From what I’ve seen, that doesn’t seem to be true. The Definitive Edition seems to have been extremely successful and most of the pros and fans did indeed convert over to it.

Hopefully there’ll be a good modding community that the community of aoe3 fans can coalesce around to continue patching it, like WoL did pre-DE.

There’s an enormous Battle for Middle Earth overhaul mod that released last year.

There’s also an entirely unrelated fan attempt to remake BFME2 which I’m personally convinced is never going to see the light of day.

Since 3 DE came out in 2020, they’ve already released 4 noteworthy DLC (plus some cosmetics):

• United States civ
• Mexican civ
• Ethiopians and Hausa civs
• Italian and Maltese civs

So this would have been the 5th expansion since the release of DE.

It’s never been my personal favourite in the franchise, but it’s still a game I have a lot of fondness for, and seeing it shunted off to the side is kinda sad.

Yeah? I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. I’m saying it’s bullshit to say a developer has done a crap job when one browser doesn’t implement a web standard that is perfect tailor-made for their site’s use case.

That’s not necessarily true. Circa 2016–17 I frequented a website that worked in Chrome but not Firefox. This was due to Firefox at the time not implementing web standards that Chrome did. Firefox only got around to it in 2019. So naturally, the developer of the site was telling people to use Chrome.

Oh, so they have. I dunno what that means precisely. I think I saw they stopped selling the old AoE3 version, but last I checked AoM EE and AoE2HD were still for sale, but deliberately greyed out and renamed to make it clearer that they’re the old versions. Not sure if they’re still for sale or not as of now.

I don’t play a lot of big budget games where this kind of thing tends to happen. Probably the worst experience I’ve had has been thanks to confusion caused by multiple remasters.

Age of Empires 2 released in 1999 with an expansion in 2000. It was rereleased in 2013 as the HD Edition on Steam.

Then it was rereleased again as the Definitive Edition in 2019.

And I have seen people get confused and buy the HD version when they meant to get DE. Not quite the same as the OP because it’s not caused by malicious anti-consumer bullshit. But that’s the closest I’ve been.

Google+ was better. The concept of “circles” being the primary way of interacting with people was ingenious and far better represents how real people interact. My fencing friends are not the same as my RPG friends who are not the same as my family.

Facebook adopted this with “lists”, but they’re not treated as the core part of the experience that G+'s Circles were, so they don’t get used.

And changing priorities and scope.