Here's Sorian's post from yesterday on the GPG forums:

http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=50161&start=25

The only thing worse than what Chris Taylor has done to Total Annihilation Supreme Commander is the spiritual sequel to Total Annihilation: Kingdoms.

I'd like to say I was disappointed by this, but I really can't. After SupCom2, I didn't really have any hope for K&C to be any good. I've watched all of the video blogs, and there are some interesting ideas in there, but I got the sense that K&C would be far more like SupCom2 than SupCom1/FA.

Staffing gets shuffled in companies all the time.

Stardock is still working on Society (www.societygame.com) but it's effectively on hold because the development resources were allocated to more near term projects. 

This might not be the case, but i think you guys should have made societies first and then Elemental. It looks pretty cool and an open beta might have been better for your new engine. Or would that make the engine issues worse today? Anyways, I always love your concepts.

Ah, so its likely just a resource allocation thing then.  Wonder what they are working on.  Figure they've got to be on something else.  Just was weird that they were doing a ton of PR and video blogs, etc, and then everything dried up. 

I'm sure they'll announce it when it's ready.

But that's what's likely going on. Something else got funded or took priority and voila.  You've only got N people after all.

Society sounded like Stardock's best idea since you announced it, Frogboy, and I don't mean to discredit your efforts between the announcement and today. Its still the reason I began following Stardock and its still my most anticipated game coming from you.

I guess it is on hold because they are working on Age of Empires Online now.

heh... that would make a bit of sense.

But to be fair, it seems like a gag order of sorts was put in place late last year.  The vid blogs died off.  Sorian stopped with meaningful posts on his blog.  Put it this way... his 2nd to last post was in OCT.  He just came back and made a recent post here in the middle of Feb.  His updates were somewhat weekly before.  Anyway, I bet several interesting things were going on behind the scenes.  At any rate, I wish GPG good luck on this.  Depending on how MS treats them (and how successful the game is), this could be a nice cash cow for them.

Looking at Firing points.com they are saying it is cause there taking over age of empires online.

And if you look at Chris Taylors quote. This wont be out anytime soon if ever. References Duke nukem forever.....thats never good.

But mainly due to the fact they will be providing post release support for AOEO. Free MMO-RTS.....no idea how that works but will be interesting to see.

yeah - its a little bit strange to me, but I know a few pay for play online games that weren't making any money because they charged money.  Then they switch to free to play and they make more money than they ever had.  No idea how it works... I'm sure microtransactions.

Successful 'free' to play games are usually designed in such a way that you can't really progress in the game without paying.  They get people hooked by making things SEEM reasonable early on, but once you hit a certain point you have to choose between paying or insane grinding.  People rationalize this by thinking it's no different than spending money on other games, forgetting the entire reason they started was because it was supposed to be entirely free.

Any free to play game with microtransactions isn't.

Except, you know, it is. Sure most free to play games encourage spending money on convenience (some more than others), but the fact remains that the game is playable for free. Some games restrict "free" accounts more than others, but this doesn't make it any less free to play. It's always the player who is deciding whether or not to spend the money.

But then again being stuck in the NOOB zone forever really detracts from any form of long term playability as in order to leave the NOOB zone requires gear and gear costs money.

So yes, a player always has the "choice" but the available choices either suck out the FUN, or suck out the FUNDS.