The End of an Age: Microsoft shuts down Age of Empires Online

Michael Dunaway
By Michael Dunaway, News Editor Posted:
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AgeofEmpiresOnlineSHutdown

Age of Empires Online has shutdown its servers for good. Originally developed by Robot Entertainment (later Gas Powered Games), the RTS launched in 2011 and underwent several content additions before Microsoft announced in January of 2013 it was halting all further developed on the title. Later that year Microsoft formally announced the game would shutdown completely on July 1st and cited upkeep costs as the reason.

A blog post on the Age of Empires website written by AoEO Community Manager Garmonbonzia81, recaps a bit of the history behind Age of Empires Online while reflecting on some of the decisions the team made stating, "we were ambitious and risky with AOEO in a number of respects; some of these experiments worked, and some did not".

A final statistics image shows Age of Empires Online enjoyed over half a billion completed single player quests with players earning over two billion EP. Interestingly, the number of multiplayer and arena matches played were much lower with the two achieving fifteen million combined.

Fifteen million is still quite a lot of multiplayer matches played (around 16000 a day roughly) and single player quests can sometimes be completed much faster, however its abundantly clear most of the playerbase spent their time doing PvE.

Are you a fan of the Age of Empire series? What did you think about Age of Empires Online?

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About the Author

Michael Dunaway
Michael Dunaway, News Editor

Michael Dunaway has been part of the MMOBomb team for years and has covered practically every major Free-to-Play MMO title since 2009.

More Stories by Michael Dunaway

Discussion (13)

corvo 9 years ago
where and how i can play age of empires ? both online or not ....i have a mac ! than you !
ATA47 9 years ago
All my empire points... gone... why microsoft.. why ;~;
Apple Sauce 9 years ago
I remember when the game first came out and i tried it out, did some quests and thought "Hey! Let's try some PvP!" so i queued up was lvl 2 or something (just started yeah) and i got matched against a maxed level player because he bought the pack that gave him max level with the purchasable only race. Needless to say while i had a bunch of villagers he already had a army that overpowered me within minutes of the game starting.
Trenix 9 years ago
I remember I was so excited about this game and looked into some videos where the developers were talking about how the free to play model is the future and such. Clearly they didn't know how it worked.
vagisil 9 years ago
What did you expect was going to happen when you put up a pay wall.
zakena 9 years ago
agreed this game was a demo lol!
Todoran 9 years ago
bye AOEO and please NEVER COME BACK!
hardmaze 9 years ago
if it was 100% free to play it would be one of my favorite games, it was just like demo - for free players.... so screw this game
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Mystika 9 years ago
Favourite title is still AoE2 (I've got the CD version as well as the Steam one, though I've yet to try out the latter). AoE3 is also quite nice (looks great graphically and naval battles are pretty sweet although overall gameplay wise, I prefer AoE2 still). I also enjoyed AoE1 and AoM for the time I played them.

On the other hand, I never really tried AoEO due to all their paywalls early on. Although they dropped them later, it was too late for me by the time they did it as I had moved on from the series.

I do hope that with all the old AoE games getting HD/Enhanced versions, that we might see an AoE4 sometime down the line.

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