2/23/2012 - Official Announcement

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February 23rd Update
2/23/2012
by Kristin Reilly, Community Manager
This week we’re incredibly excited to finally reveal our plans for our Season Pass holders. For months everyone has heard that we’ll be taking care of our Season Pass subscribers, but we haven’t been able to go into detail. Enough of that! Soon is now here and it’s time to finally divulge our plans!
We’re very pleased to announce that we will be extending the Season Pass offer to a total of 2 years from August 16th 2011. This means everyone who purchased a Season Pass when the offer was available, will receive ALL the Civilization and Booster releases for Age of Empires Online through August 15th 2013 at no additional cost. This is our way of showing our appreciation to those users who went out on a limb when we launched and purchased the Season Pass.
Last week, we also mentioned we’d be announcing several changes that will be up and coming. Besides the extension of the Season Pass offer, we’re also going to be changing our pricing structure. This is just the first of many changes and additions that will be coming in the future.
Effective Friday February 17th, on the Xbox.com Marketplace and the Empire Bazaar, Civilizations are priced at $9.99, Bundles are $9.99, Boosters are $4.99, and Vanity packs remain at $4.99. The prices will be similarly adjusted for other regions. These are not sale prices, these are the new prices going forward for current and future Civs and boosters. While we don’t have any details on future bundles to announce in this week’s update, one of our long-term goals is to accompany future content updates with fresh, attractive bundle packages.
We’re also glad to confirm that the LIVE team has issued a fix for the disconnect error that was related to the message that pops up when friends sign into LIVE. Users should no longer see disconnects from the LIVE service related to the friend notification. And if you’ve turned these notifications off, feel free to turn them back on again!
You’ve seen us mention many times over the last 6 months that we’ve learned many lessons with Age of Empires Online and Free to Play. We’re eager to start applying some of what we’ve learned and continue to improve on everyone’s experience. We’re also very excited to be able to offer the extension of the Season Pass as well as this price drop. Again, thank you to everyone who’s stuck with us and offered up suggestions. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what the future holds.