The unannounced project at World’s Edge, the studio Microsoft built to look after Age of Empires, has been scrapped as the team moves under Activision. Word of it came from the staff themselves, posting on LinkedIn after they were told their jobs had gone. Roughly half the studio went with the project, the creative director included. Microsoft has said nothing about what the game was, so the whole story currently rests on two LinkedIn posts and a restructuring announced four days earlier.
At a glance
Senior software engineer Andrew Martz wrote on LinkedIn that the studio’s next project has been shelved.
World’s Edge has lost close to half its staff in the move under Activision.
Microsoft is keeping the title and the genre to itself, and Age of Empires still has no announced sequel.
The cancellation surfaced through LinkedIn posts
On Thursday 24 September, Insider Gaming gathered several LinkedIn posts written by World’s Edge staff, first spotted by the IdleSloth account. Andrew Martz, a senior software engineer at the studio, wrote that “our next project” had been shelved, and tied that decision straight to the studio’s move under Activision.
Adam Isgreen, creative director at World’s Edge, is among those made redundant. His own post mentions “some great plans for what’s next”, which mostly tells you those plans will now happen somewhere else. Neither man named the project.
As things stand, it was the studio that broke this story about itself. Microsoft’s 22 September statement covered the studio reshuffle and left out any mention of cancelled work, and nothing has been added since. Two posts from former employees are all anyone has, which puts a hard limit on what can fairly be said about the game.
Age of Empires now sits behind a half-sized studio
Of everything in this affair, the staffing figure is the firmest part. World’s Edge walks into next week with about half the team it had last week. The cuts belong to the 3,200 job losses Xbox set out in July, 1,600 of which landed at the initial announcement, and more are expected before the year closes.
How much that costs the series depends on the way World’s Edge actually works. It produces and oversees rather than writing every line itself: the Steam page for Age of Empires IV: Anniversary Edition credits World’s Edge alongside Relic Entertainment, Forgotten Empires and Climax Studios. That arrangement leans on an internal team big enough to hold the whole thing together and keep its partners pointed in the same direction.
Halving that team bites hardest on starting something new. Age of Empires IV keeps getting updates, Forgotten Empires keeps feeding Age of Empires II, and there is no sign today that either pipeline stops.
Managing outside studios takes producers, lead designers and people who carry the technical history of a twenty-year-old series in their heads. Those are months of hiring to rebuild, and the studio lost them in the same week it changed owners. The partner studios themselves are the open question, since their work under World’s Edge needs someone inside holding the design calls, and nobody has said what the change of ownership means for those contracts.
Rare moved under Activision on the same day, carrying its own catalogue, which shows the shake-up reaches well past Age of Empires. Both studios now sit with a publisher whose public schedule revolves around a different genre entirely. Put simply, the games stay alive while the roadmap empties out, because Age of Empires has no next entry on the board and the studio meant to build it has just been cut down.
What the Activision move leaves hanging for real-time strategy
The 22 September reshuffle put World’s Edge and Rare under Activision, in the same sweep that handed the next Halo to a purpose-built team. We went through those studio moves in our report on the 268 roles cut and Halo’s move to Activision.
Activision is the Call of Duty publisher, organised around one annual shooter and the support studios that feed it. Real-time strategy has no recent precedent there, and nobody at Microsoft has explained how a demanding niche genre slots into that machine. The publisher’s release board carries nothing of the sort at present.
Looked at purely as business, the move reads differently again. Real-time strategy sells steadily rather than spectacularly, and it leans on long tails, expansions and competitive communities that stay for years. A publisher measured on quarterly shooter revenue judges that profile differently from a platform holder counting subscriptions, which is the shift Age of Empires has just been handed.
Some of what has been written around this is inference, and worth flagging as such. Insider Gaming describes the shelved project as “almost certainly” a real-time strategy game, with nothing public to pin that down. So the genre belongs to guesswork, while the cancellation itself is on the record.
If Activision wants Age of Empires to grow, a job listing or an announcement will surface over the coming months, and that one signal will settle it. Without it, the series becomes a name that gets maintained rather than developed.
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