This is a genre that will bide its time, until such time comes that it will wake up again. The MMORPG has arguably existed since 1978 when the first MUD crawled out of the void and it has proven to be one of the most resilient genres in gaming, surviving in almost complete obscurity for a very long time, until WoW came onto the scene in Nov of 2004. I'd say it's doing pretty well, given those facts.
The MMO genre is just back to where it was before WOW released, a niche market that is neither dying nor growing. Until developers start making games that are good rather then just competing with WOW things will stay as they are.
The only thing that can save the MMO genre is the amazon lord of the rings MMO. WoW is currently the only MMO with a sizable following, the rest have either been utter failures or have settled with a couple hundred thousand players. All of them seem to be dead as well when it comes to media exposure like twitch and youtube.
Personally though, i believe WoW will be around as long as blizzard wants it to be. The fanbase is massive, and a lot of people keep coming back just to test the waters. Myself for example, i haven't played WoW in two years, but i'm still a regular on MMO Champion.
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More high pop servers than retail. Overwhelmingly more viewers on twitch than retail. Only a troll(how ironic) would deny that classic has been anything short of a massive success.
https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...0of%20warcraft
Last edited by Ulfric Trumpcloak; 2019-10-20 at 10:01 AM.
Its not really dead, it has been stagnating for a very long time. WoW is barely doing anything new (with BFA basically being Legion 0.5) while other games try so hard to copy WoW. I never like it when one game dominates an entire genre. But people also aren’t willing to give other games a fair shot, since they don’t want to abandon all of their progress that took so much time of their life to get. I think thats also the reason why many BFA players look down on Classic WoW, being so overprotective of their main game.
The progression based mmorpg genre is “dead”. Why? Because there is only one game to rule them all. No other company is willing to invest money into a possible contender to WoW.
It’s not how many players willing to play one game or possibly with with FF. It’s about the market. With only one game the market is filled and no one willing to tap in kills a whole genre.
Last edited by babyback; 2019-10-20 at 10:10 AM.
To be fair. Even when there were many more MMO coming out, they didnt tend to do well. If you're measuring success by "new genre titles in the pipeline" then you're chasing a failed metric. It was kinda the joke wasnt it? All those MMO coming out and all of them near instantly folding.
Now if you want a valid metric look at how many MMO are currently going with sizeable player bases and regular updates. Looking at that metric and right now is likely a much better time in the past: WoW, FFXIV, ESO, GW2, Destiny, and new MMO that do promise more, while rarer, always attract a lot of people (and then subsequently die due to either lacking polish or being p2w).
You're looking at quantity of games and going "Well it must be on a decline" rather than the popularity of the few games.
World needs more Goblin Warriors https://i.imgur.com/WKs8aJA.jpg
This is really the issue here, the MMO genre has done very little innovation over the past 15 years and is in a period of relative stagnation. When games like WoW have tried to scrape away some of the outdated ideas and concepts to try modernise the game they're immediately hit with massive pushback from the player base. It's left the genre in a place where gaming has moved on without the MMO.
The other side of the issue is that MMO's are always trying to appeal to a broader audience, offering something for everyone. This means that they've slowly incorporated systems from various other genres over time to keep players interested. MMO's don't really have anything that is exclusive to the genre the way that FPS games have mechanics unique to them, or the way Sports games do, or Simulators etc. They're an amalgamation of several different ideas, mechanics and goals all packaged together.
Realistically the genre really needs to be broken up into it's constituent parts for them to move forwards as a whole. A smaller scope game that focuses is on delivering high quality Raid Style content exclusively can do a far better job within that niche than if they've got to balance that out with PvP, World Content etc. Trying to deliver a top notch, inovative, experience that delivers on all fronts at the same time is a monumental task that just shouldn't be attempted right now.
WoW classic didnt revive the MMO genre, WoW classic was a case of people talking about how great vanilla was for years and years (myself included, yay nostalgia?) and blizzard finally releasing their own official servers and the WoW community jumping on it because its new to them, or want something a bit more laid back without worrying about if they can get everything done for the week in retail like its a full time job. Give classic 6 months to a year and we'll see how things look.
The only MMORPGs with actual healthy populations are WoW(2004), GW2(2012) and FFXIV(2010) and somewhat ESO(2014)
when people say the genre is dead they mean nothing significant has come out in past 5 years, and they're absolutely correct
No triple A company wants to touch MMORPGs anymore because they are just not worth the investment, the genre in mainstream market is dead
Amazon has currently two MMO's in the pipeline.
There is their sandbox MMO "New World" and their is their semi announced LotR MMORPG.
We've already seen gameplay of the first one, while there isn't much known about the second one. What we kinda know is, that it's going to be
a themepark MMORPG.
as of now (sunday afternoon) on EU EN there is 8full and 15high realms on retail, and zero full and one high on classic, there is 9 marked as "layered" which we can assume are high, which still gives us less high pop realms than retail, and when we consider there is way more retail realms than classic, it clearly shows you are full of shit... as for twitch, its really low after the spike on release, so thats another shitty argument...
classic only shows what the users realy liked to see , and not what they create today
Nope, looking at the statistics Classic behaves exactly as projected - it was a big spike on launch that decayed to fairly insignificant noise.
People moved on, for all the rose-tinted goggles it is indeed a fairly inadequate entry in 2019, people got to 60, got their 2 hour MC run and dropped. Many did not even get there because the journey is shit by today's standards.
Classic is a boring AF glorified walking simulator that is out dated in literally every way.
Retail is a grind fest that leans towards more pay 2 win elements with each ex pac.
Both as bad as each other.
I think anyone who says the MMORPG genre is dead is a dummy. The sheer scope of the genre is large enough that it will be back in some form, there's almost no doubt.
It might be resting for a bit, I'm not sure, I kinda think Classic is just being carried by nostalgia. But once WoW's time in the sunlight has come and gone, modernized VR or something similar will be improved and it will pave the way for a new experience in an MMORPG setting that people will almost immediately jump to on a platform like that.