So, as many of you, I am really happy to see AoE grow so much in the last years. Many old legends coming back, big companies sponsoring tournaments, microsoft giving support to the game and servers, twitch and youtube viewers at very high levels, etc. I'm enjoying the game more than ever.
However, I'm starting to think that this growth is limited from an economic point of view. Selling game copies on Steam might be enough income at the beginning, but once the amount of downloads starts going down, you need another source of income to keep high levels of technical support, game updates, sponsor tournaments, etc. We can't pretend a company to lose money on a game just because we love it.
So my suggestion is that we add the concept of selling "skins" that already exists in many other games. They could work like visual mods that do not affect gameplay in anyway. I'm not going in detail into this, there are many ways to implement it, I just wanted to introduce the idea.
I don´t want to go back to the dark age, when we were happy to have a USD 100 tournament, or rely on a random rich guy to donate USD 500. I don´t want to rely on volunteers to release a new patch, or fix a bug in a map. I want these people to get paid properly. Being a 20 year old game, I believe that we can and we should learn from our mistakes.
Thanks for reading, I will be happy to read your opinions on this
However, I'm starting to think that this growth is limited from an economic point of view. Selling game copies on Steam might be enough income at the beginning, but once the amount of downloads starts going down, you need another source of income to keep high levels of technical support, game updates, sponsor tournaments, etc. We can't pretend a company to lose money on a game just because we love it.
So my suggestion is that we add the concept of selling "skins" that already exists in many other games. They could work like visual mods that do not affect gameplay in anyway. I'm not going in detail into this, there are many ways to implement it, I just wanted to introduce the idea.
I don´t want to go back to the dark age, when we were happy to have a USD 100 tournament, or rely on a random rich guy to donate USD 500. I don´t want to rely on volunteers to release a new patch, or fix a bug in a map. I want these people to get paid properly. Being a 20 year old game, I believe that we can and we should learn from our mistakes.
Thanks for reading, I will be happy to read your opinions on this