Is online gaming in trouble?

[Mistral]

No I don't think so.
On the contrary there are much more players around than ever before.
Every single title you named had more than ten times as many players on release than the online games 10 years ago had.

Yes the percentage of "game nomads" might be increasing and the numbers are fluctuating more than ever.
But that's more because of the steadily increasing number of alternatives we have now.
Gamers are just fussy nowadays.
If there's a little something they don't like about a game, they'll complain about it and then just quit.
Because they can.

[tehTyrant]

I think MMO's are very slowly declining in player numbers. I think over all they are still doing well, but with such a flood of MMO's over the last few years most gamers are a little bit more cautious over spending there money on games that history has shown since WOW have went free to play. I do know that my group of friends that have played MMO's for a long period of time have now all quit playing MMO's. Personally I think it's just burn out on games that use long hours of a persons free time.

No, those people just switch out and play other games for long periods of time, but you're partly right, but more is what they are doing in those games for long periods of time. Like for me, I MoP really just burned me out over dailies. I hate dailies. I've done them since they were introduced in TBC and I hate them then... AND I STILL DID THEM. WHY? I have no idea, but they were there, and I did them, but now I just can't stand this system. Especially since there's like 50 dailies in MoP. There was never that many in previous expansions. And you had to do them to get your coins, help with valor gains and unlock gear in MoP and I did them on 2 different characters. It sucked and it's a horrible system. I mean shit, they even have professions with 24hr CDs... remember to do everything EVERYDAY. No, I don't want to, sometimes, I don't want to log in, but then I miss out! I don't want that system.

So now, I am finishing single player games I haven't finished, playing Planetside 2 and possibly looking for another MMO. Hopefully one that doesn't require me to do a fuckton of dailies everyday for a month or longer.

Also, when WOW launched, there was not that many online games in 2004 and it was still "new" and even through 2009 we only had a couple MMO launches... that didn't do so well, but now... there are shit tons of online games! So people are scattered everywhere. I don't think we'll see a subscriber based game with a number like this. Of course F2P's yeah, we'll see large numbers of "account" just because they are free to make.

[Nirawen]

OP seems to be under the impression that when some stops playing a particular game online they cease to play games online in general. Every single game regardless of singleplayer or multiplayer experiences a decrease in players over time, people go from one game to another as they get bored of/overplay that game.

You listed a few games that have seen a drop in players but the vast majority of those players will have simply changed to a different game, the global population of online gamers has been and still is increasing exponentially.

The answer is no, not only is it not in trouble but there's not even a drop in people playing online.

[Valeron]

The market is saturated with mmos. It's not that there is a decline in overall numbers of people playing but that they are spread out over a multitude of games.

[Ferocity]

MMORPGs only had their golden age due to big technical revolution as in: wide spread of Internet at around 2003-2006, as before it was quite a luxury, and connections were always unstable.

I'd say that offline gaming is in trouble and need recover after MMORPGs pushed away all talents from making single player games. Thanks to indie developers, without them we wouldn't really have interesting PC games to play at all. MMORPGs will keep declining unless their paradigm will be changed.

[The Casualty]

So let me get this straight:

The premise of your hypothesis is that online gaming is suffering because you see communities declining from non-MMO (as well as MMO, but then again, that may be a separate problem altogether) games.

Let me point this out to you. All games, I repeat all games, suffer attrition. A lot of people bought GW2/Diablo 3/Spec Ops 2/etc... and decided that it wasn't for them or played through the story/content and moved on. It happens to all games.

It may surprise you, but I do not play WoW, Quake 2, CS, or UT2k4 (okay, maybe very rarely for UT) anymore, and yet I still online game. I just play through my game catalog, much like many players do.

Your fault is when you assume people should maintain the same login rate for non-MMO games as MMO games.

[ro9ue]

Planetside 2. Killer of WoW and Call of Duty in a single blow.