The date has finally arrived, July 1, when the online adaptation of Microsoft's popular franchise will be shutdown along with the PC Marketplace as of 7:00 pm EDT. Developers admit defeat, marking Age of Empires Online as a failure, and are apologetic to those who've purchased the game.

An official statement, declaring the date of the shutdown was posted on Facebook over a year ago, it read, "On July 01, 2014, Age of Empires Online will shut down permanently. We thank the loyal fans for their support and commitment and look forward to many more battles before Age of Empires Online is retired."

This announcement did not come as a shock whatsoever, even developers had realized that their game turned out to be a disaster. Part of the reason for the game's failure is due to certain factors during it's launch on August 16, 2011.

In short, the title released with far too little content, had a bad business model, and couldn't produce changes and additions to the game fast enough to satiate the players. This resulted in massive blow to the player base, in only a few months, the game's consistent players went from 100,000 to 15,000.

Executive Producer on the project had this to say during the game's launch at GDC Europe, "You don't get a soft launch for a branded title. Players come there for your brand. You only get word-of-mouth once. Whenever we got new players, they always came in with the overhead, 'but I heard this game s**ks.' That hill was extremely difficult to climb."

He added, providing closure and acceptance to Age of Empires Online's disastrous performance, "The content itself was too expensive to create," he admitted, "We did do a lot of things right, but they weren't enough to actually save the game."

Watch some gameplay footage below: