Did Space Empires V kill Space Empires?

[Black_Knyght]

The major problem is that SEV is not really a direct sucessor to SEIV, as the playing style changed too much from one game to another

What killed the SE series was not SE5 in itself, but the absolutely dumb idea to sell it to Strategy First

I absolutely agree with these two statements as to the core cause of Space Empires decline.

Firstly, SE5 was just TOO different from the previous incarnations, and had too many issues combined with an altogether new game style and awkward learning curve. While it does have it's diehard fans, SE5 has proven to have been realistically much less popular overall than SE4 was.

Secondly, and more importantly, selling off the franchise to Strategy First was a catastrophic mistake, and a costly one to Aaron personally. They even went so far as to have barred him contractually from working on another 4x space game for quite some time, and then all but abandoned any further development or support for SE5.

The combination of these two things dug a deep hole and have been slowly been pushing the SE franchise over the edge into it.

The odds are there might be a viable successor to the SE games, but there won't ever be any further development of existing, or hope for any new, SE franchise games.