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Comment by asimuvPR | Hacker News Reader

You and me, friend. Whatever happened to the MS division that published those games?

Well, the original division was shuttered. But Microsoft "remastered" AoE2 and sold 3 million (!!) copies. It's their most popular game on Steam. http://steamspy.com/dev/Microsoft+Studios

Unfortunately, they're driving the franchise into the ground with bugs and no support. :( If anyone at Microsoft reads this... help us!

MS shuttered the studio in 2009. You are going to be waiting a long time.

Microsoft Studios is still active, however, Ensemble Studios who developed Age of Empires was closed in 2009. Then you have Skybox Labs who built "HD" versions of some of their games.

Some guys from Ensemble has since formed Robot Entertainment, released e.g. AoE Online, and is supposedly (?) using Microsoft as publisher once again but I don't think they're part of Microsoft Studios anymore. AoE Online was shut down in 2014 though. :/

I wonder if those games didn't make money, or just didn't make enough money. I'm thinking AoEs and Flight Sim.

RTS genre in general is on decline. Last good RTS was Starcraft 2. It is all caused by the shift to MOBA games...

Also there is huge challenge to create playable RTS game with current popular monetization strategies - in game purchases

AoE would be awful with in-game purchases. I'd rather play an old version on a VM than go through that experience.

Rise of Nations 2

Oh yeah, totally! Surprised there hasn't been, thought it was a hit (for an RTS, that is)

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