Age of Empires Online content development halted

Gas Powered Games a stop to ongoing content development for free-to-play strategy title Age of Empires Online, citing expense.

In a post on the social effort's blog, Microsoft said Age of Empires Online has "finished its development phase, and now moves on into its support phase".

"There is a small amount of content still in the pipeline that will be released in the next few weeks, but that is all. No new features will be added. Most significantly, no new civilizations will be released; the six existing ones are the complete and final set," it noted.

Nothing else should change for players; Microsoft will continue to offer support, which can be considered complete once remaining content releases occur.

Although many games of this kind continue content drops throughout their lifetime, Microsoft says that's not cost-effective for Age of Empires Online.

"Creating top-tier content, as we have been for the last year and a half, is very expensive - too expensive to maintain for long, as it turns out. We can no longer afford to keep creating it. AOEO already has a very large amount of high-quality, hand-crafted entertainment, and adding more is no longer cost-effective," the post added.

Age of Empires Online's coming of age began to look likely last month when developer Gas Powered Games launched a mysterious countdown timer for something called Project W, suggesting it was ready to move onto a new title.

The countdown ends on January 14.

Thanks, Massively.