Originally Posted by
Val the Moofia Boss
Firstly, I doubt we will get another big budget MMO again. MMOs are quite possibly the #1 most expensive genre of game to develop and to maintain. You need to employ an army of artists and animators to make your world and hundreds of monsters and to animate all of them and give players their hundreds of different animations required. Those artists usually live in a place with a very high cost of living (Silicon Valley or LA in California, or Austin Texas, or Tokyo, etc). So the upfront costs are very high. And then you have the standard marketing strategy of sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising.
FFXIV began development in 2005... right when WoW and was an unprecedented smash success for the video games industry. Everyone wanted their own WoW clone to double dip in that "sell players a $60 game AND charge them $15 a month!" and rake in the cash. When the game finally released in 2010 and flopped, it was still in a climate in which the big developers still hadn't given up on the themepark MMO yet. WoW was still on it's meteoric rise in subscribers and the titans, SWTOR and GW2, were still just around the corner, so from a business perspective a FF themepark MMO still had a chance to be a success. That and Japanese pride to salvage the tarnished name of the FF franchise (the 2000s were pretty bad for Square, with the movie flopping so they had to merge. And FFXII, FFXIII, and Versus XIII had legendarily troubled development cycles).
Nowadays, MMOs are pretty much a near dead genre. All of the true, oldschool MMOs like Ultima Online or Ragnarok or SWG are either dead or have servers with only a few hundred players, most only currently existing as private servers. The mobile port (and remaster or remake?) of FFXI was cancelled a couple years ago. Every themepark MMO that isn't named WoW, GW2, or ESO are in sorry shapes and are in a very late term milking phase, soon to go on life support if not shut down entirely (SWTOR, STO, LOTRO, Rift, Camelot Unchained, Crowfall, Shroud of the Avatar, etc). WoW is a hollow shell of its former shelf, and being eclipsed by FFXIV isn't much to write home about when FFXIV still lives in the shadow of golden age WoW from over a decade ago, still towering over it with at least 5x as many subscribers at its height. The rest have been dead for years. The biggest MMO coming out in years, the new Lord of the Rings MMO by Amazon, has been cancelled. Apparently not even they think that the new TV show will give enough of a bump of interest in the IP to make a new LoTR MMO successful.
Rockstar gaming culture has died. You no longer have companies like oldschool Blizzard or ArenaNet that passionately make games - not to make the most money possible - but because they want to have fun, and were okay making high production quality masterpieces aimed at niche audiences. They've all been converged and have become soulless companies that chase after as wide of a market as possible and making as much money as possible. MMOs ceased being the most profitable trend to chase a decade ago. LoL happened and the craze became MOBAs. Then battle royals became the trend, but now they're no longer very trendy. Current conventional wisdom says to just make shitty mobile games.
Unless SAO's FullDive Gear becomes a reality, we will likely never get a high budget MMO again. Looking at the abysmal state of the Western AAA industry (and just look at the decline of the Japanese games' industry. Many studios and IPs did not survive the transition to HD), we're quite lucky we're even getting FF16 at all.