Dear Microsoft, let’s open source Age of Empires II

tl;dr: game is broken but still popular, my suggestion for fixing it and making more money in the process is to open source

First, as a Microsoft alum, I could not be prouder of the work you’ve done recently:

• You took .NET open source and cross-platform
• You launched a free open source cross-platform code editor
• You open sourced the advanced Edge JavaScript engine

Those have all been fantastic, effective, and widely celebrated moves. I’m hoping you’ll listen to my proposal for a new, valuable chapter of this movement: open sourcing Age of Empires II. I’ll attempt to lay out in this post why Microsoft needs to do something, and how open sourcing the game is a straightforward path to positive press and increased profits.

Does anyone still care about Age of Empires?

If you haven’t heard about AoE II lately, you may be thinking, “who cares about a 16-year-old game?” So, let’s review quickly!

• “AoE II HD”, the remastered version of the original, is Microsoft Studio’s most popular release on Steam with over 3 million sales (even blowing away acclaimed modern titles like Mark of the Ninja and Dust: An Elysian Tail).
• There are are generally tens of thousands of concurrent players. There are also professional matches viewed by thousands of spectators every weekend on Twitch and YouTube.
• In addition to the already massive worldwide brand recognition, popular YouTube channels like ZeroEmpires and Resonance22 constantly introduce the game to new players (including myself, just last year).

Why open source?

Unfortunately, despite the overwhelming popularity of the remastered edition on Steam, “mistakes were made.” The project was bold and brilliant, but the difficult rewriting of the game engine for Steam compatibility resulted in what remains a mess of an experience for users to this day. The remaining developers are mired down trying to fix bugs.

The original team on the Microsoft side even seems to have been siphoned away, leaving next to no hope for 3 million players. Due to numerous serious bugs, the community’s opinions are the depressing things you used to hear about Old Microsoft (a la IE6): “shoddy”, “money grab”, “M$”, etc.

Casual players are quitting because of the problems, and thousands of serious players are instead playing (often pirated) copies of the 2000-era binary with a community-written patch on their own platform. Either way, the association with one of your most beloved brands is being deeply tarnished.

But these problems stemmed from Old Microsoft thinking. The New Microsoft can not only salvage the situation, but turn it into a massive win by open sourcing the game.

Open sourcing would be low risk, high reward

• Increase long-term profitability: Microsoft is a services company now. Satya swears by it, and it’s working. Continually releasing an official, signed version for Steam multiplayer will result in continued profit. Already over 3 million people have purchased the Steam version, despite a superior version being easily available for free through unofficial channels online. People will pay for and use convenient, official services.
• Enormous amount of good press and good will: the three all-time most popular Hacker News posts about Microsoft were open sourcing announcements. Combine that sentiment with one of the most beloved game franchises in history, and it’s a recipe for mass appreciation across key demographics in both tech and gaming communities. An unofficial open source port of AoE II that doesn’t even work yet has an amazing 5,000+ stars on GitHub — people want to see this.
• Fix the huge list of bugs, other game improvements, and cross-platform compatibility: the community will do these for free. They already reverse engineered and improved the original binary to a much higher standard than the official “remastered” HD edition, even without source access!
• Saving money: since the community is capable of doing most of the maintenance, all that is required from Microsoft will be release management (Skybox can continue to lead this) and limited creative direction (the Forgotten Empires vendor team is doing a fantastic job of this already). You could actually reduce the amount of resources currently put towards the game while reaping all of the rewards laid out above.
• Future-proof strategy: when OpenAge, the modern cross-platform and open-source engine surpasses the official engine, all Microsoft needs to do is adopt it as the new official engine going forward. All of the amazing new features being worked on as part of OpenAge could be made available with Microsoft-owned original assets as part of a beautiful, modern release.

Next steps

You can be the one to pick this up and make it happen! You would be a hero to both the large, active AoE2 community and at home in Microsoft for scoring a huge win. Share this with your manager and peers in MS and attach your thoughts. I truly think this would be a winning move aligned with the goals Satya lays out for Microsoft.

If you have any questions about the game, its current situation, or what I see as its exciting potential for Microsoft I’m happy to meet for coffee on campus — I live in Redmond. charles.offenbacher@gmail.com