Between 2004-2015 there were 150+ MMORPG releases with on average 13 a year. Between 2016-2021 there has been a total of only 5 new MMORPGs launched (that includes WoW Classic+) or about to be launched (New World). MMORPGs went from controlling 60% of the market share in 2010 to only a projected 10% in 2022. The genre is still profitable, but is no longer a dominant factor anymore.
So how did one of the biggest genres in recent times effectively kill itself? A combination of factors.
Market saturation - From 2010-2015 there was a new AAA MMORPG being launched on average every 4-8 months. This lead to a large number of game communities and MMORPG players effectively game hopping from one game to another. You hardly had time to get invested into your current MMORPG before the next beta or release was around the corners. Most of the AAA MMORPGs reached their peak population within 1 year of release and collapsed after due to this reason and only an exceptionally small number of MMORPGs have actually grown from their initial releases.
The rise of F2P games - There’s a reason why games like FF14 and WoW have stuck with subscriptions instead of being F2P. F2P games are notoriously hard to make profitable without unbalancing the game with Pay-to-Win mechanics. If only 25% of the playerbase regularly utilize your cash shop than you’re losing money. You also don’t make money from players trying the game for a few weeks and then quitting.
The “WoW-clone” effect - Since WoW launched every MMORPG has been trying to milk the success and formula that made WoW so popular. This means there was a lack of a refreshing experience when almost every MMORPG played just like WoW and were compared to it. This ended up making people lose interest in the genre due to a lack of new innovation.
Private servers - Private servers have been notorious for having more players on them than the actual real game which eats into their profits.
So what do you guys think? Will their be a resurgence of the MMORPG market or will it fall to 5% of the market share by 2025?
In my opinion, the MMO market will continue to decline.
The days of video game players spending hours grinding content for little reward is over for a lot of players. It’s pretty noticeable in many of the threads on this forum.
At best, someone could create a MMO light that offers high rewards and low grinding to try to accommodate modern gamers…but I still doubt that will be enough to reverse the current trends
There’s also instant gratification type of MMOs out there, wouldn’t fortnight (fornite?) count? That seems to attract the younger crew from my limited experience.
I mean you’d think LoTR and some of the others would have done a better job but nah - they missed it. Wow had some magic combination going - and for a while it evolved to be better and better (imho) but it’s starting to have something of an identity crisis.
I see what sort of sales they make with an expansion - even SL - and they rock those numbers - they can garner interest for sure, they just can’t keep it. They have put far too much systems and RNG into this game to artificially boost their spreadsheets and it kills the fun. It kills agency.
I think wow can be around as long as it wants to be around.
We are in the twilight years of the MMO genre. The type of mechanics that are large part of the genre are not tolerated very well these days. The core aspects of the genre have also changed over the years to attract the instant gratification crowd to keep revenue up. These people are now getting bored with the genre and are moving to other types of games. A lot of MMOs are only keeping afloat because of whales that don’t want to leave.
To me its so strange how the state of the internet/players changed so fast. New MMORPGs were being pumped out like McDonalds and then it completely hardstopped by 2015. To go from 13+ releases a year to just 1… yikes.
The drop in new MMORPGs being releases came with the rise of the battle royale, survival, mmofps, and hero based (which includes combinations of these others) genres.
13 per year average over 5 years would have been ~65 MMO releases between those years if what you’re claiming is accurate.
And now here again, you’re claiming one new MMO every 4-8 months, which is far fewer than your claim of a 13 per year average; even if they hit your 4 month mark that’s 3 per year.
I can’t read the rest of your thread, your numbers are wrong so I assume whatever you’re claiming is also wrong.
Ashes of Creation will change it entirely. New World will prob change it a good bit. Both of these will revitalize it, but Ashes of Creation will, without a doubt, be the king of MMORPGs once it’s out, if it comes out with at least 50% of what it’s actually going for. It’s got so many big goals and since they don’t answer to anyone but themselves, like blizzard used to, they can do whatever they want and take however long they want.
There are no shareholders to answer to or anything, just good old fashioned developers who grew up on the games like EverQuest, Runescape, WoW, Diablo2 and other things like that that were oldschool and very successful for their time.
Until then, though, it will decline more and more.
Nah. Mmorpg going to survive because they’re going to try different approaches. All of the mmorpg we’re playing now are designed for us while for the new generation going to get something a bit different than ours. Our old games may live on for awhile, but eventually will be shut down and we too will have to embrace the new formula of mmorpg. Don’t expect this genre to die out because it gravitate players into a fantasy world they like.
I will often utilize my own experience over empirical evidence because I think the current participation metrics have it all wrong. The first MMORPG I ever played was EverQuest when it launched in 1999. Comparatively everything in EQ took much more time to do than modern WoW. That never mattered to us in our 20s. We had loads of spare time to get what we wanted and nothing is different today for 20 year olds. They just dislike the retail product.
If something is boring then players will always seek to reduce the time they spend in it. So their feedback will be tainted by this middle of the road approach. Instead of saying X sucks get rid of it they’ll try an olive branch and say X takes too much time so add or remove Y on it.
This means nothing positive actually happens. The game continues to deteriorate with bad ideas because conversations between devs and players never happen in a positive way. It’s like hitting a hole in one in golf from a helicopter.
All someone really needs to do is take a honest look at the old MMORPGs and see what’s different. EverQuest established a concurrency of 300k players on a brand new intellectual property. That is not an easy thing to do. Compare this to WoW which comes from Warcraft. Warcraft had at least 3 million fans before WoW released. So WoW was responsible for at most 400% more fans of Warcraft which was Wrath at 12m.
Going from 0 to 300k is more impressive than going from 3m to 12m. To me anyway. The former had a lot more to prove.
We all know WoW took a lot of inspiration from EQ but the hidden little fact is that EQ had the better MMORPG model when taking into account the popularity of Warcraft before WoW. Had Warcraft not existed and WoW was World of Werewolves it wouldn’t have garnered 12 million players. Not even close!
So establishing the top MMORPG isn’t easy as it’s not as simple as which one made more money. Even today the EverQuest lore is nowhere near as popular as Warcraft and apart from intellectual properties like Star Wars, LoTR, GoT, etc hardly anything is.
Much of that has to do with how the EQ developers and publishers reacted to WoW. Instead of becoming the anti-WoW MMORPG they went WoW-Lite, introducing a lot of the same garbage ideas like instanced dungeons. As a consequence EQ went from a thriving community to a ghost town with more players on private servers than official ones.
Basically the genre is in bad shape because of the misleading nature of WoW. Most of these MMORPGs are not fun games. They’re loaded with garbage ideas.
I really question this. We’re still years away from a AOC release if it ever releases at all. Aside from people actively interested in MMORPGs, I don’t know anyone irl who’s ever even heard of it. From what I know they’ve only recently started doing early alpha testing.
I’ve looked into the game and while the idea seems cool, I’m not holding my breath. There’s just no guarantee it’ll have all the things its promising or that it will release at all. I’ve seen way too many games proclaim how great they’ll be and how they’ll be the #1 game, only to never release at all.
We’ll have to see how AOC looks in a few years. In the meantime, it needs to actually get its name out there or it’ll be dead on arrival.
The irony is that if a new MMORPG finds itself in a dominance place and absolutely smashes records than you’d see a revival of the MMORPG market as games try and capture that games new success.
There’s little irony in the top performing games at the moment. Games like GTAV operate on much of the same vibes EverQuest did 20 years ago. That is to drop a bunch of strangers into a joined experience and let it be what it’ll be.
Sure they’re not exactly the same experience but the roots of that MMO experience are obvious to my eyes. When you play GTAV online you’re in an environment that’s not under your control and you work with and against other players to get what you want. This is exactly how 1999 EQ worked and what made the world fun and alive.
LoL is a game you can pickup and play, the type of gamers who like games you don’t have to invest time in to be powerful probably enjoy LoL. If LoL MMO has a mode where you can just login and play without pursuing power and not being handicapped because of it I can see it doing well And if it does well I can see people trying to LoL Clone it like they tried to WoW Clone.
And if it does well I can see people trying to LoL Clone it like they tried to WoW Clone.