Are Microsoft going to revive Age of Empires? Company to revive "well-loved strategy game franchise"

Quick, everyone! Get your hopes up! A job advert has emerged claiming that Microsoft are working on a revival of a “well-loved strategy game franchise”. Surely – surely – it is Age of Empires?

As reported by Total Xbox, here’s what the advert says:

“Microsoft Studios is looking for a highly experienced senior games developer to help build and lead the team for a new AAA title within an established and well-loved strategy game franchise. This role reports directly to the Director of Development / Head of Studio. Your primary responsibilities will be to recruit and lead the client-side engineering team, drive technical strategy for client development, manage the day-to-day engineering rhythm, and evaluate and recommend appropriate middleware and tools to accomplish our goals.”

And whilst it doesn’t name the AOE franchise – which hasn’t seen any new release since 2011’s Age of Empires Online – it seems like a good candidate. Can anyone seriously name another “well-loved” strategy franchise that Microsoft owns? Let us know if you’ve got a better guess in the comments.

Personally, I’d be thrilled if they revived the franchise – I’ve literally just spent the weekend playing AOE2’s HD re-release – I had to figure out how to run Windows Steam in WINE on MacOS to do it, but my desire for global conquest knew no bounds.

So consider my fingers thoroughly crossed.