Age of Empires Online is free to play with premium expansion packs
One of Robot Entertainment’s designers, Jerome Jones has commented in the press about the Age of Empires buisness model. Age of Empires Online will be available for free come Spring 2011 via the Games for Windows Live Platform. There will also be premium content to purchase separately but this content will be fully featured content and not just micro transaction for small items. Instead the premium content will be stuff like whole new civilisations with a whole set of brand new quests, similar to the size of previous expansion packs as previous games in the Age of Empires series. Jerome speaks to VG247 as follows:
“So it would be like paying for an expansion pack. … You won’t buy one thing at a time. You might buy an entire civ or another region with a bunch of quests in it”