Interesting insight about the business model change!
So all things being equal, a 20-25 year lifespan. I kind of agree. Coincidentally, this also corresponds to roughly one generation of players.
I’ve often wondered whether the cultural context of an MMO also affects it’s lifetime. Will the things that made young people excited about WoW (for example) extend to their children?
If new content comes out to shake things up and keep things interesting, I say let it roll for as long as it can. I’ve been playing its games through all of its highs and lows for 14 years, and despite how it’s a “dead game” to some, it’s easily one of my favorites and one I always come back to.
So long as a team can keep updating and building upon a foundation, I say keep it going. If games like EQ and RS are still going, there’s no reason why WoW as a game should ‘die’. It’ll keep iterating on itself, like it always has. There’s always going to be people who hate whatever a new expansion brings. People thought this game died as early as Burning Crusade, but it’s lasted this long.
Like them or hate them, the developers clearly love this game too. I’m sure we’ll see many, many more years before this game stops receiving development.
I don’t how long they SHOULD last (I still enjoy EQ from time to time) but I hope they can add the expansions back to classic every 2 or so years like they originally did. That gives me 14 years before I have to deal with the horrible war campaign story in BFA (despite the other stories being really good).
That might just last me the rest of my life 
They should last until the company can’t afford to keep the servers running anymore.
In that context, I guess I would consider an MMO that fails before hitting the 5 year mark a super mega failure. Longevity is one of the only things that draws me to the genre over just playing some single player RPGs or something like Divinity, or just going back to Halo / FPS.
I like feeling like my time investment sticks around. Even if there are soft resets on progress, I can hop back in and start playing again and it won’t be a ghost town. Most AAA games, even if they don’t technically shut down, have a shelf life of only a handful of months. Best case scenario, 2-3 years before a sequel comes out or something if you managed to enjoy it for that long. What MMO comes to mind that people loved that only lasted 2 years, let alone 5 months? I can’t think of any.
I think a 10 year failure point would be more reasonable as a minimum for this genre. But even then, if an MMO is shutting down, it’s shutting down after probably years of struggling to stay afloat. A game that shuts down at year 10 was probably considered “dead” by the community and/or the internet at large years before that moment.
So I think that’s another topic. When is an MMO considered dead, short of the servers literally turning off? I don’t have some quantifiable metric for that, but I know that for me personally, I think that moment comes before it’s actually “unplayable in the way it was designed for”. Because the moment you can see where the game is heading, you realize you’re wasting your time.
(WoW escapes that despite constant decline by merit of being so huge that it could eat that loss and still stay the #1 MMO (or very close to it))
I imagine they will release “Classic” versions of TBC and WotLK. It’s wildly profitable and there seems to be a ton of demand.
For those who are looking for “WoW 2.0” (based off Classic but changing the storyline)…I think that is highly unlikely. It will require more developmental resources.
I know they will continue to monetize the Warcraft brand though. A “WoW 2.0” is very likely in the cards. But it may not take the form of an MMO. It could be something wildly different.
I think WoW Classic has freed them to make retail into WoW 2 (which has already been underway since at least the new models).
About as long as I do. That’d be good.
SWtOR is still going strong at 8 years and getting ready for it’s 6th expac. Comparatively speaking it’s one of the longest running MMO’s out there.
But sometimes, good games go horribly bad. Take SWG for instance. One of the more popular MMO’s until SOE ruined it with the CU and NGE, then it limped along until SWtOR came out in 2011. That’s what I was playing when WoW came out.
Other older games are still going strong, some have been mentioned.
You cannot really put a time frame on a game, any game really. When the players stop playing it, it dies. Could take 6 months, could take 60 years. And to those who love it, it’s always tragic.
6-8 years, honestly.
Updating to a newer engine, revitalizing the story, and creating a hard reset. It keeps the game feeling fresh, but also makes sure that there are new things to discover.
That sounds about right to me. When I think of “failed” MMOs, they are all below that 5 year mark. Wildstar lasted 4 years, and frankly I hadn’t realized it lived that long.
I think we’d all agree an MMO needs a certain critical playerbase for all of it’s systems to function. Dungeons and raids need a certain population. I’d say that if you can’t put together a group or raid in a reasonable span of time, on the most populated server, it’s certainly on life support.
I wouldn’t pick any number because it would just be an unsupported guess. As long as a game is fun, people will play it. People still play board games. I don’t understand folks who think a video game has to have a death date.
Right, but they are talking hypotheticals for fun, and it’s not as fun if we just stop there…cmonnn
It was fun for me!
Well then, I respectfully withdraw my assertion to nudge more opinion juice out of ya. Fair enough!
Thanks for making me smile though!
Wrong.
It was sold off to that third party company, that continues to run the game in that primitive state. So you could call it “expansions”, but it would be a bit like if Wow was sold off and never grew any beyond the point it is at in BFA (so it was just people doing what they could, with the current world building tools.)
For me, EQ died when they sold it off, the same is true of Ultima Online and the other games which I think that same company bought.
How long should it last? As long as its customers are willing to pay for it.
exactly 8 years
However many years it has enough players to financially support it.