Microsoft’s Latest Round Of Layoffs May Have Killed A Brand New Age Of Empires Game

Piecing together comments from victims of Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs, it seems that there we may have been due to see a new Age of Empires game. Not any more, however, given the gutting of internal studio World’s Edge, the team that had overseen the production of the recent remasterings of Age of Empires and Age of Mythology titles. Losing at least half its staff, and being moved into Activision’s domain, key figures from the studio like Adam Isgreen are gone, and now it seems a new entry in the beloved RTS series might have been lost too. This information has been jigsawed together by Idle Sloth on X, noticing that Adam Isgreen had posted to LinkedIn noting that ahead of the firings, World’s Edge had “some great plans for what’s next,” while Andrew Martz (best known for his time at Gearbox) wrote to his LinkedIn that “our next project was cancelled.” UPDATE | A new Age of Empires game has been shelfed due to the layoffs Adam Isgreen (formerly Studio Creative Director)“We had some great plans for what's next – and I hope the team that remains can rise to the occasion down the line.” Andrew Martz (Senior Software Engineer)… https://t.co/eskQfh8uO3 pic.twitter.com/WejTwclQ5s — Idle Sloth (@IdleSloth84_) September 24, 2026 While this doesn’t definitely mean it was a new Age of Empires, all signs certainly point in that direction. World’s Edge was created to be something of a peculiarity within Xbox—rather than a development studio itself, it instead existed to oversee the Age of Empires franchise within Microsoft (an IP the company has owned since 1997), supervising multiple studios working on the series’ games. When we spoke to World’s Edge executive producer Earnest Yuen a couple of years ago, he explained, “The way World’s Edge was set up from the very beginning was to be a studio that managed the Age of Empires franchise, following something similar to say, the Marvel studio!” Over the last six years, World’s Edge oversaw the remakes of Age of Empires II, III, and IV as well as Age of Mythology, and indeed the Age of Empires mobile game. With as many as eight studios working on a game at a time, the company coordinated these endeavors thanks to talent like Adam Isgreen who worked on some of the biggest names in RTS since 1993, including Command & Conquer and Star Wars: Empire At War. The hope has long been that this could all be leading toward the much yearned-for Age of Empires V, a brand new project rather than a remake. In 2024 we put this to Yuen, suggesting to him, “It does sound a lot like you’re in a position where you kind of want to make something new?” His hesitant response went, “So… I… We… I would love…” I pressed harder and he let out, “Yes. We do have a lot of people that are very interesting in building more Age. And that is definitely something that we need to…” before yet again catching himself and redirecting the subject back to Mythology: Retold‘s imminent release. We’ve reached out to Microsoft, and to former World’s Edge employees, to see if this rumor might be true.