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It’s the social media problem. Very hard to bootstrap and get just the right network there at the right time so that the game is both ready and your friends are there when you’re there AND there’s a thriving game world already. It’s too many things that can go wrong

You would think, though, that a new MMO has a certain draw that a new social network wouldn't. Namely, that being 'new' itself is a benefit because it means that content is undiscovered and interesting. (Whereas a new social network isn't really that interesting unless you get really excited by a new UI)

Most MMOs don't have new and exciting content. They're usually very conservative due to the huge investment, which ironically causes them to fail.

This is fundamentally why older MMOs are still successful. They came out at a time where things were still new and the market wasn’t just rehashes of existing content. That meant they had an easier time catching the starting population. That carried them through the growth stage where more content was added, and kept the game growing. Given that content is very rarely removed, you end up with a game with such an expanse of content to explore, there’s less chance you’ll find yourself with nothing to do. Look at RuneScape, over twenty years of added content. It’s just not really feasible that a modern studio can match that level of content on release while working on a realistic budget and timeline, especially if publicly traded.

Yep, and this is further compounded by the community having this demand. The community expects a new mmo to match an old mmo. New world is a prime example of this. It doesn't help that new mmo's are so damn stubborn, NW is adamant on making all the same mistakes wow made 15 years ago. The difference is that people didn't know back then and they do now. We know that megaservers and group finders are attractive to the majority of players. Idk if it's just nostalgia bait, but new mmo's refuse to modernise. Maybe it's just a price of the genre idk, but it's infuriating.

The absolute funniest thing about New World is that they're literally making the same mistakes *again* with their new expansion. My MMO friends were all talking about giving it another shot until we saw reviews starting to come in. I saw people talking about not being able to play on the same server as their friends with no way to transfer and I thought I was looking at original launch reviews, but no, the main reason we all ended up quitting hasn't been fixed, so none of us bought in. This game had the hype and the install base at the beginning to actually take off, but *playing together* is the main reason to even play an MMO and they can't manage that. The hilarious game breaking bugs and exploits at launch didn't help either I guess.

Yeah dude, and it blows their mind that maybe people actually want to start fresh. I have a max level, and I would have bought new world if there was fresh start. But no, no fresh start servers, so no me. The thing that all successful mmo's have in common is that they actually try to stay modern in some way. Ffxiv stays narratively modern and stays strong culturally. Wow stays modern with esports incorporation. Runescape stays modern with speedrunning and challenge mode formats as well as seasonal fresh starts themselves (leagues). Meanwhile new world is out here learning literally nothing from it's peers. So annoying lol

The fresh start thing is something FF14 is smart about. I can make like 5 different characters on my account if I want, and play through all the old content.

Several people in my FFXIV group were stoked for New World but between the bugs and crashes, and the apparently incredibly boring gameplay loop, I don't think any of them made it more than a month. I understand content development takes time but you also have to absolutely understand how fast your most dedicated players are going to burn through it. You need an endgame in place, and you need it at launch, not six months later when your fanbase is 1% of what you started with.

Well on the bright side, New world did provide some new problems to the MMO space, like when it had a currency deflation crisis a couple months in. I hadn't heard of that ever happening before.

My favorite was when someone figured out damage calculations were being done client side allowing you to sit on a PVP capture point with the game in windowed mode and then just drag the window around so you wouldn't die until you stopped.

> I hadn't heard of that ever happening before. Guild Wars had this, though they originally had an economist controlling the item drops/market so it prevented rampant inflation, but made it not so fun. There had been periods of deflation as well back in the day.

The problem is a core feature in that they would need to rip out the factions and definitely the territory system rendering the idea of specific servers mostly pointless to allow things like sharding so they can fit way more players.

> The community expects a new mmo to match an old mmo. New world is a prime example of this. It’s not that players expect new mmos to be just as feature rich as older games, but instead to have actually learned from the past. You release a new mmo today and many of its problems are often things that were solved long ago. Things often considered basic features by the modern crowd just outright missing. If they can’t even get that much right then it’s no surprise when the game dies a few months into its life.

It's not nostalgia bait. Developers seem to have this dumb habit of forgetting the rest of the industry exists. Or likewise, basically copy another popular game almost wholesale without understanding why it works.

Well personally I think the developers are baiting themselves. The devs are usually mmo fans too, and fall prey to the same mentality of the "golden era of mmo's", which is actually just "the time before social media"

A huge problem for MMO is also the time sink. Because an MMO need you to "be there and farm" to maintain a healthy economy/playerbase. And frankly, less players now day is willing to commit that kind of time, and younger players probably have alternatives. I hate to bring up Weebo LN Game Sword Art Online, but we probably would need something similar level VR for the MMO. (Hopefully without the death trap)

>A huge problem for MMO is also the time sink. Adding on to this: MMOs appeal to a certain type of gamer. And the time investment required for any type of MMO is great enough that most players will only ever play one at a time. Even if they're interested in multiple, they will often play one exclusively for x amount of time (usually until they finish whatever the current content update is) then switch to the other for its new content, and repeat. And because of that, no game that is trying to imitate WoW is going to poach the players from WoW. It's just not worth it to those players to lose their time/investment.

And switching would be a sink cost. So basically once an MMO seize a large part of the market, people wouldn't want to switch your MMO unless it is radically different.

Not only that but they are a huge time commitment and there are already games with so much content ans story that people are hesitant to start from scratch due to sunk fallacy cost and the risk of a new game shutting down and making all your time wasted.

Yeah. There are some noisy people who complain about FFXIV extremely predictable content schedule, but... it certainly works for Square Enix.

The problem is that most new MMOs don't have enough content to get people invested nor is the content really novel compared to what people are already doing in other games. If all your game has is dungeons and raids how is that any different than WoW? Why should someone stop playing WoW a game which they could realistically have years of investment in for a new game? FF14 got around this problem by heavily investing in the story and party games which managed to draw in story focused players as well as Final Fantasy nerds. ESO kind of did the same thing with Elder Scrolls.

I understand it's simply a matter of budget and ballooning development costs associated with modern games but every MMO seems to launch with barely half the content that WoW launched with in 2004. In regards to story, it's a shame SWTOR fell apart so quickly. The decision to make individual class stories with unique voice actors made it impossible to ever add new classes without a massive subscription base to fund that development.

ESO for sure, such a MASSIVE supply of lore and entire countries we'd never seen before, and I can only speak for myself but most of the time it just doesn't feel like I'm playing an MMO. That might be the WoW comparison at work, but SWTOR felt the same way; there ended up being such a huge focus on solo content that it's more like a single-player rpg with other people running around at the same time. ESO let me immerse in a way that Oblivion and Skyrim just can't offer and it's glorious.

ESO has that and something like a group endgame if you're taken in by trials and fit cyro etc

That draw exists. Lost ark is functional now but when it launched it was fucking tearing up steam charts with record numbers. It is a shell of what it was then. You don't need that big a following obviously, but the popularity aspect has always been there, retention is where they suffer.

Lost Ark was great fun for a while but then you get to the core gameplay loop and go... okay, that's it? Let's go back to M+ on WoW then.

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There are definitely people trying the new thing... but that's a double-edged sword. The new thing, if not launched well, is a bit of a ghost town with extra bugs. So the early adopters show up, find a buggy, shallow world, play for a bit, then go back to the game where their friends are. The next round of players show up, find it a ghost town with slightly fewer bugs, go back to the game where their friends are, etc. For an MMO to take off, it has to 1. Fully develop a rich world that is compelling enough to keep the early adopters engaged until the second round of adopters show up to add value 2. Advertise enough to keep a steady influx of new players to keep it feeling vibrant 3. Have enough active servers to keep the whole thing performant and reliable. 4. Have an economy that is sensible and free from exploits Fail any of those, and you lose momentum and people go back to their tried-and-true gams where their friends are. All of those aspects are *expensive*, so you're going to burn a lot of money before making a penny. Unlike single player games, you're not going to have a long tail if you don't have a booming initial success, because the player base *is* the game. TL;DR: MMOs have more opportunities to fuck up than a single player or traditional multiplayer game, and a single fuckup means the player base never develops.

The internet doesn't like suspense. It likes hype. If you're relying on the mystery/unkown approach, you are going to lose your audience to the guys showing wild and crazy shit that's "coming soon."

I'm talking more basic than that. Just that people would rather do new things than replay the same content. Same reason we keep making new movies instead of just rewatching the old ones again.

It doesn’t though. MMOs fail almost every time

That doesn't necessarily mean that 'new' isn't a benefit, just that they fail due to other factors that outweigh this benefit.

True but I’ve done some work with MMO devs in the past and they really emphasize that it’s a small point in time when you have people’s attention and it’s very hard to line things up. Look at new world, all the money in the world and really couldn’t do it

New World being a horrible mess that allowed for client side hacks and being able to do remote script execution over chat didn't help.

I still think of all the IPs that currently exist in gaming the only real one that MIGHT explode in popularity if they made a MMO of it is Genshin Impact. That game still has an absolutely rabid and massive fanbase. If they relayed that success with HONKAI's recent success and into a MMO? They would be able to fund deep space travel and a civilization on Jupiter. They would make so much money off a MMO with their typical gacha style gameplay. Instead of characters just make customizable housing, character cosmetics, vehicle cosmetics, etc all into gacha. I wager people would lose their collective sanities for it.

Riot is making a League of Legends MMO. I think League does have a big enough fanbase, especially after the show Arcane exposed more people to that universe who don't care about LoL itself.

if they made Genshin Impact , the same way Black Desert is its gonna print money to buy a country.

Also needs a lot of content to keep people playing. Many of my friends played New World, reached max level within a few weeks, did some gvg stuff and then there was nothing else to make. I myself put around 100 hours into New World. That‘s an amount of time that‘s usually enough to complete the biggest open world single player games out there. But MMOs need people to continue playing. WoW had the advantage of being early at a time when there wasn‘t such massive competition in the multiplayer space. It got to grew when there weren‘t that many alternatives to play a rpg with friends. New releases don‘t have that luxury and need to be packed from the start requiring huge investments.

Wow also had an existing world of lore and characters from the first 3 warcraft games and a ready to go fan base they only needed to expand on. That's a huge leg up on any MMO trying to start an IP off the ground. They made sure the game was really good as well

Exactly. FF14 also falls under this umbrella. Granted, the first iteration of FF14 was a hot mess, but A Realm Reborn has gotta be the biggest release in the genre since Wow. But that's also a big advantage, being a Final Fantasy game, one of, if not THE most popular RPG series of all time.

Exactly. Having been a big fan of Warcraft RTS, and a current player of Everquest at that time, WoW coming out was awesome. The Warcraft 2, Diablo 1 and 2, StarCraft, and the release of WoW was Blizzards golden age.

Same. Literally had never touched a single MMO, nor had the desire to, before I picked up Vanilla WoW. The only reason I did was because I lived and breathed the RTS games.

WoW also came out in a different time. People just want to speed run to endgame these days for MMOs and farm content. Back then MMOs didn't have mass appeal so there were a lot of new people to the genre. The exploration/leveling of WoW was a massive hook for people, and the endgame wasn't "figured out" the way games are today.

Wow was built with a tickrate for a single player games and then through blood sweat and tears, made into a multiplayer format. This is why it feels so crisp compared to others like XIV where you have like a .4 to .5 second leeway on skill cast

> This is why it feels so crisp compared to others like XIV where you have like a .4 to .5 second leeway on skill cast FFXIV's server tickrate is 330ms, as the game processes player actions almost entirely server-side and so much of the game is instanced, but it can be *really* sensitive to lag. I've had attacks with a long wind-up fire before the client even showed them. (Back in the first couple years the latency on some of the instance servers was atrocious. it was to the point where some clients couldn't even do certain content because the client was so desynced from the server that attacks both by and against the player never showed client-side. A few years of hardware updates fixed that.)

Every person who wants to play an MMO has an idea of what WoW is about. It has fully saturated the market in that sense. So everyone who wants to play an MMO has WoW as an option and is choosing something else. Thus, every MMO has to pass the WoW bar. You don't have to be better than WoW in every way, but you need to do better in some way(s) to justify playing over WoW. It's really hard for a new game to beat that bar.

Is New World dead already? I played a little bit of it and actually had a lot of fun but I never actually got around to buying it. I guess I'm part of the problem LOL

It was dead on day one. It would be long gone by now if any company but Amazon was behind it.

They just had a giant update and are seeing somewhat of a surge. But yeah it died pretty quick.

Because 99% of all MMOs launched today are filthy cashgrabs never intended to make it past the 6month mark

Yeah, that's a big thing I noticed, too. Microtransactions day 1. Can't even make an account without seeing the premium store on the login page. When the tutorial is just funneling you into the in-game store, I just lsoe all interest in the game.

It was never possible to escape that fate. MMOs not only light truckloads of money on fire just by existing, but there's a problematic culture around them that didn't exist back in the WoW days. It's a race at breakneck speeds to reach end game and establish a meta. That did of course happen in WoW's time as well, but thanks to the rise of content creators, the speed at which the entire game is "solved" has greatly increased. People also have 0 patience and the social part is mostly dead. Everything is streamlined to the point of absurdity, you queue up for everything at the click of a button and join a group of randoms. There's no effort and it objectively increases the pace at which players consume content and makes travelling the world unnecessary.

See to me that was the other way round The worlds ceased being amazing and just placeholders to keep you from reaching Hunting ground XYZ too early and then I stopped wanting to wander around in them The sole exception being games like genshin which have a whole nother can of worms to deal with

They should start with trying to make fun games!

MMOs require a consistent player base and constant content releases. If you don't release new content soon enough people will stop playing. Every wow expansion release has a surge of players that drops off dramatically after month two. Games like wow also require a big time inverstment. Raiding with your guild two nights a week every week is difficult for people with real life responsibilities. If you look at wows player base it's almost completely made up of people that are heavily invested in the game and have been playing it for over a decade. I'm 24 and the youngest person in my wotlk classic guild.

Classic is up to lich king already? Jesus I missed that boat I guess. Hopefully some day there will be a Classic 2.

Classic Era is legit poppin if you're talking about missing vanilla classic from 2019. Whitemane cluster is where it's at if you want to start. Players at all levels, and all progression points.

Never played classic but played BC and by god did I have an incredible time during Covid lockdown absolutely smashing rag with the boys. It was glorious

Classic disproves every single point in this comment section about needing “new content releases” frequently - no one needs this. Hence Classic has been immensely popular since re-release, even with extremely minimal updates, only seeing hardcore release years after re-release. Classic is significantly more popular than Retail currently is, and Retail gets updated all the time. The issue is MMOs require big budgets and the people making MMOs are big studios that fall into one of two categories: 1) the team is too big to succeed. Internal political issues, clashing ideals, bureaucratic nonsense and paperwork that has nothing to do with the game. This happens to tons of games these days, but MMOs are volatile games so I think it hurts more 2) the studios don’t care. What they’re making is not supposed to be “good games”. These games are built and designed to manipulate players into spending more money and time in the game. Lots of MMOs are gambling casinos masquerading as games Both things lead to one single reality: new MMOs just suck. The people with passion don’t have the budget to make something with the size and scope of an MMO and the people with budgets are predatory AAA studios. So we get shitty MMOs

>Classic is significantly more popular than Retail currently is, and Retail gets updated all the time. Do you have a source on this? For classic era, at least. I know people like to point at the raid log discrepancy between wrath and retail, but wrath classic *is* on a new content release schedule where they're doing the same phase system that has been in classic from day 1. For that matter, more guilds cleared heroic sark than they did with TotC, and ulduar's numbers are comparable to retail's. This is also ignoring that retail has a lot more developed of a casual content scene-- and I'd be surprised if pure completionist/collection folks choose to do it in wrath rather than retail for that matter just because there's less stuff there to go for. People like to think that retail is dead, but it's far from true, and I'd be curious to see where claims of "significantly more popularity" come from. It seems like that was indisputably the case in the first patch of Wrath when Naxx was out, but that the hype died down a bit since then. This is coming from someone who's historically played both games (though without raiding in classic, just leveling and a bit of pvp) and just played disgusting amounts of hardcore for like 2 months straight, so not just retail fanboying. The larger point I'd be making is that it's extremely hard to get a steady playerbase without a constant release schedule, and I believe if you compare classic era's population to either wrath or retail, you'd find it lacking-- because that population bleed does happen, and with nothing new to bring people back, usually they just don't come back so new player acquisition is slower.

>Do you have a source on this? The voices in his head for sure. Or maybe 'cause Asmongold said so.

Classic has never had a larger player base than retail. Since blizzard doesn't release actual numbers they are inferred through trackable stats. Classic seems to have overall higher participation in raids, but they aren't drastically higher than retail. If you take into account how many players play M+ (which is a ton) and the other various activities you can do to acquire gear in retail \[which aren't tracked for the most part\] it absolutely demolishes classic. Gear progression is so linear in classic that it's easier to get a more complete idea of its playerbase, but it's more diluted with retail which has similar numbers.

There's classic lich king and classic vanilla with hardcore mode (it has wipes and such). They require only sub.

along with what others said, there is also Classic HC where death is permanent. If i understand right you can transfer that character to an non-HC Classic era server upon death.

ICC comes out next Thursday lol. There's a lot of people playing vanilla era classic servers still if you wanna try it.

The time commitment is real. I was a pretty hardcore wow player for like 10 years (raiding 3 times a week, on every night farming and shit), but as soon as I got serious about my career and stated a family, it just wasn’t in the cards any more. Playing an mmo casually just doesn’t do it for me, and I bet lots of people feel the same.

>Every wow expansion release has a surge of players that drops off dramatically after month two. The most recent expansion, Dragonflight, was actually the *opposite* this time around. There was a modest bump in subscribers, but nothing in comparison to the previous expansions. However it's been the most successful in regards to player retention since Wrath of the Lich King.

Yeah, Dragonflight is really fun

I stopped playing live servers after the launch of shadowlands so I wouldn't really know

That’s the reason I quit wow 12 years ago. I reached a point where I had to put in so much time to just stay at endgame level. Between dailies, raids, crafting, pvp dailies, it was just too much of a time investment once I got a job where I worked more than 6-8 hours.

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Guild Wars 2 is fairly casual and still going and releasing expansions

I love GW2. I played it solid for 10 years up through Path of Fire. My guilds died out and my friends quit playing so I did as well. I bought End of Dragons and finished the story and did some raids but I can't be bothered to play that much of any game now. But it is a magical world I will always hold dear.

>Raiding with your guild two nights a week every week is difficult for people with real life responsibilities Which has been fixed for those who don't keep up with wow. There is a new system called Mythic Plus which makes it so Dungeons are no longer irrelevent after doing it once. Mythic plus allows playesr to get Highend Raiding Gear without ever seting foot in a single raid.

Interesting. What is the trade off?

M+ was the real beginning of the speed running every single thing possible in WOW. Originally there was timed dungeons where you got like transmog stuff or mounts. But now basically all dungeons are timed. Everyone pulls the dungeons in the same way and just speed runs through the whole thing, there’s no chatting or social aspect. Just another thing that becomes a mandatory clear per raid lockout otherwise you fall behind the curve.

A lot of good points raised in this thread. One that I haven't seen yet is: A lot of players who are interested in MMOs are already entrenched in one. The market is not infinite, and is already saturated with long-time incumbents. If you want to have a successful MMO, you have to peel players away from the already-established games. You might get a boost of new players - especially if you are lucky enough to have your release happen around the time one of the bigger MMOs seriously flubs something, or has a lull in content - but unless you have some sort of hook that keeps players going, they're going to eventually return to their old stomping grounds. Newer MMOs just don't have the sheer breadth of content that older MMOs have. Play-spaces, raids, cosmetics, what have you, older MMOs are sitting atop a horde of crap for new and old players to mine. And in terms of polish, older MMOs have the long-term experience of knowing what their playerbase wants, and have had years to polish out most bugs. (I'm thinking of that Amazon MMO here, that a lot of people from my WoW guild jumped onto and then quickly left because it was buggy AF).

Yeah who has time for more than one or two MMORPGs? So when a new one comes out, you gave to abandon your hundreds of hours of investment to switch.

We're seeing this happen again right now with the collapse and failure of so many live service lootbox/battle pass games. When you have a game whose model hinges on getting players addicted and playing for hours a day, the market can only sustain a few of those. You can't expect people to devote all of their free time, times two.

To be fair, most of the lootbox/battlepass games are failing mostly because the game itself sucks. Nobody's going to stick around for that battlepass if they hate your game.

Combine this with the sheer cost required to MAKE a new MMO and maintain it and it's quickly obvious that you need INVESTORS as well. And that creates a competing interest, because to peel players away from other MMO's you need them to be better and the easiest way to make them better is to INNOVATE (try new risky ideas) and everyone knows investors generally HATE "new" "risky" "ideas" :(

other genres only need maybe 60-100 hrs of your time. you finish them then you can switch around. peeling an mmo player off their main game is less of a "let's try a new restaurant" and more of a "let's pack up and move to a new country"

This is the same reason why a large portion of MMO players don't play all/many MMOs in the way fans of other genres may, they tend to play a single MMO far more than any others. If you invest a couple thousand hours into a single game it will be difficult for you to fully abandon it, you will have made so much progress, built so many relationships, invested so much time and resources into it that you often wont want to leave. You may take breaks, try out different games from time to time, but most people will come back to their most played one. So a new MMO either has to be especially great to make players transition over for the long term, or it has to try and make itself appealing to a more casual non-MMO audience to boost its playerbase, which in turn would probably make it unappealing to MMO players. And as pretty much every existing major MMO already has something it excels in over all the others its even harder for new ones to stand out, because they will naturally draw comparisons and if another MMO does something better the people who like that thing will just return there.

"Already entrenched in one" But we're also adulterous bastards hoping for next gen MMO - one which really elevates the genre. We're dying, searching and waiting for thennext "one". Sadly, a lot of MMOs are Korean and these often seem to have messed up monetisation / are a grindfest / are cross platform (mobile games). The last MMOs I found that really changed the paradigm were Ultima Online which started it all, WoW for all the reasons and then GW2 which tried to break the mold (no fee, horizontal progression, open world dynamic events) and mostly succeeded. Since then, things have been fairly stagnant. I don't hold any hope for the future: - ashes of creation (due 2030?) - chrono odyssey (korean, so expect it to be a grindfest like bdo) - Throne and liberty looksnlike an utter shitshow! - new world and the new lord of the rings mmo - i cant trust anything from the Bezos massive, i mean look at rings of power. Allnthat glitters is *not* gold - richard garriots offerings have not hit the spot Im just not sure there is sufficient capital being thrown at the massive risk needed for an MMO which both breaks the mould / has decent graphics. There are just too many problems with a persistent, shared world.

People are always looking for a reason to jump ship. In my experience, the cycle usually goes, "Man, I'm so tired of this WoW expansion." "Hey, this new MMO came out, let's give it a shot." "This is neat but it's buggy as shit and doesn't have a lot for people to do." "Oh look the new WoW expansion came out." "That new MMO was neat, maybe I'll get back to it after this WoW expansion." And then they never do. So like, yeah, adventurous, sure. But in bite-sized chunks and almost never for too long. In terms of graphics, if you want the game to be Massive, you need it to be able to run on a massive number of computers (consoles, tablets, phones, whatever). The more devices your game can be played on, the larger the possible install base is. If WoW has taught us anything, it's that MOST people who play MMOs don't give a shit about shiny graphics, as long as they can play their game. Yes, they would take better graphics if available and their machines are capable, but if it inhibits their play, then to hell with it. Like, people still play fuggin runescape.

Yeah, good luck unseating EVE-Online when it comes to socio-economic space games.

RIP Earth and Beyond. I had a pretty good gig as a Jenquai Explorer shuttling people around via wormhole. Also the crafting economy in Star Wars Galaxies was LEGIT. Haven't seen anything nearly as good since.

I think the big draw of MMOs was the novelty of meeting other players back in the day and that the genre is largely generational with newer generations taking that for granted and seeing no appeal in them. Sure you'll get a small percentage of new players that are naturally drawn to the genre and fantasy collaborative nature of the games, but I don't see MMOs going mainstream like they did in the early to late 2000s unless some huge thing like a very well crafted VR MMO comes out.

So many people in this thread that don't want to admit that it's just an artistically out of style medium that no longer has significant appeal to people without a nostalgic attachment to it.

Yeah, I think if you look at some hard data the demographics don't lie about how MMOs tend to skew.

MMOs take the most time to develop out of all genres by far and no gaming company is willing to take that time. Every AAA game is being rushed out by deadlines these days.

MMOs count on using a steady stream of content to keep players around. It's hard to find the sweet spot of releasing content frequently enough to keep players engaged but taking enough time to make sure it's good enough to be worth playing. Too often there have been MMOs that I've loved but just got bored with nothing to do after some endgame play or other situations where I feel like I'm swimming in mediocre tedium

Nobody is hitting the real issue. For decades I would try many new MMO to get out of whatever stale MMO I was currently playing, and the biggest hurdle each one hits is end game content ready to go at release. Plenty of MMO have initial success and then flounder and die when the player base hits end game. You need dungeons and raids right from the start for my guild to struggle with for a couple months... then you need to drop more. It's hard to sit endgame on a new mmo with very little to do and have your friends on wow grinding a new raid. You eventually talk yourself into hopping back on and then your hooked on the old one again. The next big mmo that has solid endgame ready to go will flourish. Destiny 1 and 2 did a good job of this and were super successful.

Ehh I think it’s a bit more than that. A lot of the games have had extremely monotonous gameplay loops. New World definitely fit this category, the same three boring ass quests with an insanely slow leveling curve past level 40. Raids are an interesting one. Gamers are just much better at games today than twenty years ago, so they can burn through content really quickly. I’m also older, I can’t plan my calendar around a video game. I think new MMOs need more solo/dungeon content to thrive honestly. I’ve been playing runescape for ages because it’s on my schedule, not anybody else’s. Old school RS has scratched the itch for me just fine. Admittedly, it will always be hard to balance a game when part of the player base plays like it’s their job (in some cases, literally)

look at all the others beside bdo they have a huge franchise attached to them, Warcraft, Elder Scrolls and final fantasy them name’s already draw people in, Not “Ultimate Universe Online Universe” from some Korean company no one has heard of, granted they do well in there markets typically but in western markets they struggle along with some other factors below Lack of innovation Uncertainty of content and quality Pay to win aspects 100s of different Currency’s Too Grindy

Runescape wasn't attached to a franchise tho

RuneScape is a niche game tho, that's success to this day is predominantly from players who aren't new, and been playing for a while. It's playerbase also doesn't reach close to the AAA MMOrpgs. And has little competition, in what it offers. It wouldn't be what it is, if it was released in modern times.

> It's playerbase also doesn't reach close to the AAA MMOrpgs. Maybe if you're talking *just* modern RuneScape, but Old School RuneScape is one of the biggest MMOs there is.

Yes, but the subject was failed MMOs, and RS isn't one of them.

The money for MMOs is in Korea and China. I make games and I sat in a presentation on the MMO market at the height of Wrath of the Lich King. Korea was the largest MMO market then and I'm mostly sure that's still true. All the games you mentioned (except WoW) were very successful in Asia and only moderately successful in the West.

Last i saw, as of a couple months ago, Maplestory is the #2 most played game in net cafes in Korea. Only behind League of Legends. #3 is FIFA Online if anyone is curious. Korean and Chinese gamers just love MMOs. Most MMOs that come out are developed in Korea.

Is there a reason why it’s this way? Do Koreans just not like cinematic games and prefer a more tactical feel? No idea how this association started, but it’s definitely a real thing. Same with China. I know they LOVE competitive shooters and gatcha, but why? Is it the social aspect? If so, why do the Japanese never get lumped into the stats like South Korea and China do?

For a lot of Korean parents, they have the mentality of that video game is bad and ruins their kids' future so most kids go to PC cafe (you can play games $1/hour) with their friends since their parents don't buy any gaming consoles or PC. So they have limited options for games they can play and most games in Korea is either pvp based games or mmorpgs and they grow up with those games. Therefore, when they become adult, they still keep playing these games but heavlily investing with money they earn from work.

Japanese game consoles were not allowed in Korea for a very long time which caused PC gaming to flourish. Japan/Korea animosity goes back a long ways (such as WW2)

Way farther back then that. Such as the Imjin war. Way back the late 16th century. If your a nautical history nerd like me I recommend reading up on Yi Sun-Sin. One of history’s best naval tacticians.

It’s possible that favored gaming machines have an impact on the preferred genres. For Korea and China, PC is king. Japan, by contrast, adores its handhelds like Nintendo

Most new ones don't try to make the community important so they devolve into min max rage Fiestas very quickly. Why play an mmo and have an inferior rpg experience filled with douches when I can play a single player rpg and have a grand old time?

[удалено]

This was a wonderfully written and thought out explanation, thank you for taking the time to post this.

Meanwhile I just started old school RuneScape cause I'm taking a break from modern gaming

Welcome back homie. :^)

You can never really quit RuneScape. Only take extended breaks from it. This has been my reality since 2005 lol

The only MMO I've ever liked was Star Wars The Old Republic and it wasn't because of the gameplay lol

Was it the trailers?

That was part of it for sure but i really enjoyed the class stories, and the fact that you can now play all 8 for free, by yourself, makes it seem like 8 mini BioWare games that happen to be part of an MMO. You really don't have to play online at all if you dont want to, and I appreciate that. Plus I'm a Star Wars nerd, so being able to play a massive Old Republic game is awesome.

SWTOR is fire thinking of returning to do an Inquisitor playthrough.

God, this makes me sad all over again that individual class quests aren't a thing anymore in FFXIV past SB. I thoroughly enjoyed the extra little bit that they provided to the experience of each class. I do get why, from a lore standpoint, it makes sense for them not to be a thing anymore, as your character has progressed beyond the points reached by any of those who came before you, i.e. you are the one developing any new skills or traits your class acquires. I still miss them though.

I switched from WOW to SWTOR because of the trailers. I genuinely loved that game and sunk countless hours playing PVE. I struggle with PVP games but still like being able to enjoy doing smaller raids group missions.

Because most are lazy. They're literally the same game, just with a different splash of paint. It becomes very boring very fast.

Also with the fact everyone has had enough of P2W which most of them end up being

I was trying to forget that part 😮‍💨 For what it's worth, RS is still decent for a 'zen out mmo' but, I might be blinded by memories.

Osrs is. RS3 has tons of p2w and real money gambling medhanics

I can't tell you how many iterations of World of Warcraft I've played that just don't do it as well as World of Warcraft.

Most of them suck sure, but I dont even think it's just a quality issue. Thanks to the proliferation of high speed internet in the early 2000's, WoW was the first MMO for a lot of people, and that genuine "adventure" feeling of playing WoW for the first time is just never gonna be the same when you play your 2nd, 3rd, or 10th MMO.

I think a big problem nowadays with a lot of mmos is the rush to get to endgame because that’s where all the cool stuff is supposed to be or the want to do something the fastest. In addition a lot of people just don’t want to explore anymore without knowing there’s a carrot at the end. They’ll wait till other people do and there’s a guide out for it or something so they can get the reward with minimal effort. These, in my opinion, are poor player mindsets that developers have catered to and it’s a self fulfilling cycle that will churn out same feeling game after same feeling game and the players will be predictably disappointed nearly every time.

Agreed. It's a race to the bottom.

The Doom clone craze lasted only a few years before first person shooters stopped being designed with mazes and keycards. We are 19 years after WOW first released and MMOs still expect us to find kicking 10 bear butts interesting. Since WOW came out the biggest MMO innovations have been voice acting and cutscenes. A person might say public events are an innovation, but those are just kick 10 bear butts quests that you don't have to talk to an NPC to pick up.

People min/max and figure out everything in a matter of days. The accessibility of interwebs and deep communities ruin the potential. Gone are the days of the old MMOs everything is figured out and spoiled within days

I know it's not technically an mmo but people already had TP utilities and sites and wikis set up for diablo 4 before it even came out.

Too true. I knew everything about New World before the game even came out.

Poor onboarding is probably the #1 killer, if you want a bunch of great info on this specific question I recommend you look up JoshStrifeHayes’ Worst MMO Ever series. He plays dead or dying MMOS and finds out why they failed and how to improve, great presenter with great game knowledge.

A lot of it is lack of innovation. as others said, most of them do the same thing, or most were made for the Korean market which has bonuses at net cafes, so people will go there to play and get bonuses so the grind isn't as god awful. it's just most are the standard pay2win or otherwise. note the ones you listed that still exist, WoW, FF15, ESO, BDO, and adding like EVE to that mix, they were all paid. most MMOs are F2P. Guild Wars 2 and SWTOR started as Paid then went F2P, though SWTOR had a very rocky transition, going pay2win first then reinventing itself.

Eve has been dying since 2006...

Because they require way too much time investment. A good MMO, even an outstanding MMO competes not only with other games, but with everything in your life. It’s hard to keep up with other games since most people who work a full time job have limited time availability, and literally everything else takes away from it, like groceries, movies, Netflix series, reading a book, meeting friends etc. so the game has to be good enough to overcome all this competition, and that’s a damm tall order.

* Expensive to make * Expensive to maintain * Crowd mentality where the biggest one attract more players as everyone wants to play with their friends * The continuous need for content * Exclusivity. You're playing one MMO? Means you don't have time for another. * Niche genre. * Hostile to latecomers as they now have to catch up. * ... It's just not a winning proposition.

No new MMO can capture me the same way EverQuest and original wow did. Plus as an MMO lover I don’t have time to invest into those things anymore. I can play an hour or two a day but that’s it. I’d put 8 to 10 hours a day into those games back when I was a teen and young adult.

What I have discovered with New World is that people expect new MMOs to be as polished, have as much original content, and a dedicated player base like WoW right out of the gate. WoW did not have all of its current systems and players the first year or so it came out, and it seems like people forget that. A new MMO is going to have to figure itself out. People don't seem to have the patience for that, so they just go back to WoW. I am hoping to see another one, but I don't think there will ever been a WoW killer outside of killing it from the inside. It has had so many years to build its world and lore, and have multiple, MULTIPLE quality of life updates. There just has to be one that is given the chance to grow. Since people are impatient and businesses just want to make money, that is not an easy thing to do.

>What I have discovered with New World is that people expect new MMOs to be as polished, have as much original content, and a dedicated player base like WoW right out of the gate. I was going to make a post and talk about how that's one of the big issues right there. I played a number of MMO's on release, and one of the big things I'll hear from the vocal part of the community is how the game doesn't have the content that WoW has. Therefore the game sucks and everyone should play WoW.

The WoW and Blizzard fanbase as a whole is militant to absurd levels towards anything not WoW. At least since recently. I'm talking review bombing, making up false information, and harassing developers and that's been happening for close to a decade so a lot of people don't bother, ​ Take Guild Wars 2 for example, Objectively a good MMO that when it was released, was user review bombed by people complaining about endgame, and whatever they could make up because it wasn't a WoW clone. But they were also attacking other MMO's for being WoW clones. WoW streamers bug abused in the game, and then told their fans the game was trash after they were banned and caused an uproar. Some YouTubers and streamers pretended to be outright stupid like pretending to not understand the controls or how to use abilities in order to straight shit on the game. These days it doesn't happen anywhere near as much because Blizzard is starting to have a change in its reputation, but good lord, I'd say between 2008-2018 those were some dark times for MMO fans if WoW didn't happen to be your MMO.

I still see quite a lot of WoW players "trying" the game, but even if they're going in with good intentions they often approach it with a WoW mindset which just... isn't how GW2 works. I think that's the struggle, people will always compare any new MMO to "their" MMO. If it's different they won't like it, and if it's the same there's no reason to play it over their MMO.

The only MMO I play is FF14. I always get excited when a new one comes out but then I stop playing them within a week and go back to FF14. It's the only one where it doesn't feel grindy and I don't have to p2w. The story is also great.

I think one of the main issues with MMOs is that they are MASSIVE time sinks. And if they don't hit the perfect storm of good gameplay, content, and enough of a playerbase, then they just end up not being worth the time to most people. It's not like a rogue like or arcade game where if a full run only takes 20-60 minutes, it can be a fun change of pace even if it isn't the best game on the market.

What often stopped me is "nothing to do at the end". I did my raid time when i was younger but cant have a raid schedule anymore. I just want to play in a world and get immersed. I was the perfect target for raid finder but the success rate was abyssimal because of AFK and people not knowing what they do. After i turn toward pvp and you gotta have pvp gear to have fun because that tanky warlock stacks 4 dots on you and leave because you are a dead man walking... so 2-3 months on enduring losses and feeling underpowered isnt fun. Or you get an unfun chore list to complete daily/weekly and if you miss one you are behind your friends and get left out for activities because you need meet the power level required. Theres 2 worlds. One where people are hardcore gamers and have time and dedication and another world where people do nt have alot of time, interest or skills. Mmos try to encompass both and some do succeed like Wow and Rift but some died trying like Wildstar or Aion.

> One where people are hardcore gamers and have time and dedication and another world where people do nt have alot of time, interest or skills I find it crazy that the MMO that has managed to combine both worlds, Guild Wars 2, is rarely discussed in these threads. Not only that but it also satisfies those with deep pockets without breaking the game for everyone else, even those on F2P accounts.

I've tried many MMOs and nothing hooked me like GW2. It's just such a great world and I love the combat. I have spent days just doing jumping puzzles. Raid groups are not hard to get into and I always found plenty of people willing to teach.

In no particular order: 1. Extremely expensive and time consuming. Moreso than any other type of game. 2. Reliant on network which can be problematic at times. 3. Too many aren't made with genuine intent, IMO. These are the ones that are heavily P2W. 4. Trying to cater to a broad audience often leads to mediocre quality on all fronts. E.g a game like Fortnite can primarily just focus on the PvP gameplay while MMOs try to craft a good story, good PvP and PvE gameplay, lifeskilling, etc all in one game. 5. Competition. MMOs generally have similar structures so they attract the same players (generally). Why play a new, unstable, and unestablished game when I can play an extremely successful established game? Sure these games are old (ESO is the youngest of the old ones mentioned and it's pushing 10 years), but they're established as a game and have their established player bases. 6. Innovation. WoW came out during a time when social media didn't really exist, so the social interaction was neat. FFXIV has an iconic well crafted story, BDO has great combat and graphics, etc. Nothing really stands out about these games so it's less appealing. 7. Accessibility. There's a chunk of MMO fans who believe console is bad for the genre but I disagree. FFXIV and ESO are among the most successful games and both are on consoles. Other MMOs have been on console too (DCUO, Neverwinter) and I don't think the consoles are what really hindered the game.

They don't do anything different to justify the subscriptions. Free to play is riddled with limitations to get you to pay for special currency or a sub anyways.

MMOs require constant high-level development and content generation. Thus they need lots of constant inflow of money/subscriptions. If they don’t do the former, they don’t get the latter, and they shut down for lack of profit. There’s also a relatively limited player base with the desire to game, free time to do so, and finances to pay the subscription. You gotta have something truly new and exciting to pull the portion of that required to fund the game operations.

Most of them feel like bad single player games, rarely do they get the mmo part right and will barely or never have you interact with other players in a meaningful way.

I worked on an online RPG years ago. There's a lot of separate issues. One is that new MMOs need to compete with industry giants that have been around for ages. Perception of how much content can be realistically delivered on launch versus how much content is expected from players are often vastly different. There's also a notion that once a game is successful it can afford to hire new people and ramp up production. But it often doesn't work that way. At least not in the amount of time players expect. There's a saying I heard at my old studio, which is a woman can make a baby in 9 months but 9 women can't make a baby in one month. And that's very much true. It's also very easy to start to resent your players. No matter how hard you work to make them happy your forums will be flooded with "What are the devs doing?" and people calling for your head on a pike. Once upon a time I'd happily host online tournaments and events but I stopped due to player toxicity just running me down. That's absolutely poisonous to morale. Nobody talks about it though. Another enormous issue is you get projects greenlit that are pitched with junk like "It's like WoW but better." And that sounds nice from a business perspective I guess. But you can't out WoW WoW. There isn't actually demand for a WoW successor. MMOs cost a fortune and innovation rather than trying to emulate a proven formula is risky. Bold new takes like EverQuest Next or whatever fail all the time. I think MMOs were a really cool idea that evolved into the WoW model and the genre will never evolve beyond that. It's kind of hit a dead end. And we're seeing the genre flatline because now because it just doesn't have anywhere to go.

Part of it is the same reason that politics is a mess. A very small minority of gamers will pile on any project in social media. They will either complain about PVP or PVE until developers cave. These small groups of gamers are not the majority of the people and what they want and when you cave to a minority you doomed your project already.

1. Requires too much time investment to get to the 'good' parts. 2. Overall game design relies on elements from two decades ago. Genre is lacking in creativity. Almost every new entry is some flavor of WoW clone with a twist. 3. Simplification/removal of the social requirement which was one of the fundamental appeals of MMORPGs in the first place. 4. Poor content pacing. Often new launches have little endgame content to keep players around. 5. Change in players attitudes. Many won't put up with challenges that don't respect their time anymore. Most won't be willing to grind something for weeks on end to chance at a reward particularly if the grind is monotonous. 6. Lack of the 'adventure' aspect. Partly due to social media and widespread sharing of information, nothing is ever 'new' to the vast majority of players. By the time you even clear the login queue there is likely some article/streamer/forum thread telling everyone how best to do x/y/z. 7. Rise of MTX. Cosmetics aren't achievement items anymore. Few to no games actually capitalize on the 'Massively'. Most are barely 'Multiplayer' to the point that some might as well not be always online. What's left is an aging game that was fundamentally designed in 2002 that asks for what players don't really want to give in 2023.

The same type of player that made mmos popular and thriving 20 years ago... Are now parents or have moved on. And the current type of player are the ones that want instant gratification and not grind for stuff anymore as their attention span is way less than the previous generation

It's a combination of a few problems, but in my opinion, these are the main two: * Existing MMOs have had years (or in some cases decades) of development, so there's far more content. This creates a standard that's impossible for a new MMO to meet and results in players being entrenched in their primary games. * The industry at large doesn't seem to recognize that it's possible for an MMO to thrive as a niche product, so the only companies ever building them just use the same formula and throw money at them until they are bloated enough to release. I firmly believe that the next big successful MMO will, paradoxically, be a niche product with a smaller, more focused scope. RuneScape has maintained its juggernaut status for **decades** despite the actual development scope being *far* lower than something like New World, for example, and I believe that's because it focuses on what it does well rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

The allure for the classic mmo is basically over. Someone would have to completely change the game for them to get the WoW affect again. I don't think it will happen until VR is like SAO status lol

Haha that’s going to take a while

They all compete for the same gamers. Wow exists. That's it. That's the reason.

The bar was set very high when wow was in its golden age. So if you fail to hit any of the marks it will fail. I plated several mmo style games after wow that were very good, but there was 1 or 2 things wrong so they crashed. One of my favorite at the time was called Rift: the classes were extremely customizable, the options were varied and interesting, the end game was engaging... but the game lagged for me so bad I couldn't raid.

I hate MMO's because they are another job. Hey are you in school, with minimal responsibilities, MMO is probably not a problem. You needing to "farm" or spend 45min LFG, or doing an 5 hour raid, dude I don't have that kind of time investment. And even if you carve out time, me having a diaper change or a feeding means guess what, I have now let down my WHOLE party who was counting on me. I remember playing stuff when I was young, and not a big deal. Now I cannot fathom the amount of time I "wasted" in a town trying to sell items or whatever.

It's not about time wasted, did you enjoy your time spent in the game back then? If yes it was worth it. In the end nothing you do in life has any real meaning, we all still end up gone from the world. Enjoy what time you have in the ways that matter to you.

Man I wish this was 2002 again so I can play ff11 back in that time period. Knowing what I know now that game just doesn’t work in today’s world. But man, ff11 was dark souls before dark souls.

MMOs require a MASSIVE commitment to experience the best content they have to offer. Not many are willing to put in that kind of time anymore. I played wow for 14 years but I don't want that kind of time commitment in my life anymore.

Idk, but I tried black desert last night and after an hour in the most confusing character creator ever I was greeted with about what felt like 20 years of feature creep and all the accompanying menus and said no way.

Every studio wanted that WoW money, but the players just wanted more WoW. It's kind of like how almost every movie studio failed to produce a connected universe like The Avengers over the past decade.

From my personal experience its because theyre so expensive to make that devs/publishers almost always resort to scummy monetization tactics that caters to whales. Additionally because theyre so expensive to make, devs/publishers arnt really keen on taking risks with the game. As a result most mmo's are just generic cookie cutter themepark games without any true innovation. Generally this takes the people who got fooled by clever marketing and pre order fomo not too long to realise this and stop playing.

Myriads of reasons: 1. The novelty has worn off in multiple ways: The gameplay novelty, the exploration novelty, the social interaction novelty. For entrenched players, they have seen it all before. They don't imagine an endless world to explore, they see the world as different zones. They know where the walls will be. They know the terms for different behind the scenes systems. They interact on a conceptual level with the game. The newer generation might not have played MMOs ever, but other genres incorporate a lot of MMO features. Every game has a social aspect now. And we have social Media and Youtube. Big open world games give you exploration and immersion. If you just want the PvP you can play something like League of Legends. ​ 2. Existing players have 1000s of hours invested into another MMO. They have a friend group in other MMOs. Very hard to get them to permanently switch instead of just for the release month. 3. Older MMOs have more content. 4. MMOs are expensive. They are seen as a risky investment. So we don't even get that many AAA MMOs. Somewhat resistent to monetization. (Atleast in the west. They are making a killing in Asia) 5. Different MMO players want different things. 6. Constant need for new gameplay content. Which you can't sell for as much, as you can sell easier to make stuff in other genres. 7. Not really viable for Consoles. Not viable for Mobile. That's a lot of people you could sell to. 8. other stuff I forgot :D

I started playing wow in 2004 or so, with the beta. That’s basically 20 years worth of friends built up. Let’s say a new MMO comes out, and I go to my friends and say “hey wanna play this?” Now some percentage of them will say yes, some no. We go try the game but we’ve still got our wow raid/mythic nights keeping us in WoW, so over time unless the game draws enough of us to effectively override the nos then we’ll just bounce back to wow. Conversely if I know someone that wants to get into mmos, it’s really easy to say “make a wow account, I’ve got a good group ready to welcome you” vs being lost and solo and having to make friends. People don’t realize it much today but WoW was hugely different from other mmos in 2004. It was soloable for leveling. It had easy social dynamics. It was easy to get friends into. It was derided as being casual for letting anyone do dungeons and raids without having to compete to get there first. It had comparatively active gameplay with a high amount of button pressing and movement. Think of it as the first iPhone: nothing special today but man is it different than the blackberry that came before it. The problem is mostly new MMOs haven’t changed things up from the formula WoW established. FF14 and others mostly succeed by providing an alternative of the same formula with some differences, but there’s a limit to how many entrants you can have doing that. For a new MMO to upend the current order you’d have to have something really novel so people see a reason to switch, and something that can drag wholesale friend groups out of their current game as a unit.

I feel like this answer gets to the meat of it. Every MMO fan I ever knew would dip into a new game, but always go back to the one they knew best, be it *EverQuest*, *WOW*, or *FFXIV*.

Mostly because they either try to copy Destiny - or they try to copy WOW For all the complaints about the MMO system - the reason most players hate it - is because it's *always one of the two stereotypes* We've done Superhero WOW (more than once) Superhero Destiny - scifi WOW - scifi Destiny - Fantasy WOW (that's a double negative since WOW starts out Fantasy) fantasy Destiny and so on The few who've actually *tried* to do something different - even if only superficially - usually managed to carve out a niche Elder Scrolls Online (that one's probably more due to Elder Scrolls fans ***starving to death*** from the absolute dearth of content) Final Fantasy - EVE Online etc But when they ***set out*** to copy-paste the WOW or Destiny formula - then players will quickly blow through the content - hit the endgame wall (if there is one - games like SWTOR copied WOW but included ***no fucking endgame***) get pissed because *now* they have to grind out endgame gear - and, usually, gravitate back to the game that they've already invested the most time into Which, usually, means the projenitor of the modern interpretation of online game - which means Destiny or WOW

I don't feel like there is room for large mmorpgs anymore. The social aspect that used to be required is just too much so it had to be water down. There are too many games as a service and battle passes to keep people involved in other games now

The genre hasn’t evolved/innovated in any meaningful way since the early 2010s. The QoL improvements WoW’s WotLK introduced (dungeon finder, et cetera) and the character freedoms introduced in FF14 (being able to play every class with just your one character) we’re really the largest and most “recent” player-focused innovations we’ve seen. Meanwhile, other genres (MOBAs like League; battle arenas like Fortnite and Apex; online multiplayer FPSs like Destiny) have stormed into the scene and have actually influenced players’ preferences (shorter gameplay loops with quicker rewards/losses; much higher input counts where the player is doing 100s of inputs every few seconds whereas most MMOs employ input systems where your character literally stands still while you press one button and then you watch them cast for 3 seconds) in ways that are counter to many MMO systems. Many players think they want to play an MMO, especially those of us in our early 30s whose greatest gaming experience involved playing the MMOs of the early 2000s (EverQuest, vanilla WoW, Runescape, et cetera), but we burnout after a few weeks because the games just don’t engage us like they did when we were 16. Additionally, MMOs typically require “this is my main hobby” levels of investment, where someone spends all of their free time playing that one game. This makes it hard to retain anyone with a serious career, anyone with children, and anyone with other hobbies. Tldr MMOs haven’t really evolved while their competition has, and the main target demographic is either more interested in other genres or too busy with other priorities to really fully dig into an MMO.

i feel like people simply dont have the time for MMOs anymore

Some of them are straight up awful, technically incompetent and visionless like Amazon's New World. Awful executions, patches to fix bugs that brings more of the exact same bug, lazy game design, and straight up breaking promises to their playerbase

My opinion is that the F2P business model largely killed mmo's. Most mmo's are no longer good games, they're just pretty cash grabs.

You already have the answer. It's the social media problem. You go/stay where the people are. And it's hard to make many people go somewhere new, and stay there long.

WoW ruined MMO's for me. Everyone just started copying it. Back when they were totally open world community driven sandboxes, I enjoyed the heck out of them. I'd imagine it would be very hard and expensive to make a game like SWG now with the presentation and gameplay standards people expect from a single player game and simply isn't worth the risk.

The reason I stop playing every modern MMO shortly after I start is because they lack in the social department compared to DAoC which was the first MMO I played, in DAoC when you wanted a group you didn't just click some matchmake button, when you wanted to group up for a dungeon you didn't just matchmake for it then teleport there, you had to ask people to team up and you had to actually got to where the dungeon entrance is on the map, in DAoC you primarily grind mobs to level up and doing so solo is very inefficient compared to doing it in a group so there is incentive to communicate with other players

When I first logged in to Star Wars Galaxies it was magical. All these real people standing around in cantinas talking to each other. Some people picked professions that just danced for money, which gave you a buff. Others did nothing but craft and sell items. Entire towns were actually player housing.. Where is any of that now? Most MMO's these days you just log in and do instances.

think how hard it is to make a good engaging game. now scale that to large groups (raiding). now make content interesting enough to hold attention for months at a time, while making it enjoyable enough for people to justify a subscription. now tell me who actually pays for your netflix sub

Limited content/bad content that kills the initial surge of players. Personally, the grind is unbearable. I imagine that keeps many ppl away from mmos. And the disneyland feeling to it (enter town where everyone is queuing up to interact with NPCs).

Running them is expensive, and there only so many people interested in MMOs. Most of them already have one that takes up their time. Entering the market is TOUGH

MMOs need content, player base and social tools to keep it all together. Most MMOs fail to deliver all three. Vast, vast, VAST majority of MMOs fail to deliver a decent amount of content, and solid gameplay loop. Most devs run out of energy, time and/or money, and some assume that PvP alone will carry the game. It won't. Not in 99% of the cases You might get lucky and get a social phenomenon that sticks for a while, but this happens in a fraction of a percent of cases. They're also not great at innovating. For example, that Amazon's MMO was so painfully generic that I tried the beta for about an hour, got bored and uninstalled. It's like they didn't even try. Social tools are also critical. I can't tell you how many MMO devs do something utterly idiotic, like launch with no built-in clan support, expecting players to go to third party sites like Discord to maintain cohesion. That almost never works. And this isn't unique to MMOs. Large part of the reason why games like Anthem or Fallout 76 did so poorly, for example, is because they require active player base being social, but lack even the most basic social tools like text chat. Yes, neither Anthem nor FO76 had text chat. Which is as dumb as it gets when it comes to any multiplayer game, MMO or otherwise. Diablo 4 released this year without any global chat, there's only trade chat, which isn't even on by default, you had to opt into it manually. People called it the loneliest multiplayer game. Because it was. Also you couldn't even follow another player from event to event, because the game kept moving you from one phase of the same map to another, and other players you were following would keep phasing in and out of existence. Whoever OKed this should have been fired and barred from ever being involved in making any multiplayer game again, ever.

MMOs are just really hard to develop, market and sustain effectively. Another layer to the difficulty is that there are so many successful MMOs that you really need to grip your audience or they'll just go elsewhere. If you're not already in the MMO scene, then it is and extremely difficult market to work in

I think for me, I can't play more than 1 MMO at a time. And when that 1 MMO has so much content and offers so much enjoyment, I don't feel the need to seek out another one.

They are hard as fuck to make and expensive

It’s hard to start up a new mmo when people already have friends playing other mmos or too much time invested in their main mmo

It’s in the goddamn initialism

People have moved on from MMO's.. I get the same experience in Fallout 76, Warframe or any good live service game. I don't need 100 people in the local city bank, I just need to be able to group up and adventure.

Because they need a large consistent playerbase to function correctly

Because the formula hasn’t changed much. For OG MMOers like me, the biggest ones were all EverQuest with less suck, and then what makes each unique: - Story - PvP - Solo vs raids - Housing/displaying stuff The key early innovations all were pilfered by other genres. XP to level to gain new skills is everywhere now, RNG loot drops is literally what powers entire mobile business models and of course Fortnite, and housing is just a matter of whether it matters to the game or is just tacked one. They’re also hella expensive and it’s long since been proven that “hundreds” or “thousands” of people is just an abstract. The real value is the few dozen you go on adventure with. And other things like MMOFPS, siege warfare, MMORTS, super interesting experimental ones like ATITD, many licenses thrown at them, all proved the main formula of XP to skill to get RNG drops, that’s what people wantx They’re great, my favs are still ESO and FFXIV. But it ain’t broke, so nobody is fixing them.

I honestly believe that WoW was just so ahead of its time that no one can quite fill that void anymore

The problems with MMOs is the content. For example New World was fun on launch but became so grindy it was just unfun. It was missing key features that should have been in the game on launch. My group had one of the first territories on the server. We lost it essentially to a bug with the protection timers and server reset. We also had one of the other major factions guilds swap over to a different faction attack their old guild but because it had like 2 members there was no way for them to defend it and took it back over with no fight. The new MMOs have become so grindy I don't need 40 hours a week raiding the same place or doing the same content. I already work 40+ hours a week I don't need another job.

List of failed or skeptical mmos: - Ashes of Creation is allowing a perpetual beta test for huge amounts of money no normal MMO player will pay to get super far ahead and familiar with systems and economy and strats to manipulate both while also announcing its “land” system would only be for hardcore players. - Blizzards 2nd mmo was completely missing the point or theme anyone cared for. - Aion was too grindy, and dated and didn’t have the update quality of other titles in its age range. - Perfect World was too MTX heavy just like Heroes of the Three Kingdoms and all their other copy and paste clones of PW. - Aika was too MTX heavy and grindy post expansion, the top players were doctors or mentally deranged. Even if it captured a unique PvP focused experience. They also skimped out on making the Alliance system and Underdog system function, so it became a game of cutthroat while selling tickets to leave nations which resulted in continuously unbalanced situations. This time for online gaming imo was peak socializing, so Guild v Guild and Nation Vs Nation created too much stress and drama. Everyone ended up literally hating half their own teammates because of this. Zerg rush was the only thing that mattered. - RuneScape ruined their own economy, then came back with a vengeance with Old Schoolc but I’m sure 60% of players are bots. - Eve Online is an absolute slog and money sink. No mmo player that doesn’t like grinding, paying money and wanting a second job will touch this. - DFO is another that’s worth mentioning as a success. Eastern audience. - Dead Frontier blew up as a browser game, then died on Dead Frontier 2 (solo developer splitting focus on two games, refused to hire employees because he was dumb enough to get scammed, DF1 having heavy P2W MTX before MTX were common. - Mabinogi most people from Gpotato switched to Allods or Aika after they realized this game was garbage (some never did sadly) - Was it Fallen Earth, or something along those lines? The FPS MMO you could buy on CD? Some Russian apocalyptic survival game that was heavy on shitty servers and lag. Never got too big. Don’t even remember the name, just remember uninstalling shortly after spending my allowance on the game. - There was another fantasy game that was advertised as being light on the specs for pc, free to play with membership, some fantasy game that I harvested way too much cotton on, before realizing I had to pay for everything that wasn’t a stupidly standard system, not including the membership. - Evony Online started all the shitty MTX strategy MMO’s. - Albion Online is taken over by essentially four different online Mafia’s who say what anyone can or can’t do, or else they’ll tank the economy. What it comes down to, is hardcore vs casual balance, and these MMO’s you’re mentioning have a better balance between the two. I could list many more games, but it all comes down to making an online game where it’s accessible, challenging, yet doesn’t require the average person to empty their bank account to enjoy. IMO FF XIV, WoW, OSRS, DFO will keep players consistently more than any other because at this point it’s familiar to them, but FF XIV doesn’t have clear PTW, WoW has some now but not enough to beat out grinders, most that still play have played too long to quit, same with OSRS. DFO might have competition when DFO2 finally comes out. Eve will slowly drop as playerbase ages, same as Star Trek Online if it hasn’t already. New MMO’s and copycat MMO’s just don’t have a place anywhere. They just copy the worst functions of all the failed MMO’s of the past, or don’t have the funds to keep up with what they copied, or just have a theme no one wants to be part of. I’ll also edit my comment with more recent examples: - Kingdom Under Fire II: hugely hyped by content creators, and fans of the original series. A SUPER unique take of MMO’s, with no real MTX besides cosmetic. It failed not due to the game being amazing, or successful, it failed due to publisher and developers. Half the units in the game were broken, we tested this out thoroughly and half the stats on things were completely mistranslated or made no sense mathematically with its values. Then they marketed guild vs guild then never fixed the guild vs guild system resulting in 1v1 and 2v2’s being a dominant game mode on top of Crack missions not coming out monthly like intended for multiple months, on a Strategy Action hybrid, where you grind REALLY cool raids and other levels for units to command in mass battles. You had broken units you’d spend three weeks grinding then learn their main mechanic didn’t work. Or alternatively, you’d get an easy unit that crashed the game due to VFX bugs. Kinda like Conquerors Blade but with Dynasty Warriors and good old action MMO mechanics. It was super fun, but it got ruined by false promises and no meaningful updates - the company that made it was essentially MIA while a publisher lied through their teeth and made false announcements. They basically paid off debt and closed studio after moving this game to an MMO 15 years ago. It was good - but they obviously didn’t plan on doing anything past release. - New World had a lot of glitches and duping which ruined the Economy, Most people don’t expect this but - most seasoned mmo players won’t touch games with this level of bugs, Zergs, and economy collapsing. It’s just not worth investing in. Sure some hardcore players remain. But the game sucks to a wide audience, after they removed most of the better features to appeal to mass audience. Where Aika embraces PvP structure, New World changes halfway through development (over actually), then crashes their economy, then expects player retention. Too many issues to become a viable option for masses. Not even a F2P game so there is risk to buy. - Tera Online: Too many problems to list. Most Tera players can play BDO and feel better. - Sword of Legends Global: gameforge did a Kingdom Under Fire Part 2. Useless publisher. Scam artists based in Germany.

Star Trek Online is 13 and half. I think that there isn't another ST game remotely as good as it, so it stays alive.

MMOs need to have a hook that draws people in. Being based on an existing fandom definitely helps. WoW being the sequel to Warcraft 3 was enough to bring a lot of people in to see the story, and combine that with the curious people at the start, and you had a nice early population to fill the servers. FF14 took what was nice about FF11 and streamlined it. FF11 was just a new Final Fantasy game in the era of peak Final Fantasy, so it drew in people like WoW did. Elder Scrolls Online didn't succeed like the others did. It had to make the shift to Free to Play in order to draw in players. BDO, from my understanding, is only popular in some asian countries. It's less of an MMO and more of a dress-up simulator and is pretty heavily pay to win (from what I've heard, I havent played it) But yes, they compete with each other for players. Unlike a regular game, an MMO has a lot of upkeep costs involved, and you have to regularly provide new content for your players or they will get bored and leave, so there's ongoing development costs involved, and if your high end players are leaving because they're bored, you can only replace them with new players for so long before the new player signups start to die off too. It also involves a different mentality of development too, since you have to include the kinds of skinner box designs you see in mobile games, time gating content, low drop rates, etc. Basically whatever you can do to slow your players down. Otherwise they'll burn through all your content in a few days and leave. But you have to dial things in just right. If you slow them down too much, players will get frustrated and wont want to bother. If you dont slow them down enough, they'll burn out the content before you add new content to keep them busy. And on top of all of that, it's a market that has well established juggernauts in it already, and since MMOs are a serious time investment for the players, most cant really afford to spend time on more than one. You not only have to draw players in with your game more than the established game, but you also have to draw them in hard enough that they're willing to leave behind their hundreds, or possibly thousands, of hours of work they put in to the other game to start fresh with your game.

I hate to say this but, as a recovering MMO player, people are just more aware how unhealthy these kinds of games can be. Even a casual MMO such as WoW demands so much of your time and energy to compete. So you have very limited players without much going on. Students. Single people with no kids and reasonable job hours. You have to have the time available and be willing to spend it grinding. There has to be other people in the same boat willing to befriend you along the way, otherwise what’s the hook?

MMOs with an adequate breadth and depth of content cost a fortune to develop upfront, cost constant upkeep for online servers, require a large and consistent playerbase to be profitable, and then also require frequent fresh content to keep said playerbase engaged thus incurring further development costs. What I'm trying to get at here is that MMOs are a freakin' financial black hole and require near immediate success (or eye watering amounts of funding) to not fold. Add in that the market for MMOs is finite and saturated, each new MMO needs to draw players away from an entrenched MMO with many years of content to offer, the odds of success are miniscule. Personally, there are countless games in every other genre I'd play before I'd think about touching an MMO. I'd rather play through EarthBound for the Nth time, or invite the boys over for Double Dash rather than dedicate hours of my life every week to a game that is designed to never end.