Age of Empires Online development halted

Microsoft and developers Gas Powered Games have said that new content will no longer be developed for free to play online strategy title Age of Empires Online.

"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. This is a bittersweet announcement for me to make," said executive producer Kevin Perry via [GI].

While the game will continue to operate, no new content will be created and similarly, the bug-fixing process will also become slower. In essence, the development studio will move on and leave Microsoft to run the day-to-day operations and user support.

"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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