Creating more civilizations wouldn’t be cost-effective
Bit of disappointing news for those of you actively playing Age of Empires Online, but nothing can last forever. Excluding some finished content scheduled to hit in the next few weeks, Gas Powered Games won’t be adding anything else to this free-to-play title.
In a rather candid blog post, it is stressed that the game will continue to exist and actual community and customer support will continue. While bug fixes and balancing may still happen, expect this process to be “slower and, frankly, more difficult for the team. Some may, in fact, be unfixable. We will be watching carefully in case any critical bugs appear.”
The reason Gas Powered Games has ceased creating further content is an understandable one: “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. AOEO already has a very large amount of high-quality, hand-crafted entertainment, and adding more is no longer cost-effective.”
Age of Empires Online ending new content production as it’s “no longer cost-effective” [PC Gamer]