Microsoft to take over Age Community

Unfortunately, the time as come for Robot Entertainment so sign off on Age Community and hand over day to day support for community operations to Microsoft Games Studios. The transition starts today, with Ryz0n taking the reins as community support moderator. Ryzon commented:

The folks here at MGS are transitioning into supporting the AOE community.  Along those lines, I’ll be working on forum administration, account support, and generally keeping everything running as well as possible.  Our goal, as we move through the transition period, is to make the user experience change very little and have the service chug along without any issues into the foreseeable future. I’ll be coming up to speed and working with Robot on the community, server issues, and support for the titles.

The writing has been on the wall for Age Community being migrated to Microsoft since the Robot Entertainment lead Halo Wars community was transitioned and then shut down by Microsoft. Similarly the upcoming Age of Empires Online is being handled by Microsoft and not Robot Entertainment’s community team. With the news that Age Community is now being taken over by Microsoft this means that Robot is no longer handling any of Ensemble’s communities, despite having worked on patches and with many of the bot’s being the original developers of those games.

Presumably the reason behind the decision could be due to Microsoft’s reluctance to have outside developers, such as Robot Entertainment managing communities for games which Microsoft owns the rights too. Previously this would have been a non issue under Ensemble Studios being part of Microsoft but with Robot now on the outside as a third party things are not so clear. Currently there is no official word on why Robot is not managing any of the Age of Empires communities going forward.

Hopefully we will see Robot Entertainment spring back into action with a super new community website for its Game 2.0 project which may make some kind of appearance at PAX East.

One can only hope Microsoft do a better job with Age Community than the new defunct HaloWars.com.

For more details and discussion check out the thread on Age Community: http://forum.agecommunity.com/forums/thread/905469.aspx