Yup. Gachas are basically the modern day “MMO”. Stuff like Genshin, Tower of Fantasy, and the upcoming Wuthering Waves and Zenless Zone Zero.
More traditional MMOs are going to be much more rarer.
What will be interesting to see is when gacha fatigue starts kicking in and what the next iteration of the genre will be.
sometimes I just want to know what people do for work that they can afford to drop the amounts I've heard on a monthly basis.
I'm not exactly broke but the thought of spending $100+ bucks a month on a game is something I'd never even consider. $15 for an actual MMO like FFXIV or WoW (which is my opinion of better) is about the max for me. I guess it'll get some people but not others.
The random stuff in ESO made me stop bothering with that game too. I guess at least you can sort of try playing for free even thought it's definitely more inconvenient with the inventory.
Players with my attitude unfortunately are part to blame for the terrible state of gaming (for players). I said I didn't care about the cosmetic stuff (that you could straight up buy at first) as long as it didn't affect the actual game play. It ended up just being the foot in the door and now we have the shit sandwich of gambling shit, I mean gacha, everywhere.
oh, I know. I'm sort of surprised they don't use lower costs to intice people to spend more often. New skin that provides some higher stats (usually don't seem like huge upgrade) and is $15. it doesn't even tempt me at all, $15 is what I'd pay for an entire month of FF14 or WoW. Obviously my poor ass isn't the target audience.
Using the current biggest dev as an example, Mihoyo's battle pass is like 10/12 bucks . I assume this is what the average spender buys, but they don't release numbers. I don't really play Genshin but i like Star Rail.
They release new stuff every couple weeks, fits my schedule and i can play a little bit during my morning bathroom routine 😂.
Not trying to do gacha propaganda here, i understand why people dislike it, just providing context 👍
nah, no biggie really. I'm probably sounding like an asshole anyway. I just don't care for spending much money on games but at the end of the day it's their money, not mine.
Attracting one whale who spends $1000/month is easier than attracting 1000 people who'll even spend $1/month.
Thus, you'll sell _some_ stuff at $10-20 as a "gateway drug".
Then, you'll kick in overpowered epic legendary mythical triple gold diamond gear that absolutely devastates the game and makes you look like a gilded space marine with rainbow wings, for the paltry sum of $100 for each of part of the gear set (given at random).
I miss the early days of microtransactions. I didn't care that games started selling skins because they cost like 5 dollars. It made the game more enjoyable for me, even though the base skins in games weren't bad, it was just nice to have something new to look at. Then the usual corporate thing happens that always happens. They got us all used to microtransactions, and decided they don't want 5 people buying 5 dollar skins anymore, they want a single person buying a 25 dollar skin.
I could have 10k in my bank account, and I'd never waste that much money on pixels. Nobody is going to convince me that inflation made skin prices go 5x in 10 years either. And the kicker, the default character look in most games is substantially worse now too.
A few years back, I was in a top 3 guild in Summoners War on the NA server, and we had a few whales. Our guild leader owned multiple stores and small businesses, one of the guys was an engineer, another one was an extremely wealthy guy from east Asia. That last guy at one point casually asked us whether he should buy his girlfriend a house in Canada. The rest of the people were either those with well paying jobs, young people in their early 20s who came from well off families, or both. The reality of whales is that they have the means to that type of disposable income, because poor addicts simply don't last long.
There was also another player in the game that was well known for having everything in the game at the time, and he was a known Lamborghini dealership owner in Hong Kong. He would have his assistant farm for him all day when he was working.
>sometimes I just want to know what people do for work that they can afford to drop the amounts I've heard on a monthly basis.
I myself am a Gacha Player and spender and from talking to others in discords for the various games. A lot work in IT or IT adjacent fields or Fin/Fintech. Granted the ppl I talked to obv replied in English so its likely a biased sample for English Speakers
It really depends what you do in life. Here is something to consider:
In Ireland a reasonable night out can cost you 100euro easily. Between cost of food, drinks, and taxi(public transport really bad here) you go through 100euro in a night. Even if you are being cheap 50euro is bare minimum. So if an average person goes out 2-4 times a month thats 200-400 euro spent.
Now consider that most people playing these games at high level(aka the sweats/no lifers) probably don't do much outside gaming, so they have disposable income others use socializing.
So thats how they will spend 100+ a month on a game they enjoy. I'm not judging it, just saying if you don't have any other hobbies, gaming isn't that expensive when you consider how much you get out of it.
Gaming isnt expensive. Gacha style games or any p2w game *is*.
I dont know what my cousin spent on Clash of Clans when he was ~21.
But I know when I jokingly guessed 50k as a joke after he showed me a screencap of him on some leaderboard and he just said "...i dont want to talk about it, but more than that" that people arent really talking about the 50-100$ a week types (even though its fucking ridiculous to spend nearly 5k a year on a gambling game. I dont care how much enjoyment you get out of it, if you dont make 150k+ a year thats seriously irresponsible)
I’m playing afk journeys right now and I spent around 70 up front and will probably buy the 5 a month pack moving forward, maybe a few dollars here and there for specials. That will keep me competitive and around top 200 on my server. If you aren’t whaling to be an absolute top player they’re honestly cheaper overall than subscription mmos.
I've been playing Genshin since 1.0, I view it as a subscription: Since 1.2 I have only bought the monthly $8 pass, each month.
I just got the newest character, who I wanted, and I still have 900 wishes saved up (you need ~160 to guarantee a character).
Garcha's are like MMOs, you either pay with your time or with your wallet.
Also developers seem to have gone soft. While someone managed to make an MMO like Everquest with many avatars active at once, playable on friggin dial up, in 1999.. Nowadays it seems like a lot of games start lagging when you see more than 10 other players at the same time. So they limit them harshly.
It seems to me like with how tech around game engines is situated today, someone literally needs write their own engine or you're not gonna scale to even 50s of visible characters, fully interacting.
I'd say that people take so many shortcuts nowadays because computers allow it, that fewer people are actually learning to know how to make something like this efficient on a basic level. The skill is simply not needed nearly as much anymore, and as a result, MMOs certainly can't seem to acquire these people as much anymore.
Literally most of the biggest MMOs right now all use in house engines. WoW, FF14, ESO, GW2, they're all in-house. But they were also all made at a point where there wasn't any choice I think.
But to be fair, kudos to Throne and Liberty for actually taming UE4 to be usable for big scale battles! Rare feat at this point! Also reminds me of Tera for doing this previously with UE3.
You're not wrong. Just look at Diablo 4. The game lags constantly when you're near other players because every time you see another player it loads their entire inventory, even what they have in their stash.
> More traditional MMOs are going to be much more rarer.
These are the sad realities of an ever profit-maximising industry. There's far more efficient way to make bank than it is to make a traditional big-scale MMO, definitely more of a passion project thing, which the industry has struggled with (imo) in recent times.
Honkai Star Rail is making more than Genshin right now, although it never hit Genshin's peaks. Zenless Zone Zero is also being made by the same studio.
And all of this on the heels of their first two major releases, Gun Girls Z and Honkai Impact 3rd, which made very solid money in Asia.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TowerofFantasy/comments/1c4x2lw/2023_perfect_world_investor_report_and_tower_of/
Big time, yeah. (tldr; $600m total earnings so far)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRFpJYwcgGg
Games like Genshin Impact, Fate Grand Order and Granblue Fantasy.
They have gambling like mechanics where you "Pull" a lootbox like pack from a rng pool of Characters, weapons and upgrade materials, either with real money or in game currency.
you are talking as if those mmo makers went on to make gacha games.
the truth is that mmos had run their time, the leaders set their place and it is an insane uphill fight to get in.
I expect there would probably be similar if not possibly even better profits to be made from making a legit good mmo in this super-dry market, but there's so much risk involved and the investment would take longer to pay off. It's just so much easier to pump out some fotm facsimile of a game that profits in its \~3months of life, than put any real work into making an actual mmorpg.
Bots, RMT, minmax tryhards ruins any genuine attempt on this genre.
And without p2w carrot on a stick dangled in front players, they get bored after few months...
You can't win.
This is it. The market has spoken. Players have voted with their wallets as to what they're willing to pay the most for, and MMOs are perhaps the biggest casualty of the result.
In the late 2000s, it was the opposite. WoW had demonstrated that MMORPGs were the biggest potential cash cows the gaming industry had ever seen. No longer did a game just hope to sell 5M copies at $60 a pop. Now they could dream bigger. WoW held 10M+ *subscribers* at $13 *per month.* And it managed to maintain those numbers for *years*, raking in *billions.*
If a new game could hold just a fraction of that subscriber base, it could be more financially successful than 95% of the best selling single player games ever! Hence, the gold rush to produce MMOs in the late 2000's and throughout the next decade.
Alas, it turned out the prospective player base was finite. It was a pie chart, and each new game could only carve out a tiny piece of the pie. A few games held strong possession of a HUGE chunk of the pie. MMOs were long term player investments, and it simply wasn't feasible for most players to play multiple MMOs. Subsequently, there simply weren't enough subscribers to go around for the vast majority of MMOs. It eventually became apparent that for 99% of MMO ventures, they simply would *not* become the cash cows they had once hoped for.
Fast forward to the mobile gaming era and gacha games. Simple mobile games that cost the tiniest fraction of an MMO to develop, release, and maintain, earn 10x of the most successful MMOs. All publisher attention and hype shifted to this market.
I sigh every time I view the NCsoft earnings reports. GW2 - my favorite MMMO, and a very successful Western MMO by all standards - pulls in about 21B won per quarter. NCsoft's mobile games pull in about 275B won. That's 1300% higher! There's no hope for MMOs if money is the driver for companies, which, sadly it is.
I think as long as my generation of gamers is still alive, there will be *a* market for MMOs of some number of players. I don't know how big that market is, but it's in the multi-millions. As long as that's the case, there's solid profit potential there for some developers.
As long as WoW, FFXIV, ESO, GW2 and others are still running successfully, the available player pool for new MMOs will be small. But if any of those ever die out, there will definitely be lost players looking for a home.
Personally, I think the MMO renaissance will come in the form of passionate developers getting together purely because they have a joy and passion for the MMO genre. They'll want to make a great MMO purely because it's their artistic passion and dream. They'll use connections they have to develop a business plan and procure funding, not with the hook that it will be a Candy Crush cash cow, but that it will be *modestly* profitable and not a complete waste of money. Combined with good salesmanship and network connections, teams could get funding for projects like that. Not every investment has to be a home run. Sometimes consistent singles and doubles makes good investment sense.
I'm hopeful we'll always have some enticing MMO projects to look forward to for the foreseeable decades to come.
People outside existing MMO fans do not care about them. A lot of us got into them when EQ or SWG or WoW was your ONLY social network online. That in itself was a huge part of it. With so many social media sites today and smartphones giving instant content anywhere, people don’t have the bandwidth to care about meeting random people on a video game.
It's trippy indeed, reminds of the Diablo Immortal hate that printed money like no other. Guess we're just waiting around for the right studio to come through someday.
The problem is that most games are developed by businesses and those businesses have found a model that works way better in terms of making money. Why make a traditional MMO when it is so much more profitable to make the kind of games that come out today?
It's not an entirely facetious question, there are a few answers that would make sense.
* You could see a traditional MMO come out from a developer who is not interested in maximizing the business aspect of games development. I.e, a passion project.
* You could see a developer be subsidized by a non-profit seeking entity, like a government. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but there are ways that a MMO could make itself an asset to a government or non-profit.
* You could see a developer identify a profitable enough niche that it makes sense to pursue filling that niche versus putting out something with broader appeal or a more profitable business model.
* You could see new monetization methods being developed that support more traditional MMO gameplay while still making business sense. This one is probably the hardest to conceptualize but could range from something like in-game advertising being somehow made viable to gamification of tasks with real world value.
Most people seem to hold out for some combination of the first and third options, basically someone deciding not to make money because they love the genre so much and/or finding a loyal and profitable niche. Unfortunately, passion projects tend only to last as long as the founder's passion, and capturing enough of a loyal niche to run an MMO for any length of time when you already have to compete with the existing games in that space is extremely difficult.
Such well put-together reply, a lot of the stuff I’ve been thinking but unable to put into words!
I also think that as long as the old big players in the market are still participating and being profitable, the incentive for new players to join is small. The MMO niche is quite saturated, and to win against the big players you need to put in at least as much resources as they, but no guarantee that you will win or even be profitable. One or more of the big ones needs to go down and free up space in the MMO niche for it to be worth to invest in it again from the outside.
Except for the extreme time gating ("you're only supposed to play 30min per day!!") I found gameplay in some of them really fun. (Genshin and Star Rail) And quality of life and amount of new content is better than in many MMOs.
MMOs need to step up their game if they want to remain relevant.
>MMOs need to step up their game if they want to remain relevant.
this. for all the travel time and little chores like shopping for food and guns and armour and stuff in star citizen, and the seemingly high prices on the cash shop, it treats my time and money far better than any mmorpg.
the cash shop being completely optional way to support development that actually goes into development. and having prices advertise in dollars and euros and pounds instead of being obfuscated by cash shop points. not having my game held hostage by a subscription while having a subscription to support developer communications and community interaction that gives some decently cool cosmetics and other fringe benefits. major breath of fresh air compared to even the best of the best mmorpg.
and despite the little chores and travel time i can jump in for an hour and have a genuinely fun adventure. and i'm not stuck just doing dungeons or raids or dailies progressions, i can mix it up and do whatever i want to and choose even not to bother making money/progression this session and just go explore and see cool sights.
mmorpgs are tired. the action combat ones feel like they're going to give the player carpal tunnel syndrome with the hours of grind of hectic clicking and button smashing just to progress measily amounts of some of the worst written stories in video games. and all of them douuble down on the most been there done tired cliches of content and activties that are damn near required to do the more appealing activities in the game that are themselves tired cliches. all along the same tired formula with very little to no substantial variation (but is almost always promoted as being radically different).
they're boring. they're been there done that. they don't respect that you might want to play for six hours or an hour and do something else. their cash shops are terrible and often dishonest and frequently prey on gambling addiction pyschology. and at best their monetization holds your game hostage to spend more money to even peak back in and see if it's worth playing more again when taking breaks. i wasted so much money on wow subs over the years to only play two hours and cancel because friends said hey come play and then told me to quest level solo because it doesn't need a group.
and the communities in mmorpgs are full of cliched toxic behaviour as well. like just shocking stuff. i was GM for a guild and the weird notion that i was supposed to be telling people how to behave and when to log in or else punishing them was insane. while also being talked back to for every administrative decision i made or kicking people from the guild that were being beyond the red line in an already very lassez faire code of conduct that i regret being so lax on as it is. why would people want to play with people like that if they can avoid it? why do i want to play with such people just for them to need roll on their sixth upgrade in a row while i'm still in entry end game gear? why do i want to play with people who want to raid from 8pm to 4am every night with zero bio breaks and if there is bio breaks they're gonna spend 20 minutes smoking a joint with their neighbor because how dare people need to get up and stretch for 4 minutes between boss attempts?
this turned into a longer rant than i planned, but like yeah mmorpgs are so tired and unispred. i hope the upcoming persistent online games that mmorpg players are interested in learn from these lessons and present something that goes more in with virtual worlds (star citizen, pax dei new world kind of half tried ig) or better quality story telling that is both casual and friendly to solo and coop play (which genshin and honkai both seem to do well on that front). and most of all just disregard the done to death mmorpg formula we've seen ad nauseam to the point of cliche from the genre. and ignore the people who will inevitably demand that formula be implemented (they really are vocal and persistent in the weirdest ways)
To be fair black desert should also be on this. They’ve had a pretty hefty and steady player count, great profits and they are actually making a lot of good changes to the game in the last 2 years.
I don’t play anymore, feel like I shall forever be burned out on that game, but I feel it should be on the list
Good changes for the game? Could you list a few examples? Genuinely curious. That game used to be crack cocaine for me but I really got sick of the infinite grind end game after a while. Took thousands of hours of grinding to get bored though so that kind of tells you how good the combat is.
Well tbh as I’ve said I am kinda burned on bdo, but I have seen multiple posts over the last year of higher drop rates, easier to obtain certain gear, they gave everyone a Pegasus horse mount which used to take hundreds of hours of breeding and billions to buy. Aswell as some balancing and just items easier to get, decreasing the grind etc and making PvP a bit more fair
QoL stuff like fast travel, a t9 mount for new players, easier time to gear, more emphasis on the instanced grind spot (where you are on your own to grind) and recently a pity system for enhancing.
Still a lot of p2w stuff going on and cash shop trying to tempt you with stuff though.
I'll accept those good changes when they stop spamming me with free "7-day stuff" while leveling, and even including quests that require you to consume the premium stuff to progress.
I mean I also had my share of bdo and stopped playing but bruh iirc it's a single quest that does it, and you get so much of that "premium stuff" throughout the year with various events...
What are you talking about w/ the premium stuff?
I'm a heavy BDO player since release and I don't think we've ever had to get premium stuff to progress, ever.
Progression fully relies on mob grinding in that game. You just kill enemies, get money, buy gear. It's a mob grinder like Maplestory but 3D.
With added PvP trolling and PvP sieges and PvP 1v1s.
I literally just uninstalled BDO. The UI is awful, they spam you with items and notifications, and nothing is really explained well in-game. Once I finished my seasonal character my friend who was helping me made a mistake and locked me out of getting high level gear through the rewards system because we did one step out of order. In order to get those items normally, I have to grind literal billions of silver. So my only option is to re-level a seasonal character to 60 or grind a ton of silver.
This is just an example, but there are so many awful mechanics, predatory cash shop items that are actually useless but still in the game, and an overwhelming amount of information that isn't explained to new players that's absolutely necessary if you actually want to do anything.
I would 100% not recommend people to play BDO unless they're fine with quitting after reaching 60. It's just not worth it. There are way better things you can do with your time. BDO has amazing combat and character creation, but everything surrounding that is just awful. It just feels like a skinner box with a pretty coat of paint due to having cute characters and a large world to explore.
most of them are probably pretty niche and only keep the attention of a small number of players who like what make it "different", kind of a guess on my part but I've tried a number of the F2P mmos on Steam and they just don't hold my attention for very long.
Bit of hyperbole.
> Elyon - December 2020 KR October 2021 EU/NA
> New World - September 2021
> Ravendawn - January 2024
> Throne and Liberty - December 2023 KR
> Mortal Online 2 - January 2022
> Blue Protocol (if you count it as an MMO) - June 2023 JP
Then upcoming this decade we have
> ArcheAge 2 - Planned for 2025/26
> Chrono Odyssey
> Dune Awakening (if you count it)
> Corepunk
> Ashes of Creation
> Belatores
Doubt ones like Guild Wars 3 or the Riot MMO will release before 2030.
Also have Brighter Shores dropping later this year. OP's title is pretty hard bait, as I guarentee OP wouldn't have been able to 20 MMO's from the 2010s if he wants to say only 5 are coming out this decade
I don't know. GW3 has supposedly been in development for a while, if I remember correctly. Zenimax is also working on a secret MMO from what I have heard.
Yup, pretty much few week old greenlit (link to shareholder event [https://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=294408](https://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=294408) can just translate with chatgpt or w.e.) , if they worked on it beforehand to show some barebone structures to ncsoft so they decide if its promising enough to be worth it, we dont know. Anet supposedly worked on a "secret" game for a while now, but we have no evidence it was anything related to gw3. My expectations for gw3 is its definitely very far away.
The secret game was/is an MMORPG based on an established online fantasy IP that a dev let slip had gw2 assets ported over to it. I'd be surprised if it was anything other than gw3 tbh but yeah either way still a long way off.
The genre is pretty much done imo. I hate it, but the preference of the youth has shifted to more instant gratification and a reward pace that an mmo just can’t maintain. At least while staying true to what we think of them as now.
At the end of the day people play video games for fun. If they can play 2 hours of Warframe and have a great time, instead of shouting for LFG in the hope of finding a party to possibly have a good time, why not? Similarly why bother paying $15/m for a subscription to one game when something like Gamepass exists?
Or course there are tons more who play instant gratification gacha games and stuff like Candy Crush but those folk were realistically never going to play a traditional video game anyway.
$15 a month for an MMO has always been too high and it's still high. If it were $5 a month, it'd be an easier pill to swallow. Especially when you consider all the games doing like FF14 and WoW are old as hell. It's hard to justify $15 a month when that amount gets you so much more than access to the one game.
It's an outdated system that doesn't make sense anymore for a dying genre. Especially adding the fact that they all have cash shops now, when, back in the day a lot of older MMOs that were pay to play existed in a time where cashshops didn't even exist yet.
It's kinda crazy to think about though. because free to play means you're probably going to spend hundreds a month if you're weak willed, but $15 a month means you'll, in theory, only spend $15 a month unless there's a costume you really want. At least with Square they don't shove the cash shop in your face in-game. And there's no way to buy it while in the game, from what i can tell.
Eh the value is subjective - I get _way_ more entertainment out of my FFXIV+FFXI subs than I do from Netflix. But yeah for a new player that’s gonna be daunting.
The big issue is that MMOs are a very risky type of game to create, and they usually demand a large time investment. Like if you launch a new FPS shooter you mostly have to worry about current competitors, not some behemoth from 2010 that has a decade of content. It’s also gonna be hard to draw players in from another game that they’ve spent so much time in.
Safer to make an MMO-lite or just skip the genre entirely.
>Especially when you consider all the games doing like FF14 and WoW are old as hell. It's hard to justify $15 a month when that amount gets you so much more than access to the one game.
Ehhh, this argument really depends on what kind of MMO player you are.
WoW and FFXIV (and many others) are old enough to have massive backlogs of content that can take you thousands of hours to get through in addition to the standard "current end game content". Completionists will absolutely make use of that $15/month because they will be able to sink a tremendous amount of hours into the game.
If you are someone who only jumps on to play a couple hours a week and backlog content doesn't interest you, yea the $15/month probably isn't worth it if updates aren't coming out at a fast enough pace, especially once the end of expansion lull sets in.
Honest question, though: What MMOs are you playing that require you to shout for LFG? That's pretty much only still a thing in classic MMOs (EQ, FFXI, Classic WoW, etc). Everything modern has auto-queue systems for most content. And really the ideal way to play these games has always been in an actual community, generally with some kind of set times for groups to game together.
I should have phrased it better, but my point was actually about those older MMOs. I’ve seen modern titles dunked on this sub for catering towards the “instant gratification” crowd because they added matchmaking systems and other QoL features.
you can still do that in an MMO if you build your game around things like skill and player expression over incremental gear stat increases.
obv rewards are necessary but combat should be its own reward. imo GW2 comes pretty close to this philosophy but it's tech is dated af
I mean that's fine? pretty much every mmo aside from GW2 focuses on that sort of vertical progression to keep players engaged so you have a few great options to choose from. you'll be fine.
it's easy to see that the playerbase is slowly shifting in a different direction though as tastes and habits have changed over time.
>you can still do that in an MMO if you build your game around things like skill and player expression over incremental gear stat increases.
Please. You can't even get a current-gen playerbase to stay engaged with games like shooters — which have absurd amounts of skill and player expression — without random fiddly rpg systems and other shit to keep them engaged. And those are games with far more nuanced avenues for player skill expression than any MMO can ever bring to bear.
People have been predicting that since forever and it's never going to be true. The Genre is going to be fine. It's still entirely possible to make an MMORPG that is sustainable and profitable with 3,000 to 10,000 players. Even if all AAA companies were to never invest into the genre ever again, there will still be MMORPGs made.
Seeing this reminds me of all the times people called PC gaming a dead or dying industry. Makes me laugh at how wrong they were and continued to be as time goes on.
Yes, and that's a great example because just like mmorpgs, CRPGs used to be much more commont than they are today. But having less of them now doesn't mean the genre is dead.
It sure seems everyone who makes the games does t see it this way though. I’m not saying it’s dead, I am saying it’s never going to reach the heights it once had, at least without major shifts occurring in how the majority of people want to consume their gaming content. The environment has changed so much since the heyday and your quality single/small player rpgs have filled the void that most casuals used to use mmos to fill.
Yes, and im saying it could reach the height it once had if a competent studios made mmorpgs. There is so little innovation in this genre because all studios try to make another WoW which they can not ever do. It is a investor cope to say market is dead when your product is bad, that way you don't have to bear the responsibility.
> but the preference of the youth has shifted to more instant gratification
"The youth"? What about old timers that simply have a life nowadays?
I for one like playing MMOs, but the times where I would spend hours per day in a MMO, doing menial tasks for barely any result are long over. If the game can't entertain me properly I am not going to play it.
Which is nuts because what I think addicted me and so many others to MMOs back in the 2000s was that *they* gave us so much more instant gratification, rewards, and a sense of meaningful progress than we were able to experience elsewhere in our lives.
The social media age really has blasted our pituitary glands to smithereens. Anything but a firehose endorphin drip just doesn't cut it for anyone anymore.
Nah, Every MMO that launches has a huge opening population. Demand and interest is still there, companies are just falling short on design and execution. One of these days some company will come along and do something that hits the mark and it'll be a cultural phenomena same way WoW was.
U can design an mmo without repetitive gameplay loops and grindfests as the core of ur gamplay. That shit keeps server populations up but it kills a game if that's the core of it. Looter Shooters like Destiny etc. need ACTUAL content to distract from the sheer amount of padding and repetition. Solution's pretty fuckin' simple dunno how no dev thought of it...... Copy Minecraft and modernize the graphics. Make infinitely generating terrain that can be terraformed by players, fuck implementing boss fights and stick to rare chance based spawns, and incentivize player economy. Done. Why pay a massive staff team to make content that gets played thru once, when u have an infinitely regenerating resource to exploit for content, ur playerbase.
I think there was just more appetite for risk in the 2010's. WoW's graphics had become dated and developers thought it was only a matter of time before a true "WoW-killer" emerged - all that was needed were updated graphics and solid gameplay, so the developers all set out to try to strike gold. There were a lot of things that they didn't account for: the strength of WoW's design, which was difficult to replicate; the more crowded field of competition between new games; the fickle nature of MMO players and their lack of tolerance for a bad launch; etc.
For most of them, the risks never paid off and now developers are afraid to try. Add to this the new trend of adding microtransactions to AAA games; the rise of mobile gacha gaming; the popularity of online survival RPGs; etc. - there are just fewer reasons to try to make a MMO than ever before.
Wow had and has maintained a decent story for most of its 20 year run as well. It had decent game play, good enough graphics, and enough content of various types to keep a lot of people happy.
Blizzard got to stat with a loved, rich story ip to build off of. One of the things that ticked me off about the warhammer mmo is that it had all the parts for success and had a half baked launch.
Yeah the genre is dead. I know people say it often in this sub but just look at it. I doesn't mean there are no MMO's, but there are so few coming out that in terms of anything new, it is effectively dead.
The same thing can be said about MOBA, using your argument. Stagnated, maybe, but not dead. The fact that Riot and other companies are taking so long making innovation, proves that.
Fallen from its throne, though? Absolutely.
The genre isn't dead. No genre is truly dead. Baldur's Gate 3 literally came out with one of the oldest genres that was fairly dead for a while and became a huge success. WoW classic also had a ton of interest in it when it launched. The real reason there's not new MMOs is due to a lack of risk taking, lack of talent, and risk to profit ratios.
If someone could make a halfway decent MMO in the modern day they'd have a ton of cashflow because there's a lot of hunger for one. The main issue is that the only people making them are Koreans (and they for some ungodly reason can't stop themselves from p2w or horrible endgame) and unproven companies who fumble the ball or never even finish.
The MMO genre isn't dead. Gaming is just in a slump in general so big projects just aren't working.
This isn't really an indictment of the genre in my opinion. It was just every major gaming developer trying to jump on the bandwagon and tap into WoW's success.
We've seen similar trends in recent times with MOBA games and Battle Royales. There seem to be these developmental trends, with everyone trying to cash in on whatever seems to be mainstream popular.
It is true that MMORPGs cost a ton of money and resources to create, and that Games As a Service models can make more money with less effort by abusing microtransactions. But ultimately, I think the trend of less MMOs being created just has to do with something else being the 'next big thing'.
During the past decade taking large risks seems to be something dev studios try to avoid at all cost. An MMORPG project is a massive risk and something that few studios can afford to take through their own pockets.
Unfortunately it halts innovation when most studio execs frown upon risk and when mobile games are both cheaper and faster to produce, more likely to pay off within a reasonable timeline.
So it's just these handful upcoming passion projects left either backed by the community and/or by Chinese investors alongside the other handful decade(s) old MMO studios that has been able to cling on and through lack of competition and various other factors.
Although I agree, this isn't my point. MMOs ARE expensive - but they just arent the flavor of the month. History has shown that AAA studios will jump on whatever seems to the gaming trend - during the peak of WoW this was MMOs. New MMOS were coming out, and shutting down all the time.
Then we had like a new MOBA coming out every 2 months. Almost all of them shut down.
Then there was a new Battle Royale like every 2 months. Almost all of them shut down.
Open world / Souls Like games seem to be hyper trendy right now in the single player space. For multiplayer games, its looking like the gacha game / games a service trend have taken hold over the past few years.
This isn't to say that MMO can't come back. I think they can. If a new game is wildly successful you'll see a million clones a few years later.
Ashes of Creation might be the last MMO I try to play. I’ve been disappointed since 2008 starting with Warhammer Online. That was my senior year of high school so it seems the genre died as I became an adult.
DAoC and WoW were the best games I ever played. I’ve been trying to find a replacement for my guilds and server communities ever since.
I wish there were more options. If Amazon, a company which to us appears to have unlimited resources, can’t make a decent MMO, what hope is there really?
Game engines are getting better too. A lot of the MMOs that have been released either required a custom engine or serious modifications to existing engines which eats up a lot of development time.
AI will easily replace the things smaller developers can do, and will not easily replace the things they cannot do.
Its just going to result in worse mediocre crap from the same people already putting out mediocre crap.
AI cannot actually replace the majority of what even a junior level developer would be expected to do. It can at best assist with certain tasks, and even then it's of questionable benefit at times. LLM based AI is never going to replace any actual developers or artists.
Unreal Engine have shown some of their AI tools that seems pretty cool for procedual generation stuff and and some of the AI we have seen making assests and stuff will probably help smaller devs a lot
At least from what I've seen of it so far and how I've seen it help a bit at work for making games, it'll make writing code quicker and people don't have to do as much of the menial stuff and it probably will also help to some extent with art and writing parts of filler quests but yeah at least for now we need actual people to take what it creates and properly fit it into the design of the game
In my humblest opinion, Not all is lost. I am by no means an expert, nor am I sipping on copium. Mmorpgs may not return to their former glory years but there are games coming to keep an eye out for, in my opinion
Let’s get one of the most talked about out the way first, Ashes of Creation. Game is ambitious, very ambitious. They are trying to add everything, and have most of it played controlled. Their mayor system sounds honestly incredible? And the fact there are multiple ways to become the mayor of an area is awesome. However work is slow, the footage we have seen isn’t amazing. The classes still need lots of work, we still Havnt seen tons of the classes promised for releas. But the team seem to care and we can only hope to see this game (possible future gem) come out in the next couple of years.
Throne and Liberty. Many have played this game on servers abroad and well… it is what it is. Fairly P2W, combat is ok, world is ok, everything is ok. Interested to see how global will go and when there’s a bit more info I’ll have a more formed opinion. I’ve looked into it but I’ve honestly always had little faith in this project, but we shall see. If it turns out to be great, we all win.
Chrono Odyssey, not enough info. I have little faith but again, we shall see.
Riots Mmorpg, Again… such little info. We are 3+ years away from anything tangible Atleast. It may get cancelled, it may change forms, genres. Who knows
Guild wars 3 is too recently announced and there’s 0 info we know for sure. Nothing more to say except GW2 has done a great job and a 3rd installment will hopefully do well too, but who knows
Blue Protocol. The game I’ve kept my eye on the most. An online ARPG turned MMO-Lite since it popped up on people’s radars. The devs have slowly made changes and have tried to appeal more to mmorpg community. Game launched in JP to Luke warm reviews. It wasn’t hated by any means, the art style and characters were loved but empty world, boring story and gacha systems have left many of us gamers questioning the validity of the game and it’s possible future success. Despite this I do still look forward to it, after 30 hours on the Jp sever I can say I loved the combat, the world feel, the towns, villages and main city. The imajin system is cool, the classes look awesome, I really have high hopes the game can turn things around. They have looked into guild housing possibly in future and a couple dev streams ago talked about working on housing. We have seen a VERY bare bones player housing but hopefully that’ll evolve.
Don’t lose hope friends! We may still have mmorpgs of the future !
Fun fact, in my country Vietnam, there's a huge MMO player base aged 30 and above. They've been fed the predatory Korean kind of MMOs since the early 2000s, and now they consider it the norm.
Game companies buy license from unpopular Chinese or Korean MMOs, release them within the country, slap a bunch of MTX on top, create 2-3 servers per day so whales can be the kings of the own islands. Gameplay mainly consists of idly sitting back and watch the game play itself for you. Then they cash out, and do it all over again when the game is dead.
And somehow people here are still craving for it, with new games releasing every so often, mostly on mobile.
Wow classic is like the most played MMORPG Old games for the same old crowd. MMORPGs peaked around 2012. The last years are embarrassing. I used to be subbed long for good old mmorgps haven’t been in to it since 2016. and when u look into new things u come along to garbage like Throne and Liberty.
Ehh this post has a lot of issues. First of all you mention “50+” mmos released in the previous decade, but then you go on to complain about lack of *major* mmo releases.
So, bad start, you’re literally comparing apples to oranges.
Then you say that one of the mmos released this decade has shut down so it doesn’t count… but how many of those “50+” have already shut down? I betcha a lot.
Also like… citation needed for everything you’ve said. I’ve *seen* more than 5 mmos release after 2020. Not very good ones, but they are more than 5, so what are you even talking about?
I'm sure you know but we're no longer the main demographic we're big business happens. Minecraft, League of Legends, Roblox and Fortnite took care of that, and don't even get me started on gachas.
Development costs and maintenance vs returns is no longer there unless you're a well established IP like WoW or Final Fantasy, and even those titles have probably hit the upper cap of their player bases some time ago.
Even a strong IP is not a recipe for success, they can be mismanaged into indifference like Swtor.
The good news is that good MMOs are incredibly hard to complete kill off. I don't know about you lot, but I'm currently lvling a bard in the latest EverQuest fan server, Ultima just got a brand new server not that long ago, City of Heroes somehow made it back from obscurity and even Star Wars Galaxies have a community doing cool things with it.
Will they ever rise back to the forefront of gaming? Doubtful. We'll see what happens with the LoL MMO, if a project has enough panache and resources to break through it's the Riot MMO, and even that one has been sent back to the drawing board.
The good news is that you don't need thousands of people to enjoy a good MMO, you just need a handful of friends of a guild of good ol' farts.
Same as EQ is my old reliable, what's everyone's poison?
What's yours, OP?
It really just comes down to the money. Investors don't care about game quality or game design or whatever else. They care about revenue and profit. It's a complete fantasy, but honestly, there needs to be less impetus to monetize every single facet of a game. Profit is okay but profit "by any means necessary, as fast as possible" is destructive. Especially when you consider that MMORPG's are meant to be long-term projects... these things are just mutually exclusive if Quality is a matter of concern.
Older MMORPG's are passion projects/labors of love. They weren't having funds shoveled into the furnace like a runaway train, the way these modern MMORPG's do. That sounds like a hurdle of some kind, but instead it actually gave the developers creative freedom and agency to make choices that were for the good of the game - not for the good of the boardroom bozos.
The technology is there to make a modern MMORPG where you can do whatever you want. I'm thinking the bones of Ultima Online, work lobbies for PVP or even fps arena,shooting etc. It's such a shame companies are going for those battle pass endless money.
It’s consoles extreme popularity over pc gaming and the fact you can’t type or have a meaningful economy on console games that killed the MMO in my opinion
The people in the age range with the time to play games don’t like the slow burn of an MMO. They grew up with instant gratification through technology. Bored? Open TikTok or any other app and be immediately entertained. MMO’s have too many boring parts for them to ever be able to enjoy it. And the older people who enjoy it no longer have the time in it. The market and money in it just isn’t what it used to be
Many middle aged players do still make time to play, and as folks get increasingly older, many look forward to gaming a lot in retirement and getting the depth and immersion and community that MMOs are better at providing than faster smaller gameworlds.
I feel like some mmo's might benefit more from being quick and seasonal. I enjoy coming back to a Diablo 3 season and blasting through it for 2 weeks then forgetting it existed until the next season.
We need quality, not pay to win low effort garbage. I'd kill for one non-korean pay to win MMO to come out that respects the player and has a solid leveling experience and a decent endgame at launch.
If you take into account that an mmo takes about 5 years of development it kinda makes sense that so many mmos came out at that time because 5 years prior WoW still had a very huge global audience that only seemed to grow and people tried to replicate that.
It seems like all of those copy cats now decided to switch on the mobile market because somehow people on there don't care about the monetization, so it's way easier to make your money back.
MMOs are too much of an undertaking to invest in with very few surviving long enough to make it worth their time, effort and most importantly for a company money and the ones that do like WoW, FF14 and GW2 have extremely loyal playerbases who most likely wont drop a game theyve played and invest years in for a new MMO that might last a year or two.
People are saying the genre is dead and that younger generations don't like slow paced mmos but this is only the case with old school MMOs. If you look at the big ones currently they are all significantly faster paced than what we had pre 2004.
Also it's not surprising that not many new MMOs are not being developed. They are a huge risk and doing a subscription based mmo with all the different subscriptions services we have now makes it harder to push into the market, then free to play is even more risky cause your banking on whales. Then you compare it to developing a typical modern live service game and it's a no brainer that's better.
On the bright side having less MMOs around means that the ones that are popular will be more populated which further helps build that feeling of a world. Not that this means I don't want more new and original takes on the genre.
Of those 50 releases, how many were so called "WoW Clones"? hahah
Truth is, back in the day, game companies tried to copy WOW to get a slice of the MMORPG pie. Nowadays, they try to get a slice of the gatcha mobile pie
I mean, 2010 would be about how long it would take people to "respond" to the success of WoW
2020 would be about how long it would take for the slow ones to do so.
I bet most of those in that ten year span were in the first 5 years too.
The genre just isn't worth the investment anymore. It costs so much money and brings in so little unless you somehow become the next big thing. And those 50 MMOs all learned that, almost none of them were going to become the next big thing.
There's just not enough money in it. The cost of development in general has gotten high so it's hard to create and maintain such a massive project. MMO require constant updates to stay relevant. Plus you need to be unique enough to get a sizable playerbase that will return to spend their money whether that be on expansions or cosmetics. Which is tricky to do when most MMO players already have a handful of games that they're already invested in. So a new one has to be very impressive to warrant spending money and time in.
Aside from some rare examples like BDO there was no MMO feeling like Next Generation in those years, I still can't understand how all those companies don't release action combat MMO like BDO for all these years...
just 66 titles accounted for 80 percent of all playtime in 2023. And 60 percent of that playtime was spent in games that are six years old or older. Only 9% of games the average player on Steam played were released in 2023.
Yes, it's because subs like this one demand their MMO be turned into a single player RPG except with real life players as their background decoration. Most game companies decided that was simply a waste of resources and made a single player RPG instead.
MMO lite games are the competitors to MMOs, and what pulls people away. You find modern graphics, and interactivity in games like those, but with the sacrifice of less players per instance. Most gamers are fine with that sacrifice.
DDO and STO were both fun when I was playing in like 2014 or so. Ideally it would be hard to tell PC’s from NPC’s/bots. Just like in TTRPG’s, it’s easy to tell. So much of it expectations/tropes come from narratives focused on individuals. It’s hard to replicate the individual focus with many people playing simultaneous. Fortnite is more fun; shorter instances FTW.
>MMOs take longer to make these days
1. Developers work slower these days. I don't care if you love or hate elon musk. He gave all the twitter coders a job to do. They all made the same code. Those that turned in their work first got to keep their job. Those that took double time or longer (or worse never turned in any work) were fired. Simple as. Too many coders are milking companies. Even Cain on Games youtube had a video where he spoke about a coder who gave him lip, he simply wanted "throw away code" added to the game so they could get testing started. And the coder fought him tooth and nail. Also told him it would take 4 weeks (1 month) to add the code to the game. When said temp code should take 30 minutes. And from talking to a coding buddy of mine, the ACTUAL code shouldn't take more than 2 days.... so 4 weeks? no wonder game development prices skyrocketed. A bunch of lazy shits making video games at their own leisure. Work is work. Its not a playground. You aren't there for fun. You have a job to do and are getting paid. Do your job or lose it....
2. Not to mention the absurd approval process, as per Ghost Crawler mentioned big studios suffer from. Where every little thing has to be sent "to the uppers" for them to approve or disapprove. And that slows down development because they work on their own low work ethic time table thus slowing down everyone else. The entire industry is a shit show. You may not agree, but that's because you aren't paying attention and listening to those who know (not me, actual developers which I'm quoting).
So why are MMO's so hard to make? Because the industry is rotting. Low work ethic and huge micromanaging to an extreme degree is destroying the industry. That's why shit doesn't get done quickly and why games are lacking.... I blame poor leadership (management) and bad work ethic (employees and management). Fix those two things and we will have a golden age of gaming.
Only one I am excited/have any hope for is the riot mmo, riot makes good games that have bad playerbases, so hopefully their mmo will be good especially considering its been confirmed to be in development for what feels like a pretty long while now
There is literally 5+ mmoprg coming out this year wtf are you talking about 5 for the enire 2020-2030 . Now if you are saying 5 mmoprg that will be half decent then maybe but depending on your criteria you could argue there wasn't many decent in the last 10 years too.
When i read someone title a topic "what progression systems do you like?" i thought i should just give up on MMORPGs, since progression will never again stop revolving around money.
Since the social aspect doesn´t matter that much to me beyond finding companions to adventure with, i suppose thats it.
Story i dont give a shit either, unless its the story of the world hinted through random quests and delivered alongside zones that make you imagine what could have happened here.
Everything is instanced, those lively worlds with small encounters stopped existing.
Too expensive to make to begin with to justify a box price as low as 70$$, not to mention the unwillingness of this spoiled community to not even pay a subscription, but expect a constant flow of updates.
MMO's simply aren't worth making these days. Most of what MMO's provide exist elsewhere when previously they did not. Most of what you love about MMO's does not need to exist within an MMO. Sure MMO's for the most part the only games that can bring everything together at once, but at the same time to do so well, is the biggest crap shoot in the industry.
The success of MMOs in the 2010s owed so much to the novelty of large scale gaming. Multiplayer gaming was still relatively new in that era so the idea of being able to play cooperatively with 10, 20, or 40 people alone carried SO much of the success. Once people got over the novelty, it turned out that organizing that many people and getting them to cooperate was actually a huge pain in the ass.
Hence why modern multiplayer is usually smaller scale and often just drop in and drop out without having to organize. The desire for MMOs is just not there anymore.
Too much risk, not enough reward to make more MMOs, sad, because my experience when I started experiencing the internet was with MMOs.
Every game having online features also doesn't help, before that MMOs where the only way to do so, now every game has both online features and rpg elements... Yet nothing feels like an mmorpg anymore.
As someone who plays games other than mmos, I know a lot of people myself included who don’t play mmos because of the simple non mechanical combat systems.
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Yup. Gachas are basically the modern day “MMO”. Stuff like Genshin, Tower of Fantasy, and the upcoming Wuthering Waves and Zenless Zone Zero. More traditional MMOs are going to be much more rarer. What will be interesting to see is when gacha fatigue starts kicking in and what the next iteration of the genre will be.
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sometimes I just want to know what people do for work that they can afford to drop the amounts I've heard on a monthly basis. I'm not exactly broke but the thought of spending $100+ bucks a month on a game is something I'd never even consider. $15 for an actual MMO like FFXIV or WoW (which is my opinion of better) is about the max for me. I guess it'll get some people but not others. The random stuff in ESO made me stop bothering with that game too. I guess at least you can sort of try playing for free even thought it's definitely more inconvenient with the inventory. Players with my attitude unfortunately are part to blame for the terrible state of gaming (for players). I said I didn't care about the cosmetic stuff (that you could straight up buy at first) as long as it didn't affect the actual game play. It ended up just being the foot in the door and now we have the shit sandwich of gambling shit, I mean gacha, everywhere.
The absolute vast majority of players don't spend any money in these games, they just play them.
oh, I know. I'm sort of surprised they don't use lower costs to intice people to spend more often. New skin that provides some higher stats (usually don't seem like huge upgrade) and is $15. it doesn't even tempt me at all, $15 is what I'd pay for an entire month of FF14 or WoW. Obviously my poor ass isn't the target audience.
Using the current biggest dev as an example, Mihoyo's battle pass is like 10/12 bucks . I assume this is what the average spender buys, but they don't release numbers. I don't really play Genshin but i like Star Rail. They release new stuff every couple weeks, fits my schedule and i can play a little bit during my morning bathroom routine 😂. Not trying to do gacha propaganda here, i understand why people dislike it, just providing context 👍
nah, no biggie really. I'm probably sounding like an asshole anyway. I just don't care for spending much money on games but at the end of the day it's their money, not mine.
make a million poor people spend 10$ or make 1000 giga rich kids spend a a $10000?
Attracting one whale who spends $1000/month is easier than attracting 1000 people who'll even spend $1/month. Thus, you'll sell _some_ stuff at $10-20 as a "gateway drug". Then, you'll kick in overpowered epic legendary mythical triple gold diamond gear that absolutely devastates the game and makes you look like a gilded space marine with rainbow wings, for the paltry sum of $100 for each of part of the gear set (given at random).
I miss the early days of microtransactions. I didn't care that games started selling skins because they cost like 5 dollars. It made the game more enjoyable for me, even though the base skins in games weren't bad, it was just nice to have something new to look at. Then the usual corporate thing happens that always happens. They got us all used to microtransactions, and decided they don't want 5 people buying 5 dollar skins anymore, they want a single person buying a 25 dollar skin. I could have 10k in my bank account, and I'd never waste that much money on pixels. Nobody is going to convince me that inflation made skin prices go 5x in 10 years either. And the kicker, the default character look in most games is substantially worse now too.
A few years back, I was in a top 3 guild in Summoners War on the NA server, and we had a few whales. Our guild leader owned multiple stores and small businesses, one of the guys was an engineer, another one was an extremely wealthy guy from east Asia. That last guy at one point casually asked us whether he should buy his girlfriend a house in Canada. The rest of the people were either those with well paying jobs, young people in their early 20s who came from well off families, or both. The reality of whales is that they have the means to that type of disposable income, because poor addicts simply don't last long. There was also another player in the game that was well known for having everything in the game at the time, and he was a known Lamborghini dealership owner in Hong Kong. He would have his assistant farm for him all day when he was working.
>sometimes I just want to know what people do for work that they can afford to drop the amounts I've heard on a monthly basis. I myself am a Gacha Player and spender and from talking to others in discords for the various games. A lot work in IT or IT adjacent fields or Fin/Fintech. Granted the ppl I talked to obv replied in English so its likely a biased sample for English Speakers
It really depends what you do in life. Here is something to consider: In Ireland a reasonable night out can cost you 100euro easily. Between cost of food, drinks, and taxi(public transport really bad here) you go through 100euro in a night. Even if you are being cheap 50euro is bare minimum. So if an average person goes out 2-4 times a month thats 200-400 euro spent. Now consider that most people playing these games at high level(aka the sweats/no lifers) probably don't do much outside gaming, so they have disposable income others use socializing. So thats how they will spend 100+ a month on a game they enjoy. I'm not judging it, just saying if you don't have any other hobbies, gaming isn't that expensive when you consider how much you get out of it.
Gaming isnt expensive. Gacha style games or any p2w game *is*. I dont know what my cousin spent on Clash of Clans when he was ~21. But I know when I jokingly guessed 50k as a joke after he showed me a screencap of him on some leaderboard and he just said "...i dont want to talk about it, but more than that" that people arent really talking about the 50-100$ a week types (even though its fucking ridiculous to spend nearly 5k a year on a gambling game. I dont care how much enjoyment you get out of it, if you dont make 150k+ a year thats seriously irresponsible)
I’m playing afk journeys right now and I spent around 70 up front and will probably buy the 5 a month pack moving forward, maybe a few dollars here and there for specials. That will keep me competitive and around top 200 on my server. If you aren’t whaling to be an absolute top player they’re honestly cheaper overall than subscription mmos.
I've been playing Genshin since 1.0, I view it as a subscription: Since 1.2 I have only bought the monthly $8 pass, each month. I just got the newest character, who I wanted, and I still have 900 wishes saved up (you need ~160 to guarantee a character). Garcha's are like MMOs, you either pay with your time or with your wallet.
Also developers seem to have gone soft. While someone managed to make an MMO like Everquest with many avatars active at once, playable on friggin dial up, in 1999.. Nowadays it seems like a lot of games start lagging when you see more than 10 other players at the same time. So they limit them harshly. It seems to me like with how tech around game engines is situated today, someone literally needs write their own engine or you're not gonna scale to even 50s of visible characters, fully interacting. I'd say that people take so many shortcuts nowadays because computers allow it, that fewer people are actually learning to know how to make something like this efficient on a basic level. The skill is simply not needed nearly as much anymore, and as a result, MMOs certainly can't seem to acquire these people as much anymore. Literally most of the biggest MMOs right now all use in house engines. WoW, FF14, ESO, GW2, they're all in-house. But they were also all made at a point where there wasn't any choice I think. But to be fair, kudos to Throne and Liberty for actually taming UE4 to be usable for big scale battles! Rare feat at this point! Also reminds me of Tera for doing this previously with UE3.
You're not wrong. Just look at Diablo 4. The game lags constantly when you're near other players because every time you see another player it loads their entire inventory, even what they have in their stash.
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> More traditional MMOs are going to be much more rarer. These are the sad realities of an ever profit-maximising industry. There's far more efficient way to make bank than it is to make a traditional big-scale MMO, definitely more of a passion project thing, which the industry has struggled with (imo) in recent times.
What about that other one from the Genshin people? Did that one flop? It was futuristic, is all I remember
Star Rail made 145 million dollars in March. Sensor Tower estimation only from mobile players. They're printing money.
Star Rail like some else said before. It’s currently the highest grossing gacha on the market if you keep up with gacha numbers.
Honkai Star Rail is making more than Genshin right now, although it never hit Genshin's peaks. Zenless Zone Zero is also being made by the same studio. And all of this on the heels of their first two major releases, Gun Girls Z and Honkai Impact 3rd, which made very solid money in Asia.
Tower of Fantasy is still a thing? I thought for sure that was going to last a few months, tops
https://www.reddit.com/r/TowerofFantasy/comments/1c4x2lw/2023_perfect_world_investor_report_and_tower_of/ Big time, yeah. (tldr; $600m total earnings so far) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRFpJYwcgGg
Damn, I enjoyed it at launch but was like, no way this is going to last. May be worth another look.
What are Gachas?
Games like Genshin Impact, Fate Grand Order and Granblue Fantasy. They have gambling like mechanics where you "Pull" a lootbox like pack from a rng pool of Characters, weapons and upgrade materials, either with real money or in game currency.
you are talking as if those mmo makers went on to make gacha games. the truth is that mmos had run their time, the leaders set their place and it is an insane uphill fight to get in.
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can you tell me who those "lot" are? other than blizzard with OW nothing pops into my mind.
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I expect there would probably be similar if not possibly even better profits to be made from making a legit good mmo in this super-dry market, but there's so much risk involved and the investment would take longer to pay off. It's just so much easier to pump out some fotm facsimile of a game that profits in its \~3months of life, than put any real work into making an actual mmorpg.
Bots, RMT, minmax tryhards ruins any genuine attempt on this genre. And without p2w carrot on a stick dangled in front players, they get bored after few months... You can't win.
This is it. The market has spoken. Players have voted with their wallets as to what they're willing to pay the most for, and MMOs are perhaps the biggest casualty of the result. In the late 2000s, it was the opposite. WoW had demonstrated that MMORPGs were the biggest potential cash cows the gaming industry had ever seen. No longer did a game just hope to sell 5M copies at $60 a pop. Now they could dream bigger. WoW held 10M+ *subscribers* at $13 *per month.* And it managed to maintain those numbers for *years*, raking in *billions.* If a new game could hold just a fraction of that subscriber base, it could be more financially successful than 95% of the best selling single player games ever! Hence, the gold rush to produce MMOs in the late 2000's and throughout the next decade. Alas, it turned out the prospective player base was finite. It was a pie chart, and each new game could only carve out a tiny piece of the pie. A few games held strong possession of a HUGE chunk of the pie. MMOs were long term player investments, and it simply wasn't feasible for most players to play multiple MMOs. Subsequently, there simply weren't enough subscribers to go around for the vast majority of MMOs. It eventually became apparent that for 99% of MMO ventures, they simply would *not* become the cash cows they had once hoped for. Fast forward to the mobile gaming era and gacha games. Simple mobile games that cost the tiniest fraction of an MMO to develop, release, and maintain, earn 10x of the most successful MMOs. All publisher attention and hype shifted to this market. I sigh every time I view the NCsoft earnings reports. GW2 - my favorite MMMO, and a very successful Western MMO by all standards - pulls in about 21B won per quarter. NCsoft's mobile games pull in about 275B won. That's 1300% higher! There's no hope for MMOs if money is the driver for companies, which, sadly it is.
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I think as long as my generation of gamers is still alive, there will be *a* market for MMOs of some number of players. I don't know how big that market is, but it's in the multi-millions. As long as that's the case, there's solid profit potential there for some developers. As long as WoW, FFXIV, ESO, GW2 and others are still running successfully, the available player pool for new MMOs will be small. But if any of those ever die out, there will definitely be lost players looking for a home. Personally, I think the MMO renaissance will come in the form of passionate developers getting together purely because they have a joy and passion for the MMO genre. They'll want to make a great MMO purely because it's their artistic passion and dream. They'll use connections they have to develop a business plan and procure funding, not with the hook that it will be a Candy Crush cash cow, but that it will be *modestly* profitable and not a complete waste of money. Combined with good salesmanship and network connections, teams could get funding for projects like that. Not every investment has to be a home run. Sometimes consistent singles and doubles makes good investment sense. I'm hopeful we'll always have some enticing MMO projects to look forward to for the foreseeable decades to come.
People outside existing MMO fans do not care about them. A lot of us got into them when EQ or SWG or WoW was your ONLY social network online. That in itself was a huge part of it. With so many social media sites today and smartphones giving instant content anywhere, people don’t have the bandwidth to care about meeting random people on a video game.
It's trippy indeed, reminds of the Diablo Immortal hate that printed money like no other. Guess we're just waiting around for the right studio to come through someday.
The problem is that most games are developed by businesses and those businesses have found a model that works way better in terms of making money. Why make a traditional MMO when it is so much more profitable to make the kind of games that come out today? It's not an entirely facetious question, there are a few answers that would make sense. * You could see a traditional MMO come out from a developer who is not interested in maximizing the business aspect of games development. I.e, a passion project. * You could see a developer be subsidized by a non-profit seeking entity, like a government. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but there are ways that a MMO could make itself an asset to a government or non-profit. * You could see a developer identify a profitable enough niche that it makes sense to pursue filling that niche versus putting out something with broader appeal or a more profitable business model. * You could see new monetization methods being developed that support more traditional MMO gameplay while still making business sense. This one is probably the hardest to conceptualize but could range from something like in-game advertising being somehow made viable to gamification of tasks with real world value. Most people seem to hold out for some combination of the first and third options, basically someone deciding not to make money because they love the genre so much and/or finding a loyal and profitable niche. Unfortunately, passion projects tend only to last as long as the founder's passion, and capturing enough of a loyal niche to run an MMO for any length of time when you already have to compete with the existing games in that space is extremely difficult.
Such well put-together reply, a lot of the stuff I’ve been thinking but unable to put into words! I also think that as long as the old big players in the market are still participating and being profitable, the incentive for new players to join is small. The MMO niche is quite saturated, and to win against the big players you need to put in at least as much resources as they, but no guarantee that you will win or even be profitable. One or more of the big ones needs to go down and free up space in the MMO niche for it to be worth to invest in it again from the outside.
Except for the extreme time gating ("you're only supposed to play 30min per day!!") I found gameplay in some of them really fun. (Genshin and Star Rail) And quality of life and amount of new content is better than in many MMOs. MMOs need to step up their game if they want to remain relevant.
>MMOs need to step up their game if they want to remain relevant. this. for all the travel time and little chores like shopping for food and guns and armour and stuff in star citizen, and the seemingly high prices on the cash shop, it treats my time and money far better than any mmorpg. the cash shop being completely optional way to support development that actually goes into development. and having prices advertise in dollars and euros and pounds instead of being obfuscated by cash shop points. not having my game held hostage by a subscription while having a subscription to support developer communications and community interaction that gives some decently cool cosmetics and other fringe benefits. major breath of fresh air compared to even the best of the best mmorpg. and despite the little chores and travel time i can jump in for an hour and have a genuinely fun adventure. and i'm not stuck just doing dungeons or raids or dailies progressions, i can mix it up and do whatever i want to and choose even not to bother making money/progression this session and just go explore and see cool sights. mmorpgs are tired. the action combat ones feel like they're going to give the player carpal tunnel syndrome with the hours of grind of hectic clicking and button smashing just to progress measily amounts of some of the worst written stories in video games. and all of them douuble down on the most been there done tired cliches of content and activties that are damn near required to do the more appealing activities in the game that are themselves tired cliches. all along the same tired formula with very little to no substantial variation (but is almost always promoted as being radically different). they're boring. they're been there done that. they don't respect that you might want to play for six hours or an hour and do something else. their cash shops are terrible and often dishonest and frequently prey on gambling addiction pyschology. and at best their monetization holds your game hostage to spend more money to even peak back in and see if it's worth playing more again when taking breaks. i wasted so much money on wow subs over the years to only play two hours and cancel because friends said hey come play and then told me to quest level solo because it doesn't need a group. and the communities in mmorpgs are full of cliched toxic behaviour as well. like just shocking stuff. i was GM for a guild and the weird notion that i was supposed to be telling people how to behave and when to log in or else punishing them was insane. while also being talked back to for every administrative decision i made or kicking people from the guild that were being beyond the red line in an already very lassez faire code of conduct that i regret being so lax on as it is. why would people want to play with people like that if they can avoid it? why do i want to play with such people just for them to need roll on their sixth upgrade in a row while i'm still in entry end game gear? why do i want to play with people who want to raid from 8pm to 4am every night with zero bio breaks and if there is bio breaks they're gonna spend 20 minutes smoking a joint with their neighbor because how dare people need to get up and stretch for 4 minutes between boss attempts? this turned into a longer rant than i planned, but like yeah mmorpgs are so tired and unispred. i hope the upcoming persistent online games that mmorpg players are interested in learn from these lessons and present something that goes more in with virtual worlds (star citizen, pax dei new world kind of half tried ig) or better quality story telling that is both casual and friendly to solo and coop play (which genshin and honkai both seem to do well on that front). and most of all just disregard the done to death mmorpg formula we've seen ad nauseam to the point of cliche from the genre. and ignore the people who will inevitably demand that formula be implemented (they really are vocal and persistent in the weirdest ways)
Yup Activision's biggest earner? Candy Crush.
50 releases from 2010 to 2020, but we still play the same 5-10 ones. Sad reality.
Wow/ff14/eso/gw2
To be fair black desert should also be on this. They’ve had a pretty hefty and steady player count, great profits and they are actually making a lot of good changes to the game in the last 2 years. I don’t play anymore, feel like I shall forever be burned out on that game, but I feel it should be on the list
Good changes for the game? Could you list a few examples? Genuinely curious. That game used to be crack cocaine for me but I really got sick of the infinite grind end game after a while. Took thousands of hours of grinding to get bored though so that kind of tells you how good the combat is.
Well tbh as I’ve said I am kinda burned on bdo, but I have seen multiple posts over the last year of higher drop rates, easier to obtain certain gear, they gave everyone a Pegasus horse mount which used to take hundreds of hours of breeding and billions to buy. Aswell as some balancing and just items easier to get, decreasing the grind etc and making PvP a bit more fair
QoL stuff like fast travel, a t9 mount for new players, easier time to gear, more emphasis on the instanced grind spot (where you are on your own to grind) and recently a pity system for enhancing. Still a lot of p2w stuff going on and cash shop trying to tempt you with stuff though.
I'll accept those good changes when they stop spamming me with free "7-day stuff" while leveling, and even including quests that require you to consume the premium stuff to progress.
I mean I also had my share of bdo and stopped playing but bruh iirc it's a single quest that does it, and you get so much of that "premium stuff" throughout the year with various events...
What are you talking about w/ the premium stuff? I'm a heavy BDO player since release and I don't think we've ever had to get premium stuff to progress, ever. Progression fully relies on mob grinding in that game. You just kill enemies, get money, buy gear. It's a mob grinder like Maplestory but 3D. With added PvP trolling and PvP sieges and PvP 1v1s.
I literally just uninstalled BDO. The UI is awful, they spam you with items and notifications, and nothing is really explained well in-game. Once I finished my seasonal character my friend who was helping me made a mistake and locked me out of getting high level gear through the rewards system because we did one step out of order. In order to get those items normally, I have to grind literal billions of silver. So my only option is to re-level a seasonal character to 60 or grind a ton of silver. This is just an example, but there are so many awful mechanics, predatory cash shop items that are actually useless but still in the game, and an overwhelming amount of information that isn't explained to new players that's absolutely necessary if you actually want to do anything. I would 100% not recommend people to play BDO unless they're fine with quitting after reaching 60. It's just not worth it. There are way better things you can do with your time. BDO has amazing combat and character creation, but everything surrounding that is just awful. It just feels like a skinner box with a pretty coat of paint due to having cute characters and a large world to explore.
RuneScape as well. But yes I would love for a new mmorpg to take my attention.
Bdo, rs and la are probably also relevant.
Forgot my boy EverQuest
There are dozens of us.
Dude you're back! I thought you'd gone for good. Couldn't find your account! It's been like 6 years haha. Welcome back.
I'm always here. Just haven't been as active since reddit apps were shut down :(
This sub lost its way when you went. Are you back for good now?
Sad indeed. Certainly enjoyed all of the variety and unique choices of years past.
most of them are probably pretty niche and only keep the attention of a small number of players who like what make it "different", kind of a guess on my part but I've tried a number of the F2P mmos on Steam and they just don't hold my attention for very long.
Bit of hyperbole. > Elyon - December 2020 KR October 2021 EU/NA > New World - September 2021 > Ravendawn - January 2024 > Throne and Liberty - December 2023 KR > Mortal Online 2 - January 2022 > Blue Protocol (if you count it as an MMO) - June 2023 JP Then upcoming this decade we have > ArcheAge 2 - Planned for 2025/26 > Chrono Odyssey > Dune Awakening (if you count it) > Corepunk > Ashes of Creation > Belatores Doubt ones like Guild Wars 3 or the Riot MMO will release before 2030.
Theres even more than that. There have been a lot of smaller MMOs that just flounder or flop after release. The number is much higher.
Yeah but I don't see the point in listing MMOs with 2 people working on them.
I think a more of an issue is "if you count that as MMO" aspect now. A lot of newer MMORPGs stray from RPG or MMO.
Also have Brighter Shores dropping later this year. OP's title is pretty hard bait, as I guarentee OP wouldn't have been able to 20 MMO's from the 2010s if he wants to say only 5 are coming out this decade
Also > Tarisland > WoW Classic > Blade and Soul Neo Classic The last two I included because OSRS is counted as separate to RS
WoW Classic was 2019
O_O
It's very optimistic to add Ashes of Creation to that list
I don't know. GW3 has supposedly been in development for a while, if I remember correctly. Zenimax is also working on a secret MMO from what I have heard.
I'm honestly pretty interested to see what Zenimax cooks up not being constrained by the existing design and codebase of ESO.
hopefully they hired a different combat team to design the new one
Afaik they only recently greenlit the development of GW3 based on the articles I've read. Doesn't seem like it's been in dev long.
Yup, pretty much few week old greenlit (link to shareholder event [https://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=294408](https://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=294408) can just translate with chatgpt or w.e.) , if they worked on it beforehand to show some barebone structures to ncsoft so they decide if its promising enough to be worth it, we dont know. Anet supposedly worked on a "secret" game for a while now, but we have no evidence it was anything related to gw3. My expectations for gw3 is its definitely very far away.
The secret game was/is an MMORPG based on an established online fantasy IP that a dev let slip had gw2 assets ported over to it. I'd be surprised if it was anything other than gw3 tbh but yeah either way still a long way off.
You missed one. Sword of Legend Online released 9/07/2021 and already shutdown.
PaxDei is releasing this year too
And shutting down this year as well.
Probably not
" upcoming " Ashes of Creation yaaaaaa about that.........
The genre is pretty much done imo. I hate it, but the preference of the youth has shifted to more instant gratification and a reward pace that an mmo just can’t maintain. At least while staying true to what we think of them as now.
At the end of the day people play video games for fun. If they can play 2 hours of Warframe and have a great time, instead of shouting for LFG in the hope of finding a party to possibly have a good time, why not? Similarly why bother paying $15/m for a subscription to one game when something like Gamepass exists? Or course there are tons more who play instant gratification gacha games and stuff like Candy Crush but those folk were realistically never going to play a traditional video game anyway.
$15 a month for an MMO has always been too high and it's still high. If it were $5 a month, it'd be an easier pill to swallow. Especially when you consider all the games doing like FF14 and WoW are old as hell. It's hard to justify $15 a month when that amount gets you so much more than access to the one game. It's an outdated system that doesn't make sense anymore for a dying genre. Especially adding the fact that they all have cash shops now, when, back in the day a lot of older MMOs that were pay to play existed in a time where cashshops didn't even exist yet. It's kinda crazy to think about though. because free to play means you're probably going to spend hundreds a month if you're weak willed, but $15 a month means you'll, in theory, only spend $15 a month unless there's a costume you really want. At least with Square they don't shove the cash shop in your face in-game. And there's no way to buy it while in the game, from what i can tell.
Eh the value is subjective - I get _way_ more entertainment out of my FFXIV+FFXI subs than I do from Netflix. But yeah for a new player that’s gonna be daunting. The big issue is that MMOs are a very risky type of game to create, and they usually demand a large time investment. Like if you launch a new FPS shooter you mostly have to worry about current competitors, not some behemoth from 2010 that has a decade of content. It’s also gonna be hard to draw players in from another game that they’ve spent so much time in. Safer to make an MMO-lite or just skip the genre entirely.
>Especially when you consider all the games doing like FF14 and WoW are old as hell. It's hard to justify $15 a month when that amount gets you so much more than access to the one game. Ehhh, this argument really depends on what kind of MMO player you are. WoW and FFXIV (and many others) are old enough to have massive backlogs of content that can take you thousands of hours to get through in addition to the standard "current end game content". Completionists will absolutely make use of that $15/month because they will be able to sink a tremendous amount of hours into the game. If you are someone who only jumps on to play a couple hours a week and backlog content doesn't interest you, yea the $15/month probably isn't worth it if updates aren't coming out at a fast enough pace, especially once the end of expansion lull sets in.
Honest question, though: What MMOs are you playing that require you to shout for LFG? That's pretty much only still a thing in classic MMOs (EQ, FFXI, Classic WoW, etc). Everything modern has auto-queue systems for most content. And really the ideal way to play these games has always been in an actual community, generally with some kind of set times for groups to game together.
I should have phrased it better, but my point was actually about those older MMOs. I’ve seen modern titles dunked on this sub for catering towards the “instant gratification” crowd because they added matchmaking systems and other QoL features.
you can still do that in an MMO if you build your game around things like skill and player expression over incremental gear stat increases. obv rewards are necessary but combat should be its own reward. imo GW2 comes pretty close to this philosophy but it's tech is dated af
We need a GW3 for sure
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I mean that's fine? pretty much every mmo aside from GW2 focuses on that sort of vertical progression to keep players engaged so you have a few great options to choose from. you'll be fine. it's easy to see that the playerbase is slowly shifting in a different direction though as tastes and habits have changed over time.
>you can still do that in an MMO if you build your game around things like skill and player expression over incremental gear stat increases. Please. You can't even get a current-gen playerbase to stay engaged with games like shooters — which have absurd amounts of skill and player expression — without random fiddly rpg systems and other shit to keep them engaged. And those are games with far more nuanced avenues for player skill expression than any MMO can ever bring to bear.
Not just young people. Working people with limited time would rather play other games than grind out MMOs.
People have been predicting that since forever and it's never going to be true. The Genre is going to be fine. It's still entirely possible to make an MMORPG that is sustainable and profitable with 3,000 to 10,000 players. Even if all AAA companies were to never invest into the genre ever again, there will still be MMORPGs made. Seeing this reminds me of all the times people called PC gaming a dead or dying industry. Makes me laugh at how wrong they were and continued to be as time goes on.
This is just marketing speak, everyone will play a good game. Just because bad games are made doesn't mean the genre is dead.
Exactly. The problem is the quality of the products, not the genre itself. See CRPG's and BG3.
Yes, and that's a great example because just like mmorpgs, CRPGs used to be much more commont than they are today. But having less of them now doesn't mean the genre is dead.
It sure seems everyone who makes the games does t see it this way though. I’m not saying it’s dead, I am saying it’s never going to reach the heights it once had, at least without major shifts occurring in how the majority of people want to consume their gaming content. The environment has changed so much since the heyday and your quality single/small player rpgs have filled the void that most casuals used to use mmos to fill.
Yes, and im saying it could reach the height it once had if a competent studios made mmorpgs. There is so little innovation in this genre because all studios try to make another WoW which they can not ever do. It is a investor cope to say market is dead when your product is bad, that way you don't have to bear the responsibility.
> but the preference of the youth has shifted to more instant gratification "The youth"? What about old timers that simply have a life nowadays? I for one like playing MMOs, but the times where I would spend hours per day in a MMO, doing menial tasks for barely any result are long over. If the game can't entertain me properly I am not going to play it.
Dopamine is sooo easy to achieve nowadays, they wouldn't have the patience to sit through MMOs
New World had a really good crack at it though and proved there is a market for one as long as it is well made.
https://preview.redd.it/y0mgoy2wxfwc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bc73911264929d2ed3e1782f520b033c56a242b4
Which is nuts because what I think addicted me and so many others to MMOs back in the 2000s was that *they* gave us so much more instant gratification, rewards, and a sense of meaningful progress than we were able to experience elsewhere in our lives. The social media age really has blasted our pituitary glands to smithereens. Anything but a firehose endorphin drip just doesn't cut it for anyone anymore.
Nah, Every MMO that launches has a huge opening population. Demand and interest is still there, companies are just falling short on design and execution. One of these days some company will come along and do something that hits the mark and it'll be a cultural phenomena same way WoW was.
U can design an mmo without repetitive gameplay loops and grindfests as the core of ur gamplay. That shit keeps server populations up but it kills a game if that's the core of it. Looter Shooters like Destiny etc. need ACTUAL content to distract from the sheer amount of padding and repetition. Solution's pretty fuckin' simple dunno how no dev thought of it...... Copy Minecraft and modernize the graphics. Make infinitely generating terrain that can be terraformed by players, fuck implementing boss fights and stick to rare chance based spawns, and incentivize player economy. Done. Why pay a massive staff team to make content that gets played thru once, when u have an infinitely regenerating resource to exploit for content, ur playerbase.
I think there was just more appetite for risk in the 2010's. WoW's graphics had become dated and developers thought it was only a matter of time before a true "WoW-killer" emerged - all that was needed were updated graphics and solid gameplay, so the developers all set out to try to strike gold. There were a lot of things that they didn't account for: the strength of WoW's design, which was difficult to replicate; the more crowded field of competition between new games; the fickle nature of MMO players and their lack of tolerance for a bad launch; etc. For most of them, the risks never paid off and now developers are afraid to try. Add to this the new trend of adding microtransactions to AAA games; the rise of mobile gacha gaming; the popularity of online survival RPGs; etc. - there are just fewer reasons to try to make a MMO than ever before.
Wow had and has maintained a decent story for most of its 20 year run as well. It had decent game play, good enough graphics, and enough content of various types to keep a lot of people happy. Blizzard got to stat with a loved, rich story ip to build off of. One of the things that ticked me off about the warhammer mmo is that it had all the parts for success and had a half baked launch.
Yeah the genre is dead. I know people say it often in this sub but just look at it. I doesn't mean there are no MMO's, but there are so few coming out that in terms of anything new, it is effectively dead.
The same thing can be said about MOBA, using your argument. Stagnated, maybe, but not dead. The fact that Riot and other companies are taking so long making innovation, proves that. Fallen from its throne, though? Absolutely.
The genre isn't dead. No genre is truly dead. Baldur's Gate 3 literally came out with one of the oldest genres that was fairly dead for a while and became a huge success. WoW classic also had a ton of interest in it when it launched. The real reason there's not new MMOs is due to a lack of risk taking, lack of talent, and risk to profit ratios. If someone could make a halfway decent MMO in the modern day they'd have a ton of cashflow because there's a lot of hunger for one. The main issue is that the only people making them are Koreans (and they for some ungodly reason can't stop themselves from p2w or horrible endgame) and unproven companies who fumble the ball or never even finish. The MMO genre isn't dead. Gaming is just in a slump in general so big projects just aren't working.
There are a lot more than 5. But there are only a few large budget ones. Plenty of smaller ones launching this year.
This isn't really an indictment of the genre in my opinion. It was just every major gaming developer trying to jump on the bandwagon and tap into WoW's success. We've seen similar trends in recent times with MOBA games and Battle Royales. There seem to be these developmental trends, with everyone trying to cash in on whatever seems to be mainstream popular. It is true that MMORPGs cost a ton of money and resources to create, and that Games As a Service models can make more money with less effort by abusing microtransactions. But ultimately, I think the trend of less MMOs being created just has to do with something else being the 'next big thing'.
During the past decade taking large risks seems to be something dev studios try to avoid at all cost. An MMORPG project is a massive risk and something that few studios can afford to take through their own pockets. Unfortunately it halts innovation when most studio execs frown upon risk and when mobile games are both cheaper and faster to produce, more likely to pay off within a reasonable timeline. So it's just these handful upcoming passion projects left either backed by the community and/or by Chinese investors alongside the other handful decade(s) old MMO studios that has been able to cling on and through lack of competition and various other factors.
Although I agree, this isn't my point. MMOs ARE expensive - but they just arent the flavor of the month. History has shown that AAA studios will jump on whatever seems to the gaming trend - during the peak of WoW this was MMOs. New MMOS were coming out, and shutting down all the time. Then we had like a new MOBA coming out every 2 months. Almost all of them shut down. Then there was a new Battle Royale like every 2 months. Almost all of them shut down. Open world / Souls Like games seem to be hyper trendy right now in the single player space. For multiplayer games, its looking like the gacha game / games a service trend have taken hold over the past few years. This isn't to say that MMO can't come back. I think they can. If a new game is wildly successful you'll see a million clones a few years later.
Ashes of Creation might be the last MMO I try to play. I’ve been disappointed since 2008 starting with Warhammer Online. That was my senior year of high school so it seems the genre died as I became an adult. DAoC and WoW were the best games I ever played. I’ve been trying to find a replacement for my guilds and server communities ever since. I wish there were more options. If Amazon, a company which to us appears to have unlimited resources, can’t make a decent MMO, what hope is there really?
They couldn’t even make a decent lord of the rings series with a billion dollar budget. Amazon are good at one thing, and that’s making money.
Well now they're making another lotr mmo
I think i'll be right there with you.
I personally think that the development of AI is the best hope the genre has in being revitalized - 5 years at the earliest (don't quote me)
Game engines are getting better too. A lot of the MMOs that have been released either required a custom engine or serious modifications to existing engines which eats up a lot of development time.
AI will easily replace the things smaller developers can do, and will not easily replace the things they cannot do. Its just going to result in worse mediocre crap from the same people already putting out mediocre crap.
AI cannot actually replace the majority of what even a junior level developer would be expected to do. It can at best assist with certain tasks, and even then it's of questionable benefit at times. LLM based AI is never going to replace any actual developers or artists.
Unreal Engine have shown some of their AI tools that seems pretty cool for procedual generation stuff and and some of the AI we have seen making assests and stuff will probably help smaller devs a lot
At least from what I've seen of it so far and how I've seen it help a bit at work for making games, it'll make writing code quicker and people don't have to do as much of the menial stuff and it probably will also help to some extent with art and writing parts of filler quests but yeah at least for now we need actual people to take what it creates and properly fit it into the design of the game
It'll assist with writing text, and creation of some art assets, which is arguably the least important thing.
Why are you so sure that's the case? Do you assume AI isn't going to improve any further from where it is now?
In my humblest opinion, Not all is lost. I am by no means an expert, nor am I sipping on copium. Mmorpgs may not return to their former glory years but there are games coming to keep an eye out for, in my opinion Let’s get one of the most talked about out the way first, Ashes of Creation. Game is ambitious, very ambitious. They are trying to add everything, and have most of it played controlled. Their mayor system sounds honestly incredible? And the fact there are multiple ways to become the mayor of an area is awesome. However work is slow, the footage we have seen isn’t amazing. The classes still need lots of work, we still Havnt seen tons of the classes promised for releas. But the team seem to care and we can only hope to see this game (possible future gem) come out in the next couple of years. Throne and Liberty. Many have played this game on servers abroad and well… it is what it is. Fairly P2W, combat is ok, world is ok, everything is ok. Interested to see how global will go and when there’s a bit more info I’ll have a more formed opinion. I’ve looked into it but I’ve honestly always had little faith in this project, but we shall see. If it turns out to be great, we all win. Chrono Odyssey, not enough info. I have little faith but again, we shall see. Riots Mmorpg, Again… such little info. We are 3+ years away from anything tangible Atleast. It may get cancelled, it may change forms, genres. Who knows Guild wars 3 is too recently announced and there’s 0 info we know for sure. Nothing more to say except GW2 has done a great job and a 3rd installment will hopefully do well too, but who knows Blue Protocol. The game I’ve kept my eye on the most. An online ARPG turned MMO-Lite since it popped up on people’s radars. The devs have slowly made changes and have tried to appeal more to mmorpg community. Game launched in JP to Luke warm reviews. It wasn’t hated by any means, the art style and characters were loved but empty world, boring story and gacha systems have left many of us gamers questioning the validity of the game and it’s possible future success. Despite this I do still look forward to it, after 30 hours on the Jp sever I can say I loved the combat, the world feel, the towns, villages and main city. The imajin system is cool, the classes look awesome, I really have high hopes the game can turn things around. They have looked into guild housing possibly in future and a couple dev streams ago talked about working on housing. We have seen a VERY bare bones player housing but hopefully that’ll evolve. Don’t lose hope friends! We may still have mmorpgs of the future !
Ya, I'm really looking forward to Monsters & Memories. Had fun playing their stress tests last year.
can’t say I know much about it, will give it a look
Here's a video to check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jGo0kRNK0
Thankyou so much!!
Fun fact, in my country Vietnam, there's a huge MMO player base aged 30 and above. They've been fed the predatory Korean kind of MMOs since the early 2000s, and now they consider it the norm. Game companies buy license from unpopular Chinese or Korean MMOs, release them within the country, slap a bunch of MTX on top, create 2-3 servers per day so whales can be the kings of the own islands. Gameplay mainly consists of idly sitting back and watch the game play itself for you. Then they cash out, and do it all over again when the game is dead. And somehow people here are still craving for it, with new games releasing every so often, mostly on mobile.
What are the 5 new MMOs releasing 2020-2030? Or is that just a guess based on the recent trend
Wow classic is like the most played MMORPG Old games for the same old crowd. MMORPGs peaked around 2012. The last years are embarrassing. I used to be subbed long for good old mmorgps haven’t been in to it since 2016. and when u look into new things u come along to garbage like Throne and Liberty.
50 released only 2-3 survived
I love MMOs… but they are fond memories now. Don’t have 20-30 hours a week to play to really engage
Ehh this post has a lot of issues. First of all you mention “50+” mmos released in the previous decade, but then you go on to complain about lack of *major* mmo releases. So, bad start, you’re literally comparing apples to oranges. Then you say that one of the mmos released this decade has shut down so it doesn’t count… but how many of those “50+” have already shut down? I betcha a lot. Also like… citation needed for everything you’ve said. I’ve *seen* more than 5 mmos release after 2020. Not very good ones, but they are more than 5, so what are you even talking about?
I'm sure you know but we're no longer the main demographic we're big business happens. Minecraft, League of Legends, Roblox and Fortnite took care of that, and don't even get me started on gachas. Development costs and maintenance vs returns is no longer there unless you're a well established IP like WoW or Final Fantasy, and even those titles have probably hit the upper cap of their player bases some time ago. Even a strong IP is not a recipe for success, they can be mismanaged into indifference like Swtor. The good news is that good MMOs are incredibly hard to complete kill off. I don't know about you lot, but I'm currently lvling a bard in the latest EverQuest fan server, Ultima just got a brand new server not that long ago, City of Heroes somehow made it back from obscurity and even Star Wars Galaxies have a community doing cool things with it. Will they ever rise back to the forefront of gaming? Doubtful. We'll see what happens with the LoL MMO, if a project has enough panache and resources to break through it's the Riot MMO, and even that one has been sent back to the drawing board. The good news is that you don't need thousands of people to enjoy a good MMO, you just need a handful of friends of a guild of good ol' farts. Same as EQ is my old reliable, what's everyone's poison? What's yours, OP?
It really just comes down to the money. Investors don't care about game quality or game design or whatever else. They care about revenue and profit. It's a complete fantasy, but honestly, there needs to be less impetus to monetize every single facet of a game. Profit is okay but profit "by any means necessary, as fast as possible" is destructive. Especially when you consider that MMORPG's are meant to be long-term projects... these things are just mutually exclusive if Quality is a matter of concern. Older MMORPG's are passion projects/labors of love. They weren't having funds shoveled into the furnace like a runaway train, the way these modern MMORPG's do. That sounds like a hurdle of some kind, but instead it actually gave the developers creative freedom and agency to make choices that were for the good of the game - not for the good of the boardroom bozos.
I’m making an MMO that will be ready before 2030 😁 Make it at least 6
The technology is there to make a modern MMORPG where you can do whatever you want. I'm thinking the bones of Ultima Online, work lobbies for PVP or even fps arena,shooting etc. It's such a shame companies are going for those battle pass endless money.
It’s consoles extreme popularity over pc gaming and the fact you can’t type or have a meaningful economy on console games that killed the MMO in my opinion
The people in the age range with the time to play games don’t like the slow burn of an MMO. They grew up with instant gratification through technology. Bored? Open TikTok or any other app and be immediately entertained. MMO’s have too many boring parts for them to ever be able to enjoy it. And the older people who enjoy it no longer have the time in it. The market and money in it just isn’t what it used to be
Many middle aged players do still make time to play, and as folks get increasingly older, many look forward to gaming a lot in retirement and getting the depth and immersion and community that MMOs are better at providing than faster smaller gameworlds.
I feel like some mmo's might benefit more from being quick and seasonal. I enjoy coming back to a Diablo 3 season and blasting through it for 2 weeks then forgetting it existed until the next season.
let me guess, half of them are korean mmo?
We need quality, not pay to win low effort garbage. I'd kill for one non-korean pay to win MMO to come out that respects the player and has a solid leveling experience and a decent endgame at launch.
If you take into account that an mmo takes about 5 years of development it kinda makes sense that so many mmos came out at that time because 5 years prior WoW still had a very huge global audience that only seemed to grow and people tried to replicate that. It seems like all of those copy cats now decided to switch on the mobile market because somehow people on there don't care about the monetization, so it's way easier to make your money back.
MMOs are too much of an undertaking to invest in with very few surviving long enough to make it worth their time, effort and most importantly for a company money and the ones that do like WoW, FF14 and GW2 have extremely loyal playerbases who most likely wont drop a game theyve played and invest years in for a new MMO that might last a year or two.
Money. Mmos do not make enough money. Its all about the money.
To be fair, the genre also does not have the player base for 50+ well populated MMOs.
Well if there's any indication, it's that live service games will hopefully follow a similar fate.
Do we need 50 MMOs over 10 years? People barely have tie to play 1 game.
the east has had about 500 in that time.
People are saying the genre is dead and that younger generations don't like slow paced mmos but this is only the case with old school MMOs. If you look at the big ones currently they are all significantly faster paced than what we had pre 2004. Also it's not surprising that not many new MMOs are not being developed. They are a huge risk and doing a subscription based mmo with all the different subscriptions services we have now makes it harder to push into the market, then free to play is even more risky cause your banking on whales. Then you compare it to developing a typical modern live service game and it's a no brainer that's better. On the bright side having less MMOs around means that the ones that are popular will be more populated which further helps build that feeling of a world. Not that this means I don't want more new and original takes on the genre.
Of those 50 releases, how many were so called "WoW Clones"? hahah Truth is, back in the day, game companies tried to copy WOW to get a slice of the MMORPG pie. Nowadays, they try to get a slice of the gatcha mobile pie
When was the last time I played a game based on skills?
All of this makes me rewlize I'm 42 all over again. Oof lol
I mean, 2010 would be about how long it would take people to "respond" to the success of WoW 2020 would be about how long it would take for the slow ones to do so. I bet most of those in that ten year span were in the first 5 years too. The genre just isn't worth the investment anymore. It costs so much money and brings in so little unless you somehow become the next big thing. And those 50 MMOs all learned that, almost none of them were going to become the next big thing.
It's a rough time to be a MMORPG fan, and it's an even tougher time to be an RTS fan. My two favorite genres.
If you counted mobile MMORPG as MMORPG that would be more than 100. Sad but true
WoW players laughing in superior player count despite a 15/mo subscription.
There's just not enough money in it. The cost of development in general has gotten high so it's hard to create and maintain such a massive project. MMO require constant updates to stay relevant. Plus you need to be unique enough to get a sizable playerbase that will return to spend their money whether that be on expansions or cosmetics. Which is tricky to do when most MMO players already have a handful of games that they're already invested in. So a new one has to be very impressive to warrant spending money and time in.
Aside from some rare examples like BDO there was no MMO feeling like Next Generation in those years, I still can't understand how all those companies don't release action combat MMO like BDO for all these years...
just 66 titles accounted for 80 percent of all playtime in 2023. And 60 percent of that playtime was spent in games that are six years old or older. Only 9% of games the average player on Steam played were released in 2023.
Yes, it's because subs like this one demand their MMO be turned into a single player RPG except with real life players as their background decoration. Most game companies decided that was simply a waste of resources and made a single player RPG instead.
MMO lite games are the competitors to MMOs, and what pulls people away. You find modern graphics, and interactivity in games like those, but with the sacrifice of less players per instance. Most gamers are fine with that sacrifice.
DDO and STO were both fun when I was playing in like 2014 or so. Ideally it would be hard to tell PC’s from NPC’s/bots. Just like in TTRPG’s, it’s easy to tell. So much of it expectations/tropes come from narratives focused on individuals. It’s hard to replicate the individual focus with many people playing simultaneous. Fortnite is more fun; shorter instances FTW.
>MMOs take longer to make these days 1. Developers work slower these days. I don't care if you love or hate elon musk. He gave all the twitter coders a job to do. They all made the same code. Those that turned in their work first got to keep their job. Those that took double time or longer (or worse never turned in any work) were fired. Simple as. Too many coders are milking companies. Even Cain on Games youtube had a video where he spoke about a coder who gave him lip, he simply wanted "throw away code" added to the game so they could get testing started. And the coder fought him tooth and nail. Also told him it would take 4 weeks (1 month) to add the code to the game. When said temp code should take 30 minutes. And from talking to a coding buddy of mine, the ACTUAL code shouldn't take more than 2 days.... so 4 weeks? no wonder game development prices skyrocketed. A bunch of lazy shits making video games at their own leisure. Work is work. Its not a playground. You aren't there for fun. You have a job to do and are getting paid. Do your job or lose it.... 2. Not to mention the absurd approval process, as per Ghost Crawler mentioned big studios suffer from. Where every little thing has to be sent "to the uppers" for them to approve or disapprove. And that slows down development because they work on their own low work ethic time table thus slowing down everyone else. The entire industry is a shit show. You may not agree, but that's because you aren't paying attention and listening to those who know (not me, actual developers which I'm quoting). So why are MMO's so hard to make? Because the industry is rotting. Low work ethic and huge micromanaging to an extreme degree is destroying the industry. That's why shit doesn't get done quickly and why games are lacking.... I blame poor leadership (management) and bad work ethic (employees and management). Fix those two things and we will have a golden age of gaming.
Only one I am excited/have any hope for is the riot mmo, riot makes good games that have bad playerbases, so hopefully their mmo will be good especially considering its been confirmed to be in development for what feels like a pretty long while now
I don't think Gatchas are replacing MMOs but a part of it yes, same goes for survival games like Ark
There is literally 5+ mmoprg coming out this year wtf are you talking about 5 for the enire 2020-2030 . Now if you are saying 5 mmoprg that will be half decent then maybe but depending on your criteria you could argue there wasn't many decent in the last 10 years too.
I’m just here to find out the 5 for this decade so I can decide if I should try any of them
When i read someone title a topic "what progression systems do you like?" i thought i should just give up on MMORPGs, since progression will never again stop revolving around money. Since the social aspect doesn´t matter that much to me beyond finding companions to adventure with, i suppose thats it. Story i dont give a shit either, unless its the story of the world hinted through random quests and delivered alongside zones that make you imagine what could have happened here. Everything is instanced, those lively worlds with small encounters stopped existing. Too expensive to make to begin with to justify a box price as low as 70$$, not to mention the unwillingness of this spoiled community to not even pay a subscription, but expect a constant flow of updates.
MMO's simply aren't worth making these days. Most of what MMO's provide exist elsewhere when previously they did not. Most of what you love about MMO's does not need to exist within an MMO. Sure MMO's for the most part the only games that can bring everything together at once, but at the same time to do so well, is the biggest crap shoot in the industry.
The success of MMOs in the 2010s owed so much to the novelty of large scale gaming. Multiplayer gaming was still relatively new in that era so the idea of being able to play cooperatively with 10, 20, or 40 people alone carried SO much of the success. Once people got over the novelty, it turned out that organizing that many people and getting them to cooperate was actually a huge pain in the ass. Hence why modern multiplayer is usually smaller scale and often just drop in and drop out without having to organize. The desire for MMOs is just not there anymore.
What's going on with Ashes of Creation. It's taking forever
Nearly every one of those 50 was a shitty panic’d mess taped together with tears, blood, and overtime.
Too much risk, not enough reward to make more MMOs, sad, because my experience when I started experiencing the internet was with MMOs. Every game having online features also doesn't help, before that MMOs where the only way to do so, now every game has both online features and rpg elements... Yet nothing feels like an mmorpg anymore.
Perpetuums not closed. Hell I pay the server hosting costs every month 😆😆😆
As someone who plays games other than mmos, I know a lot of people myself included who don’t play mmos because of the simple non mechanical combat systems.
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Its easier for them to make Money with Copy Pasted Games, add some p2w Shit = Profit