And if not free multiplayer to be a great game that was moderately close to finished upon release.Aoe4 has more ongoing matches running, last time i checked it was x2.5 the numbers than aoe2, i like to use the ongoing matches numbers cause they are trustworthy, it doesn't count guys that left the game open or are just doing SP stuff, when you use those numbers from players that actually have an impact in the multiplayer then those 13k players you see on steam+the guys on the microsoft store are just in real numbers something like 4k players active with a peak of 6k on weekends, if aoe2-net adds a way to count users playing then we could talk about real numbers of active players and stop using those inflated numbers that don't help at all in the MP scene.
But yeah aoe4 hasn't been really successful, if you remove the big names streaming with their audience, you will find that aoe4 streams in the majority have 1 viewer average, meaning that the game hasn't created interested consumers browsing for its content, sometimes the big numbers are held by one single sc2 streamer.
As for the playerbase, their numbers aren't really big but well but lets be fair lets wait until 1 month and then verify the data 2 months later.
But compared to their big brothers it seems aoe4is being overshadowed by forza horizon 5 and the upcoming halo infinite which already has much bigger numbers, like i said several months ago aoe4 needed a free multiplayer to succeed.