I agree that making this a WinStore-Win10 exclusive is not the best idea, even more so considering many people into the original AoE would be retro gamers that don't like the latest M$ products.
I am a client of M$ products as I run Win 10, I use Office and I always considered the Xbox line of consoles better than Nintendon'ts and PolyStations. I really enjoy M$ published games: AoE, Gears of War, Killer Instinct (at least the last iteration). Bill Gates seems to be doing a better good for the humanity than other billionaires out there. That being said what I am going to express is just my opinion, which luckily we can do in this forum as long as it is done with civility. It kind of worries me how stuff seems to be developing.
M$ is making what I think are not the best decisions for gamers for some years already.
WinStore is apparently inferior compared to Steam (or at least I heard, as I use neither).
Also there was the Xbox One decisions, that although don't affect PC gamers, show that someone there seems to be a bit lost regarding what players want: kinect and online as musts, not possible to play used-copies of games, cancellation of exclusives (like that ScaleBound game that looked pretty neat,even though the main character was obnoxious), the delay of PC version releases (Galo 3, Gears of War 2...) etc. And although some of these have been worked around, sometimes I say to myself "What the heck are they thinking".
If M$ cares about pleasing the fans of the series they should reconsider their decision and try to make AoEDE as available as possible, or they may suffer something similar to the Xbox One fate (unexpected low sales).
For me the win10-WinStore is not a deal breaker (actually at least in my case that couldn't be more irrelevant), but I know that for many others getting them is not an attractive necessity.
[This message has been edited by Suppiluliuma (edited 07-30-2017 @ 07:45 AM).]