exclusively on the Windows Store, and later on Steam.
June 2019 - World's Edge Studio, LLC is established as a subsidiary of Xbox Game Studios. It is tasked with overseeing the Age of Empires franchise.
November 14, 2019 - Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is released. It is developed by Forgotten Empires in collaboration with World’s Edge, with additional work by Tantalus Media and Wicked Witch and features all previously-released AoE2 content. Five expansion followed, the most recent of which is The Mountain Royals, released on October 31, 2023.
October 15, 2020 - Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition is released. Three expansion packs have since followed, with the latest being in 2022.
October 28, 2021 - Age of Empires IV is released. Two expansions have followed, including some content delivered as free updates.
In total, Age of Empires II has been remastered twice with nine expansion packs released over 25 years. About half of its expansion packs have come out in the 2020s.
Meanwhile, in Berlin
At this week’s tournament in Berlin, one of the first things that jumps out about the AoE2 competitors is how much everyone seems to like each other.
Although games get intense, every series I’ve watched has ended with smiles and embraces between the competitors.
When I asked Canadian pro player Hera about an upcoming match against legendary player TheViper, he was effusive in his praise of his rival:
“The match against Viper is always the most fierce one for me,” Hera says. “I think he’s the most well-rounded player out there, and he’s the GOAT of AoE2, so there’s a lot at stake whenever we play. I also love his playstyle. I think its a very balanced and exciting one, so the games between us are always great for us and the viewers.”
“NAC5 is a celebration of everything the AoE2 pro scene brings to the table,” popular YouTuber T90Official says, “The best players in the world are here, the best casters are here, and it brings a family vibe where we can all hang out and get to know each other in between games.”
The aforementioned “GOAT” player TheViper agrees. “It’s a family at this point,” he says. And NAC is, according to him, the most enjoyable AoE2 event for this very reason. “Just hanging around with all the casters and players, having a great time and topping that off with some high level Age of Empires is just an amazing experience.”
Peruvian pro player Hearttt says that the in-person format of NAC make it unique in the space: “Putting every player and caster in the same house makes for very fun situations and a different atmosphere than any other tournament.”
Everyone I spoke with agrees that Age of Empires II wouldn’t continue to be successful without the enterprising players that have stuck by the game for decades and continued to support it with tournaments like NAC5.
“I largely attribute my love of gaming to Age of Empires,” says James “Dash Patterson, a professional commentator known globally to League of Legends esports fans who has joined the casting couch in Berlin for NAC5. “While I had played games before AoE2, there was something so captivating about it and its core mechanics.”
Greg Street, one of the original designers on Age of Empires II (and with many games credits besides) says that some of those core mechanics and early design decisions continue to hold up: “We always gave a lot of attention to how the game felt to watch whether it was your game or as a spectator,” Street says. “The villagers are pretty charming when hoeing or bringing back a fish. The knights look regal. The windmills are pretty. It’s a world you wouldn’t mind spending time in despite all the carnage going on.”
Pro Player Wishlists for Future AoE2 Content Updates
We asked pros and casters how they’d like to see the game continue to evolve:
”I think it would be great for the game to have some of the maps seen in tournaments be on the ranked ladder. I'd also love to see new campaigns with great storylines be introduced as DLCs. There's so much history I feel there's a lot of potential there.” - T90Official
“Making the game free to play would be a huge plus to attract new players, and can give us a big surge of new faces trying out the game. I also think that advertising tournaments on the home page to make existing players more invested is a solid strategy.” - Hera
What’s next for Age of Empires II esports?
As for the future of the game more generally, both players and the dev team have high hopes. According to Microsoft’s McCahill, the game is regularly breaking its all-time records for active players, and “The competitive scene grew last year by 10-20% depending on the metric you look at despite it being a down year for streaming in general.”
Early 2024 brings two big AoE2 tournaments to watch for:
NAC5: The finals rounds of NAC5 continue to run on Nili’s Twitch channel throughout this weekend, and will wrap up with a grand finals match this Sunday, Jan 14th.
HIDDEN CUP V: From February 25–March 3 there will also be the return of one of the biggest tournament series in the history of the game: Hidden Cup V, hosted by popular YouTuber T90Official, which pits the world’s top players against each other using completely anonymized accounts. T90Official has high hopes for viewership: “I'm hoping to hit 100k concurrent viewers but I think that is going to be an extremely lofty goal,” he says. “We'll see!”
Players share in McCahill’s enthusiasm: “The game is on a great trajectory at the moment,” says T90Official, “as more and more people are realizing it's still alive and thriving more than ever.”
“I would love for AoE2 to hit the same level as the popular esports like League of Legends,” says Hera. “Sold out arenas, huge tournaments and big prizepools… those are all dreams that seem possible in the not so distant future!”
Regardless of what the future holds, players and casters agree that 2024 is already a watershed year for Age of Empires II. James “Dash” Patterson says that “without a doubt,” the current landscape of AoE2 is the most competitive it’s ever been.
And, says Dash, this weekend’s finals matchup will be a must-watch.
“We already have the GOAT of Age (TheViper) and the most recently dominant player in the scene (Hera) on a collision course to meet in the semi-finals. This comes after the group stage alone delivered us one of the best series in AoE2 history (between Hera and Tatoh),” Dash says, with a possibility for a rematch in the finals.
“If you want to see what 25 years of iteration on a classic competitive game looks like, then these are matchups you don’t want to miss.”
Great article, but exclusion Age of Mythology from history is a crime)
Thanks so much for writing this Ryan. 2 editions in and I already can't wait for the next one.