It’s a simple question, really. How many years should an MMO last?
Generally speaking, we look at death in somewhat of a context. If your 20-year old friend dies, that’s a shocking tragedy. If your 112 year old great-gram dies that’s…sad, but also impressive in a way. It’s not tragic. It’s normal.
Everquest is still putting out expansions, so we know an MMO can last 20 years. If WoW lasts 5 more years and shuts down servers in 2024, would that be a tragedy or just something you’d expect? Suppose it shut down in 30 years? 50?
I’m not presuming there’s a “right” answer, by the way. Just curious about the general take on this.
How many years should a good MMO last?
Note: by “die” I mean “turn off the servers”. Wildstar is dead, Matrix Online is dead. City of Heroes is dead (sob!). EQ and WoW aren’t.
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I guess once the player base becomes too low and the game cant be sustained anymore
And a game with a story like wow needs to keep making story to sustain itself, but theres a limit to that, WoW will have to end some day
And then WoW 2 happens!!!
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Fair. But if you had to put it in years, what number would you pick?
Ultima online is still sub based and has a following. Just like anything in life, when it no longer is profitable. Can’t put a number on that. People still play Nintendo games.
That’s really difficult to say. I think Classic’s success will sustain the whole IP for a lot longer than retail would’ve done on its own.
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It’s a simple answer, really. It should last as many years as it can.
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Until the cost of server upkeep is too great against player subscription.
Or your company name is “Sony Online Entertainment”.
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The unfortunate thing about WoW is that nothing is determined about player subscriptions, as most of the money is made off of microtransactions nowadays.
WoW could have lasted a lot longer, if Blizzard’s writers didn’t suck.
Their idea of a story is explaining away everything, up the ladder all the way to the gods/creators of the cosmos (and usually we end up fight one which is just dumb).
Instead of creating stories in the world of warcraft, where there are demons and light and magic, they have to explain it all- oh, the demons are from this one guy who spawns them on argus. and the light is from these naaru guys. magic is because world soul blah blah.
So sadly, we’re gonna run out of “explanations” pretty soon. In fact we already have, since we’ve moved onto “the void” as an enemy, which is like the laziest fantasy trope ever.
as long as it last? this is a game not a persons life here. it can be updated and changed. the “game” may be gold but Bfa is like…what a year old? its new content and a new world added to a old one.
wildstar only lasted like what couple of years?
/shrug
Mr. Youthinkyoudobutyoudon’t was the one that killed Star Wars Galaxies so I suppose time will tell.
I don’t see a reason to apply a hard cap to how long an MMO “should” live. If it’s still being developed, people are still playing, and it’s still fun, why should I think it should shut down just because it’s been x years?
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As long they make a profit. I miss Wildstar, but it ended because they were losing money. It was a great game, great lore, a bit hardcore, and fun. Unfortunately, they messed up in the first month on release, and made some mistakes afterwards. I would love to see a WoW reborn or something. Few thousand years later or so.
As long as it’s player base continues to support it.
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I don’t disagree. I suppose I’m wondering when an MMO can take a “victory lap”. If it lasts 30 years, was it a success? Is it a failure if it doesn’t last 50 years? That sort of thing.
You do know that there are CoH private servers now and NCSoft is doing NOTHING to shut them down?
I’m actually considering playing it again since i was one in the first wave of players to start playing CoH in april 2004 (when it went live).
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Let me just ignore the whole business side and just say that I believe an MMO should never die. From the foundations, they should be worlds that strive for immortality, an existence beyond any individual creator, maintainer or player, growing larger and deeper with the footprints of all who have visited it.
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Margins for subscription based MMOs are wildly profitable. This is partly why there’s huge outrage when store mounts became a thing.
However, WoW’s business model has evolved down this path to the point where subs aren’t really a good measure of the degree of profitability due to extended monetization from the store.
I truthfully think that this evolution has at least extended WoW’s life by 2-3 expansions AFTER BFA. Had WoW stayed as a subscription-only game, I think Legion would have been the end…particularly after how bad WoD was.
So I think perhaps another ~5-7 years, all else equal. If WoW changes its business model again, it could extend that timeline further.
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