Premature death of Rise of Nations...?

After talking with a few folks in the lobbies of Room 9 and Room 8, I got the distinct impression that not a few people believe that RoN is pretty much finished, that Big Huge Games is going to move on to something else.  The lack of patches or updates stands as silent testimony to this possibility.

StarCraft is still one of the most popular games being played, often with more people concurrently online than the entire population of any of the top ten MMORPGs.  And StarCraft is several years old, and many people probably cut their teeth on it in the RTS genre.  But, Blizzard has shown much more support for their games (Diablo, WarCraft, StarCraft) than it seems BHG does to RoN.

While I personally don't believe that RoN is going anywhere soon, there are a few things that concern me.  There were 176 people who signed up for Extended Hostilities, yet many did not show up for their matches.  I had three byes, before playing my one game... Are people quitting the game?  Or was the fact that signups started one month before the tournament took place?

And, there's a large, glaring bug in RoN:T&P that has not been addressed yet, as far as I can tell, that of the Red Fort causing Out of Sync errors.

I'm going to pay much more attention to the news coming out of BHG, to see if I can sniff out what the current direction RoN is taking, whether it's done and they are looking for a new game, or maybe if we'll see something in the next six months or so...

Keep on Rising!