"The neckbeards aren't gone... they're WAITING."

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Doesn't Asmongold surround himself with kids?

How would he know?

Ya, its an unfortunate truth, but Asmongold essentially just RPs as a serious WoW player.
He does nothing but play games all day so that makes him a neckbeard, but he is not a competitive gamer any more and that is what the gaming market has trended towards.
He will fit in better with the Classic crowd than the 2018 gaming crowd now-a-days.

[Chloral]

FF14 is extremely good. It's subs are at around 3 millions as of march 2017. I have played it a lot during the WoD disaster and had a blast

[Pickynerd]

Ya, its an unfortunate truth, but Asmongold essentially just RPs as a serious WoW player.
He does nothing but play games all day so that makes him a neckbeard, but he is not a competitive gamer any more and that is what the gaming market has trended towards.
He will fit in better with the Classic crowd than the 2018 gaming crowd now-a-days.

Best of luck to him, eventually he will find out why casual gaming is a thing.

[MoanaLisa]

When it has continued to thrive for much longer than any other offerings who can it not be considered the current standard?

Since World of Warcraft's initial release we have some data points about what can be expected when a game studio releases a new MMORPG and how the business can be expected to go. If you could graph that, World of Warcraft would be a clear outlier. That's really the heart of my argument.

Of course a game studio will desire to do WoW's business. But the expectation on whether the new game is a success or not should be based on average performance for all like titles and statistically you would want to not include outliers at either end.

- - - Updated - - -

FFXIV is doing paid subs and is probably the #2 highest active MMO out there right now.

It's a fair point to call that out. To say they are gone as I originally did was too much.

What I was driving at was the expectation on the part of players, investors, etc. that World of Warcraft is the stake in the ground that determines whether or not an MMO is successful. That's unrealistic and actually hurts the chances of a new title succeeding. Perception is important and if a game is always to be compared to a title that is a clear outlier and then abandoned when it doesn't live up to those expectations then everyone loses. The game studio loses because they "failed" and players lose as the game studio moves on to other things.

FFXIV is fine and doing well after its restart. Even the best guess about that though is that their base of concurrent players is several orders of magnitude smaller than WoW. Kudos to them for continuing to have reasonable expectations about their business.

You can sort of see the same thing here with a dedicated crowd of players/posters who expect Classic to outstrip the regular game in users. I would argue that if it pays for itself and makes Blizzard a profit then it's done very well even if it has many fewer players. Surely though, there will be those that will say the whole idea was a complete failure because there aren't several million playing it. Time will tell on how well it does.

[Deleted]

Wildstars terrible forgettable story scenary and its awful action reticule combat killed it harder then the. "Hardcore" aspect.

Wildstar was never going to be a contender veing a new IP

Lets be honest WoW villan hero and world backlog is what caused it to surge and survive in the first place.

And if you truely believe lich king. , illidan, or burning legion didnt sell boxes you are a special kind of ignorant.

Sure nowadays most subs are still around by pure addiction and time investment alone. Its a hard link to break. But the rng spiral since WoD caused me to leave.

I only hold an interest for the two decades plus of investment i have in the franchises story and watching it still play out. Azeroth and its characters and villans are top notch.

I can agree on pretty much all points, actually.

The idea that there are millions of poopsocker sleeper agents ready to drop their job, kick their wife and children out of the house and GLORIOUSLY RETURN when/if a "hardcore" (again, wtf) AAA MMO appears is just laughable to me, so I decided to poke at it using Wildstar as the stick.

At the best of times a handful, nowadays less than a handful. And certainly not the majority of people who made WoW surge and survive, ofc.

[Jtbrig7390]

I wouldnt be suprised if someone finds a way to bring back oldschool MMOs in some form and that there is actually a bunch of old and young fans, who could get into that.

One did and its Jagex with Old School Runescape. They listened to there community and brought it back from there it has been developed into its own thing while keeping a lot (if not all) the core element's OSRS had.

Now it has a very active and lively community and nothing major gets put in (Besides quests) unless a vast majority agree on it.

Hell its the only MMO I play at this time, Also at the time of this post there is 74.5k people playing OSRS.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I dont understand the us vs them mentality when it comes to classic and retail. Subs are subs. If money comes in for classic then it is good for the retail game. It isn't like after it releases they are going to be giving it a new raid tier every six month or even using the same team. Activision Blizzard is a multi-billion dollar company and isn't going to go into the dirt over classic WoW. It just brings people back that are giving there money to strange russian net hounds and other shady internet people on PRs and has a lot of that money rediected into Blizzard.

Is this good for people that like the live game? Yes. Is it good for people that like classic? Sure.. as long as its not turned into non-classic. Then who know some people that only play one or the other might end up playing both, playing the other, or staying with what they like. All this sounds good? Just get over it already.. this really isn't that big of a deal. If anything its great news for everyone that loves WoW.

[Soon-TM]

I'd say that the success of somewhat hardcore games like DS and PoE support OP's idea. As someone said already, the next big thing won't come from the AAA publishers, because they are no longer (even if they were at some point) innovative. They handle huge budgets under the watchful eye of a shareholders' board, so they stay with the "tried and true" formulae and leave little room for experimentation, if any. Much like what's happening in the film industry...

[Zamfix]

All the people who liked hardcore MMOs grew up or got real lives. The people who were on high school or younger for EQ, Ultima, WoW, etc. grew up and don't have time for that. Everyone older who played those probably realized they were wasting their life playing. And everyone who played who doesn't fall into one of those two camps is excited for WoW Classic.

I'm in the former. I liked vanilla WoW because I was in high school. I ain't got time for that anymore, I got a life and family now.

[Soon-TM]

All the people who liked hardcore MMOs grew up or got real lives. The people who were on high school or younger for EQ, Ultima, WoW, etc. grew up and don't have time for that. Everyone older who played those probably realized they were wasting their life playing. And everyone who played who doesn't fall into one of those two camps is excited for WoW Classic.

I'm in the former. I liked vanilla WoW because I was in high school. I ain't got time for that anymore, I got a life and family now.

I don't think that's the motive. For example, if you liked basketball when you were a teen, there is no reason for you not to continue playing during adulthood, even if you evidently won't be able to play as many hours as when you were a 15 y/o. With videogames it's the same thing, except that they still carry a stigma (sort of) in certain social milieus.

[bergmann620]

Hardcore means different things to different people. I think, in the Vanilla sense, it mainly meant, "Grindy as fuck, logistics nightmares, and the joy of discovery."

The next "MMO" that does the kind of business WoW has probably hasn't begun development yet.

It will almost certainly be console-based. It will almost certainly exist in VR. It will more than likely have much more 'natural' game systems, like say Skyrim, but with actually decent animations. The biggest changes will be the overall immersion, and the inability to use current tools like WoW Popular and Mr Robot. The skill will exist on a far more natural level.

[melodramocracy]

People tend to forget that WoW significantly altered the expectations of a successful MMO (much to the detriment of the genre, in my opinion). Everquest at its highest popularity had a fraction of the players WoW has ever had, as did Asheron's Call.

In todays gaming climate, both of those games would be considered failures, and probably be shuttered within a year. So yes, those players are out there, and they are waiting, but there are just way fewer of them than you might be led to believe. And odds are they didn't exactly love WoW in the first place.

[Steelangel]

Well considering it flopped horrendously and went F2P in record time, I'm sure there's a lot of things.

But to quote myself, they tailor made a game to appeal to a market that was a lie. I'm not saying that some people don't want ye olde WoW with 40 man raids and attunements, that much is obvious. But a large portion of those who 'want' it have never actually experienced it first hand and changed their minds when they did, and what was left was simply not enough to sustain the game themselves.

The biggest thing about W* was that people didn't give it half a chance. The gameplay was awesome. Crafting was innovative. Telegraphs and positioning were key. The build system was a bit clunky - but so was Vanilla WoW.

People got the vanilla experience from W*. Then they said "screw this" and left in droves once they realized that they had to actually form dungeon groups in trade chat and couldn't get into LFRs.

W* should have been a hit, but they listened to the internet instead of listening to Blizzard's business model.

[Witchblade77]

I will never stop being amused at people who think Vanilla was hardvore. compared to mmo's of that time it was "hello kitty online" which is why it blew up and becasue as popular as it has. hardcore audience is incredibly niche. and a lot of the people who were hardcore back then? got older, got families and have neither time nor desire to play "hardcore" anymore.

[Soon-TM]

The biggest thing about W* was that people didn't give it half a chance. The gameplay was awesome. Crafting was innovative. Telegraphs and positioning were key. The build system was a bit clunky - but so was Vanilla WoW.

People got the vanilla experience from W*. Then they said "screw this" and left in droves once they realized that they had to actually form dungeon groups in trade chat and couldn't get into LFRs.

W* should have been a hit, but they listened to the internet instead of listening to Blizzard's business model.

Blizzard's "business model" with WoW was a combination of both very talented game designers with sheer dumb luck. It won't ever be recreated, so I can't blame the Carbine folks for not even trying. Now, if their game had been a bit more polished... There were game breaking bugs everywhere, and it often lagged horribly; the first impression is the strongest, and the devs did quite a disservice to their game.

[Steelangel]

Blizzard's "business model" with WoW was a combination of both very talented game designers with sheer dumb luck. It won't ever be recreated, so I can't blame the Carbine folks for not even trying. Now, if their game had been a bit more polished... There were game breaking bugs everywhere, and it often lagged horribly; the first impression is the strongest, and the devs did quite a disservice to their game.

I have to disagree - Blizzard had a LOT of luck, yes, but they have constantly iterated over their game design, smoothing out rough edges and adding features that help to include all players of the game. "You think you want it, but you don't" is not because the devs are obstinate; it's because they have exabytes of data to back them up and people on the forums have their small friend group.

Now, W* had a lot of bugs at launch, granted. It could have gone with another round of beta stress testing before it opened up. Some features (like warplots) were great in theory, but were practically worthless. But the game had so much potential - great music, great atmosphere, and great .. well everything, in my opinion. I would still be playing it now if the game didn't crash and burn into f2p.

[Dimmak]

I believe part of the problem is that what is defined as a successful game is far too high of a ROI. Everyone wants to charge $15 a month and have 7 million subs like wow. If you're not pulling 50-100 mill a years it's a failure.
Where as if you have a small team and can maintain at least 100k subs ( with a million not unheard of ) and charge only 5 a month then you can sustain a profit and pay your staff. 500K a year is more than enough to maintain a staff of 6 and 5 million means you can invest in secondary games. And that is where Blizzard excels. While WoW has been the flagship guaranteeing a continual stream of money Blizzard is always reinvesting and support in another game design team after another. They have what Overwatch, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. All of which would not be as popular if not for the support of WoW. There's cross marketing, players drift from one game to another but are still in their brand. Mean while the other WoW-killers only have their wow-killer and when the draught of content comes they falter and sputter out.

So for an MMORPG to be long term successful it will need to hit hot and while their rush of players and income is there they need to start putting out a different game at the same time, and then as that rushes out another xpac, and then snowball that play over and over. All the while dismissing the concept they will be able to get fat rich off that one big game.

[Deleted]

I had the opporunity to sit down with Asmongold yesterday and talk about Classic WoW and MMOs in general (link is in my signature).

He brought up a very interesting point about the MMORPG audience not being dead, but simply waiting in the wings for the next hardcore AAA MMO to release. I wanted to know how you guys feel about that; Do you think the MMORPG market is still alive and well, but dormant? Could we see another resurgence of the genre with Classic WoW?

First off, i am spouting the mother of ugly neckbeards atm as my gf shaved my moustache off very early this morning and hid my shaver. I had 5 minutes this morning, before leaving, with a pair of scissors and a misty mirror. It aint good

On topic

I dont think the wow type of mmo has a future. The market just isnt there anymore. The demographic is growing older and the new gen prefer other types of genres.

[tikcol]

He's right. I'm very dormant. WoW isn't capable of delivering anything new and exciting at this point.

That's why the demand for classic wow is as high as it is. People know that WoW won't be delivering new things so their expecting it to at least re-deliver the best of it.

[Re4leader1]

There won't be another huge mmo. The times have past since then. 80% of gaming is on console now. When mmos where big it was a time where consoles were just getting the whole online multiplayer thing. And it sucked. It has come along way since then. Kids don't ask their parents for a 800$ with 200$ screens you can grab a used ps4 and tv for 300$ now. And its not the in the market to drop millions into an mmo. Many have tried and they're hot for a couple months and they drop. Look at ESO it was supposed to be amazing and it flopped. Unfortunately I think we have to cherish what we have now as mmos are long dying breed