So basically the MMO genre is dead, or?

[Deleted]

I always said EQN was the last AAA western MMO. Now we are stuck with "sandbox crowdfunded" MMOs. The theme park AAA MMO is dead, in its place we have survival sandbox MMOs. Is it a good exchange? I don't think so. Looks like I am stuck with WoW for a while.

[Edge-]

The genre is definitely dieing.
All upcoming mmo's and the ones You mentioned are niche games, especially Star Citizen will have a very limited gameplay and choices.
Camelot Unchained, Albion Online, Crowfall - all are PvP sandbox centered games. Niche titles as one can say.

The MMO market can only sustain so many games. It's not like the multilpayer shooter market (which is similarly dominated by a small handful of games) where annual releases or bi-annual releases are possible. MMO's need to stick around for a while.

The fact that the market is spinning into moving away from "bigger" releases that are already out there and supported and towards more targeted/niche games is actually pretty great. More variety, more interesting stuff, all while the market sustains the games people are already playing.

The MMO market as a whole is far, far from dying.

[Thessik-Irontail]

Yes, the MMO genre is dead.

[Lazuli]

You're not stuck with WoW because of its numbers; those numbers ultimately mean nothing since you will not interact with the vast majority of players. And when you do, it's most likely a miserable LFR experience with worthless garbage who don't care about playing well.

Other MMOs have pumped out more and better content than WoW, so I wouldn't focus much on the numbers. Now, that's not to say every MMO has a healthy community. Many of them do not meet my standards for a minimum player base. But that player base doesn't need to be in the millions. Player bases between 10,000-100,000 are sufficient for a good recruitment pool to accomplish your goals.

I don't really care about numbers, I care about quality. I know some MMO's have pumped out more content than WoW. Still can't stand the globals and insane graphical intensity of FFXIV, or the extreme simplicity of GW2 combat.

I still play the original GW, imo the only real unique MMO since its release that gives you elder scrolls levels of customization. I've been playing that more than WoD recently while I wait for legion, so that should tell you how much I care about population as it's probably 1 of the most dead MMOs on the market, even though it has a loyal community.

[Slaughty8]

I don't think this post is internally consistent, nor does it say anything to prove the genre is dying.

Unless you meant to imply that a genre has to have AAA games coming out that have ALL THE FEATURES and appeal to ALL THE DEMOGRAPHICS in order to not be dying.

It is internally consistent. All I wanted to say is that the era of theme park mmo's is over, nobody wants to risk making one. New mmos are niche/sandbox crowdfounded/or not.

The MMO market can only sustain so many games. It's not like the multilpayer shooter market (which is similarly dominated by a small handful of games) where annual releases or bi-annual releases are possible. MMO's need to stick around for a while.

The fact that the market is spinning into moving away from "bigger" releases that are already out there and supported and towards more targeted/niche games is actually pretty great. More variety, more interesting stuff, all while the market sustains the games people are already playing.

The MMO market as a whole is far, far from dying.

That's true, but, it depends on your personal needs. For theme park mmo lovers, the mmo industry is dying, there is no doubt about that.

[Edge-]

That's true, but, it depends on your personal needs. For theme park mmo lovers, the mmo industry is dying, there is no doubt about that.

If you want brand new games all the time, I guess. But the ones on the market are getting tons of content, most with regular updates and expansions. If anything, they've been pretty steadily improving across the board as the years go on. It's a pretty fantastic place for the market to be, honestly. A number of health, stable MMO's all supported by their devs with updates years and years after release.

So if you're looking for new MMO's, sure. But if you enjoy the ones already on the market, you're biggest problem is that you can't have enough time to keep up with all the awesome content being release every year.

But again, a constant flow of brand new MMO's isn't sustainable without older ones dying off to free up some market space. MMO's require longterm stability, unlike non-MMO's where they're built around one-off releases (sometimes with DLC) or refreshes in the way of sequels/expansions.

[unholytestament]

It is internally consistent. All I wanted to say is that the era of theme park mmo's is over, nobody wants to risk making one. New mmos are niche/sandbox crowdfounded/or not.

Okay.

That has nothing to do with what I said, as I was talking about the genre as a whole.

[Thrif]

If you mean it's dead in terms of new releases being put out, then yes, it's dead. But it's not so weird. It's though to compete with an already established market. In order to pull people away from games like WoW you need to put out a game so good that it'll pull people away from a game they have invested thousands of hours in, and a game so much better than what one of the biggest game developing companies in the world can pull off. And if you fail, it's a huge ass investment going down the drain.

Once WoW has died enough though, I think we might see some new games trying their luck.

[Nachturnal]

Star Citizen, Shroud of The Avatar, City of Titans, Camelot Unchained.

Please stop lol.

Star Citizen, albeit a very ambitious project, is still very niche and considering the resources, I don't see it being anything huge. Isn't City of Titans a reboot of City of Heroes /Villains which was shut down? Camelot Unchained lol.

Anyways, the mmo genre I wouldn't say is dying of is dead. But it's definitely stagnant.

[unholytestament]

ITT: People who don't understand that the MMORPG genre itself is niche.

WoW is the outlier. WoW is NOT the standard.

[Fencers]

Pretty harsh bias, willful exclusion and subjective qualifiers make the OP's assertions fruitless to argue against.

The OP and thread premise are poorly written.

[kenn9530]

Please stop lol.

Star Citizen, albeit a very ambitious project, is still very niche and considering the resources, I don't see it being anything huge. Isn't City of Titans a reboot of City of Heroes /Villains which was shut down? Camelot Unchained lol.

Anyways, the mmo genre I wouldn't say is dying of is dead. But it's definitely stagnant.

star citizen has just under 1.4 million people who have backed the game and are waiting for it to be ready, the space genres have always been a smaller minority but its still a massive amount of people, star citizen is revolutionising the space MMO genre.

[Edge-]

Please stop lol.

Star Citizen, albeit a very ambitious project, is still very niche and considering the resources, I don't see it being anything huge.

Considering they've already raised $100M...that's pretty fucking huge, dude.

Isn't City of Titans a reboot of City of Heroes /Villains which was shut down?

Spiritual successor. There are a few of them in the works, but they're all still pretty far from launching.

Camelot Unchained lol.

Why? It's making steady progress and looking good. It knows what it is/wants to be CSE doesn't pretend that it's much more than a PvP centric MMO.

Anyways, the mmo genre I wouldn't say is dying of is dead. But it's definitely stagnant.

See, with all these smaller niche projects, I'd say quite the opposite. If anything, the market is shaping up to see its most diverse lineup of games ever. By quite a longshot, actually. What we used to have was second generation MMO after second generation MMO, each trying a slightly different take while aiming for WoW-bux. A few unique games popped up from time to time and there were some fantastic features/systems/innovations in some, but they were largely based around the same core design principles.

The market is finally moving away from that, even if it's not the big boys driving the development now. And that's pretty bloody fantastic.

[Mcbenchpress]

WoW will be the last large scale triple-A MMO to exist. The genre is effectively dying all around it, with the exception of the very hardcore players of their respective games. Once WoW has run it's course (which is indefinite), it's done.

[Sevyvia]

Yeah I know about Eve, it has a strong following, but like I said I don't know if those are considered MMORPGs. I don't even know if Eve has a story, lol. I was never really into space sims as I am more of a on-the-ground combat type player.

EVE Online has an absolutely amazing, insane story, it just doesn't throw it at you. Spend some time looking into it if you're interested in cyberpunk/sci-fi themes.

[Bigbazz]

I think the traditional Everquest/WoW style MMORPG genre is on life support, not dead but it's not growing. The MMO genre still has a world of possibilities though, especially in the future with VR tech but we're not there yet. Problem with MMO's is they take too much time and money to develop even the basic bread and butter, but one day we will see something incredible launch, until then it's probably steady decline back to a niche genre for the traditional MMORPG.

[dope_danny]

Its not dead until its dead -take this from a fan of lightgun games and rail shooters and that shit largely died off with the Dreamcast at the turn of the century. But the market has certainly crashed in terms of new ips versus established products. Games with an established userbase are going strong even if some like WoW have had a massive player decline from what they were. But new games? new mmos? whens the last one that took off? FFXIV like 3 years ago?

Theres a lot of reasons for mmos failing to launch. However this is compounded by one simple fact: The mainstream doesnt give a shit anymore.

How often do you see an ad for an mmo over a regular game in your day to day life that isnt a banner ad on a website?

The age of 'get this game and put in hours on one character' has burnt out and lost interest for the mainstream. Shit even mobas are already losing steam in this regard and again its the same thing: established with a dedicated userbase? you do fine. A new attempt to get some of that money? yeah you might last a year tops.

Online games got big in the mainstream around 2008 but it isnt 2008 anymore and people simply want different things. We are standouts because we are coming to websites like these where they are talked about 24/7, for other websites the last few years most mmo news is "BLANK studio, producer of BLANK mmo declares its shuttering" or some variant of it on repeat since late 2014.

the bubble burst.

[notanmmmonewbie]

Yeah I know about Eve, it has a strong following, but like I said I don't know if those are considered MMORPGs. I don't even know if Eve has a story, lol. I was never really into space sims as I am more of a on-the-ground combat type player.

I hate to be *that* guy that breaks down what each letter stands for in "MMORPG". But the last 3 letters? R-P-G? thats exactly what EVE online is all about isnt it? And the cool thing is that people can set out to define their own role that may or may not fall in line with what the devs had in mind. Like would anyone have thought that Red Frog Freight would have been a thing? thats a group of people who made it their "role" in the game to provide a secure shipping service to the community. You have other stuff too i think like professional market speculators, people who take on non-combat roles and even people who act like banks providing loans and i think renting equipment out too.

[karumayu]

MMOs are long term investment for companies and its more or less ideal for a major publisher/developer to focus on having one or two MMOs under their management. Churning out a new mmo on yearly basis defeats the entire basis for MMOs as it is based on longevity. Many players have settled with one or more MMO's they play and are highly invested in these days. They are not consolidated into one MMO however like the glory days of WoW and I don't think they ever will. Now we have several MMO's appealing to certain areas more so than others, which is great for the player base.

The only MMO that have not actively adding new content to their game is WoW. Other smaller budgeted MMOs have constantly been updating their games with content, so I really do not see the OP statement about other games being out dated or out of content. Also the decline of WoW does not signal a decline of the genre.

[Lazuli]

Star Citizen, Shroud of The Avatar, City of Titans, Camelot Unchained, etc. Pay some attention before you start questioning a genre's death.

I already mentioned star citizen

Lol shroud of the avatar something straight out of the 90's

City of heroes remake? I heard about that YEARS ago... I thought it was dead.

Camelot Unchained yet another niche failure on an atrocious engine

May as well have mentioned all the other kickstarter MMOs that will never see the light of day