A new interview courtesy of German site GameStar reveals why the upcoming remaster of classic RTS title, Age of Empires Definitive Edition, is staying exclusive to the Windows Store – It’s so you can play with your friends.
GameStar interviewed Microsoft’s head of production for global publishing, Jorg Neumann about the title and its exclusivity to the Microsoft Store platform, instead of bringing it to the far more popular Steam platform. Microsoft has been more open to publishing on Valve’s client in recent years. But in the interview, seen below, Neumann speaks about how the big concern was keeping the player base together on Xbox Live.
“This may be a misunderstanding, the platform is where people play, and people play in the social spaces of Xbox Live, which means that if Xbox Live exists somewhere, we can get a game out there.” Unfortunately, there is no solution to doing this on Steam, but it depends less on us than on other people,“ Neumann stated.
“There are certain things that are important to us, and in multiplayer games, we want to make sure our fans can play together, which is not okay if one man buys the game in one store and another in the other, and then two friends For some strange reason, we can not play together, we’re totally against it, and our only way to make sure of that is Xbox Live,“ Neumann further explained.
Neumann did offer some glimmer of hope, though he does wash his hands of the situation by saying that it depends less on them than on Valve working with them to get Xbox Live linked to the service. Age of Empires Definitive Edition will release on Windows 10 PC on February 20.
