All empires to die July 1st as Age of Empires Online gets unplugged

It is a genuinely entertaining and well made game, but Microsoft apparently does not feel it makes enough profit.   Therefore,  on July 1st Age of Empires Online is being terminated.

It is a sad end to this editon of the Age of Empires franchise.  While previous editions from over a decage ago are still getting upgrades and modernized (i.e Age of Empires 2 and 3),  Age of Empires Online embraced the free-to-play, on-line only business model.   Without a sufficient stream of stable income to support its servers,  the game carried too much overhead to justify continued support.

For gamers, this is the big risk in supporting online-only games. Unlike a single-player game, an online version incurs constant overhead for its developer.   Every additional player adds to the overhead and bandwidth costs, yet each player may not necessarily make any substantial in-game purchases.

I wish Age of Empires Online could have at least been ported to a non-online platform before being euthanized.   It was an enjoyable and more lighthearted take on the traditional empire-building genre.

RIP Age of Empires Online
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Walmart sucks

I needed an adapter for my laptop. It was the final piece necessary to play my PC games on my big new glorious 70 inch 3D LED television.  Normally I just get such things from Amazon but I was feeling impatient and wanted it NOW. I look up the thing on Walmart's site and it happens to be in stock at my local store for $20.  I head on over, find it, and check out when I notice the receipt says $30.  I go to the service desk and tell them to check the price because online it was $20.  The clerk tells me that is the online price and he cannot change the local price.  I asked him why if I buy it online and select the pick-up-at-store option the exact thing costs $20, but when I take it off the shelf myself it is $30. He tells me that is just the way it is.  I asked him if I could just borrow his computer to pay for it on the web and specify store-pick-up, whereby he could then give me the adapter.  He said yes I could do that, but it would take a couple hours to fulfill the order.  At this point, I decided that Walmart doesn't deserve to be able to sell this thing and I didn't really need it today anyway.

My adapter will now arrive Tuesday from Amazon at a cost of $12.