Microsoft has stopped the updates for Age of Empires Online because they’re too costly. Remember the days when the series was revered among many? What happened that people have lost interest in these games? Maybe it is because of Age of Empires 3 and its change in direction, or simply because strategy games don’t really have a big market right now.

Robot Entertainment was working on the game and then gave the reigns to Gas Powered games, which also kind of indicates the problems the publisher faced while trying to make a big profit out of the game.

Here’s what executive producer Kevin “Trajan” Perry wrote on their blog (Via GamesIndustry.Biz)

“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,” he said.

“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 civilisation), 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.”

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Age of Empires will be free-to-play once the summer update launches after 5-7 weeks. You don’t have to pay for civilizations, booster packs and vanity items at the store and can unlock them all by simply playing the game and earning Empire Points.

If you have any existing Empire Points it will be converted into coin. Any new points bought will be associated with the account. They have also mentioned that the game will not be pay-to-win.

“No. We have a separate PVP mode, called Champion mode, in which no gear or consumables are allowed. We will not change that. Players will only compete against each other with their skill, not their wallet or their spare time,” read the AoE Online page.

“We are not making changes to the game’s difficulty or pacing to make you spend cash on EPs. In fact, in the Spring Update we just made it faster for everyone to level. Now, there is nothing we can really demonstrate to prove this one way or the other. But please believe that we understand that making the game experience less fun until you pay is a terrible mistake.”