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

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?