Stardock CEO Brad Weddel has recently announced that they are merging the base Ashes of the Singularity (AOTS) game with the $20 Escalation expansion that had been released last November. AOTS if you would recall would be the first game to launch with DirectX12 support as well as to include a multi-core AI system.

The base game will be discontinued.  If you have a copy of it,  you  can still play it and we will still support it.  But we won't be selling it anymore.  Everyone who had Ashes of the Singularity now has Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation as well.  And anyone who already upgraded to Escalation from Ashes now has an automatic season pass to the DLC for Escalation.

By merging the products, we add over a hundred thousand people into the Escalation multiplayer pool, modding community, forums and allows us to focus all our attention on Escalation.Source: Brad Weddel

Possibly forseeing how a split fanbase would harm the long-term survival of the game as well as the work efficiency and feasibiity as an independent studio, Stardock has responded to customer's concerns by merging the two games together so that the player base of the game becomes much larger.

Thus any improvements that the developers work on will not just benefit one particular group of players. In addition to that, the survivabilty of AOTS as a franchise also gets extended as there is more incentive for gamers to continue playing knowing that there's unified support from the developers:

For example, even if we solved the multiplayer community fragmentation, what about modding? What about community discussions on strategy and tactics? What about future expansions?

A check on Steam indicates that indeed the base AOTS game has been withdrawn from the store and that the merged Escalation game is now retailing for $39.90. What do you think of Stardock's decision to merge the two games together, and what else do you want to see implemented in AOTS!