I believe MMORPGS are a dying genre, most people realize their time is much more valuable.
I tried to get my friend that’s a tattoo artist to play. In north Texas a tattoo artist makes 200 to 250 an hour base with tips…
As in, he could tattoo for a few hours and buy a really good account which that’s an example of your personal time > grinding a game.
Those are my thoughts. Maybe video games in general are slowly dying out.
MMORPGs used to be among the most popular games because there was a lack of an alternative - the highest quality production value games of the early 2000s were MMOS. Hence, they garnered a lot of appeal.
Now the gap in production value has closed bewteen genres (in general) and amount/genre of games have vastly increased and MMOs are no longer the reigning champion for video game populations.
MMOs are just like every other genre - fills a niche of people who want a long-term game with RPG player progression, social gameplay. People keep comparing MMOs to the glory days when almost every gamer was enamored with one - that’s never going to happen again because every gaming niche is saturated, and culture is changing.
I had similar thoughts during the original Burning Crusade release when I had my first max level characters that I played with friends.
Now, I’d be surprised if most players (historically) ever reached end game content, even though a lot of strong opinions come from people on the forums
who consistently schedule time to play this game as one might schedule time to do work. I suspect that represents a very large number, but I doubt it’s the majority, if we force that dichotomy.
Because the devs don’t have the spine to make the game what it should be, instead they carry on their warpath of ‘authenticity’ just to shove it in our faces for the way we behaved pre-Classic launch.
This community deserves it though.
The game could be better if the devs stopped letting the loudest group control their actions.
MMOs were never the most popular game, ever.
For games sold, WoW has never hit in the top 10 unless you specifically looked at PC sales in North America, you know what did in 2007-2009?
Wii sports.
Now if you want to talk about gross? World of warcraft hits the top 10 because of subscription and the store around 2011-2015 and then is smoked because Blizzard can’t compete with a million free to play mobile games and gacha games
I’ve seen some dumb crap on this forum but this takes the spot of the dumbest.
It is dying like everything else on this planet. This game wont last forever and its going to die eventually like all of us .
Nothing lasts forever.
Yeah, they should have thrown this authenticity bs out the window long ago. Even now it’s still leading them to make terrible decisions with the game.
MMOs were at their best when they were niche. WoW brought the genre to the mainstream which could have worked out but they fumbled the ball and killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. They had a lot of help killing the genre though - they couldnt have done it without you.
I dont see it as the genre dying as much as its returning to its roots. Smaller player bases that actually care. The whole kickstarter thing put a damper on things for several years but one of these days a developer will get it right.
The whole WoW Classic thing just proved Brack was right and this player base cant get out of its own way.
Since the worldwide success of WoW:WOTLK in 2009 the MMORPGs drasticly changed and everyone was trying to copy WoW.
Nowadays, 90% of the MMORPGs are fully instanced themepark.
They are making the genre “too much” accessible meaning that average to HC players are consumming the content faster than it can be produced
Themepark end up being all about doing the same end game instanced content again & again in a competitive way. The open world is dead.
MMORPGs were more sandbox, open world & time consuming in 90s/20s than now.
There are way more reasons but i don’t want to write everything here.
Video games are doing fine.
MMO RPG’s on the other hand are not. They’ve been basically stagnant in terms of new design ideas for 20+ years. And by that I mean basic design ideas, they’re still stuck in a design that was mandated by technical limitations from when we were still on dial up modems and refuse to evolve. And it’s just not aging well.
Not really.
MMORPGs were more openworld & complex in theirs gamedesign (not gameplay) before than now.
By trying to make them more accessible, they removed all of the “too much RP/complex parts” to focus on the instanced end game content.
You can even see the difference in term on gamedesign with WoW : no more attunements, no more jobs specialization, way less open-world event +layering/sharding, no more “long” epic/legendary weapons quests…
Video games are on the rise lol… Where do you even come up with this stuff… In fact, many dudes would rather play video games than deal with the general insanity of a GF and the general delusions that comes with them picking a partner. Esports are where the players are going because thats all they hear about. Blizzard doesn’t advertise like they used to but everyone hears about the 12 year old millionaire playing rocket cars or whatever.
I’m not talking about details of gameplay like more accessible, whatever that actually means(BTW There are plenty of grindy MMO’s out there still retail WoW also does have some long grinds still so no that hasn’t gone away). I’m talking basic gameplay, MMO RPG’s are still locked into a psuedo turn based game design that was required years ago and just doesn’t age well.
Why play WoW when you can play massive open world rpgs with similar scale solo with NPCs smarter and better behaved than your average WoW player? 
Grind doesn’t mean good gamedesign it’s just a good way to keep players in-game and have long term objectives + a good feeling of investment vs reward.
As i can see you are talking about gameplay and not gamedesin.
Removing tab/target doesn’t make a MMORPG great. A lot of modern MMORPGs are using modern gameplay but still “failed”.
Even if Wow goes to full action it won’t remove all of the gamedesign flaws which are : nothing to do except farming the same instanced content for months.
We need to go back to more complex/unique & openworld gamedesign.
I think the problem is the only endgame and challenges available are unbalanced PVP, being chained to a weekly raid schedule and running the same 10 or so dungeons for an entire expansion. The majority of gamers and people that play games casually can find way better experiences in other games.
Eh… old school MMO world design was significantly less complex… it was literally go out in the world farm mobs, level up.
What they offered which was unique at the time was a persistent multi player experience. And that is something they simply don’t any more. Virtually every game now adays has some form persistent progression that is shared with a large multi player community.
The mere existence of Season of Mastery says otherwise, and we can easily look at the performance of that project to gauge the accuracy of your claims.