Nice article, well written. Very jsw and politically correct. I doubt anyone will be triggered by it.
Except for me. But that's probably because of me, not you.
You see, i think the way you describe it the decline in the player base on the major mmo's and over the whole scene probably is just the way of things is somewhat simplified and pacified. Like seasons, and when the sun returns so will the players return to shelter from the sun...
But that's most probably not how it goes, however much we'd like the simple blameless and repercussion-less explanation to be true. There are indeed causes, causers and blame to be handed out Oprah style. I will try to rationally, calmly and emotionless explain all the factors and actors in this drama and maybe even get to the end of it without ranting.
Lets start with the part you've touched upon which is in part understandable and least generous with blame and shame. That ofcourse is the age of the top i don't know how many of the mmo's at the moment. I'll take the ones i am most familiar with as examples, mainly because they're also at the very genesis of the filthy rotten mess we're in right now... but i'll get to that bit later. Among the biggest mmo's out there are ofcourse WoW, GW, STO and SWTOR.
Probably need to take the time to acknowledge the mmo's that came before from the MUD games back in the mainframe days on through the 80's and 90's beginning with "mazewar" the first true graphical mmo going through "Adventure" into Dungeon and then Zork and finally becoming "Multi-User Dungeon" the MUD origional. The ball got rolling then and soon the likes of "Avalon" appeared (which is still a running and nicely populated game to this day by the way, showing there *can* be a way to exist for ever without traumatizing an industrie) as well as "Avatar".
This brought the concept for gaming to the attention of money makers and soon the first commercial mmo was a fact ("the island of kesmai"), Funny bit of trivia is that the second to go and make money off of mmo's is still at it and probably one of the few doing it right too; Lucasfilm games. They came with "Habitat" and were big influence on the genre ever since. After that well... needles to say loads of mmo's came and went, NCsoft became the nr1 in the genre, but none of that is interesting for the moment.
The only mention worthy of it would be "MapleStory" as it is where one of the root causes of todays mmo extinction saw it's genesis. It was the first free to play mmo which used micro transactions selling gear, pets and other stuff to its players.Their way of keeping the gripe about pay2win and all that from surfacing was to make most items bought temporary. But i digress, this is a disclaimer paragraph i remind myself. The point is that the mmo game did not start with World of Warcraft, which was no more than a result of natural evolution going on since the early 70's.
I think i've satisfied those who'd be up in their keyboards by now if i hadn't put up the previous paragraph.
Because ofcourse.... what everyone thinks of when the hear or say MMORPG is:
World of Warcraft
and everything that came after it.
The Success and impact of WoW is undeniable and every MMO that came after it were all attempts at equaling or topping the successes of WoW (none of which have been successful at that to this date). And to this day WoW is rigidly and successfully sticking to it's monthly subscription requirement to play, resisting the call of the f2p monster valiantly.
But they're an endangered species of sorts in that regard. Star Wars the Old Republic has it's free to play and preferred player options so capped and reduced in ways of xp gaining and level-progression that anyone who likes the game just a little bit will tell you that there's only one way to play SWTOR and that's subbed. Besides those two sub based mmo's i don't know of any who can be called really successful.
StarTrek Online, our own universe of choice, wasn't even able to keep the subscription only strategy viable for more than 2 years.
The method they have used, until tier 6 came and they too betrayed us all, is in my opinion the only excusable and long term viable way to put micro transactions into a game which is to keep everything that the users can buy with their money are cosmetics, social items, convenience perks and gear you would be able to obtain by normal game-play in relatively sane amounts of time.
Alas Tier 6 and the refit ships that were introduced in STO ended those blissful times for us Trekkies too.
And with that i arrived at one of the bigger and more sinister factors involved in the MMO Extincion event we're witnessing. Unfortunately i hadn't yet described the other more mundane factors so i'll go back to them first now.
As i was saying some of the top mmo's (i have knowledge of) the past years and today are arguably WoW, gw2, STO and SWTOR. I know this isn't exactly true but for the purpose of my explanation these are the most vivid examples to draw upon. One thing they do share and which is one of the problems with the decline is that the games are old. They're all running in time measured in decades.
So like you mentioned a portion of the player base simply grow tired of them and moved on to newer and other games. But this is not as big of an influence as you think. SWTOR sees a resurgence of millions of players each time they release a major expansion and when a new StarWars Movie is released for example.
The numbers drop rapidly again however when everyone has done the new content with their toons and are again left with the end game wich offers little reward for a lot of repetative grinding. STO is said to be on life support which is not true, but for no other reason than the huge number of StarTrek fans who keep playing the game until a newer and better way to imagine ones self in the center seat of a starship in the StarTrek Universe comes available.
So even though age is an issue, a much more important and influential factor has been the sheer number of mmorpg's (for those mumbling that's not the only kind of mmo, hang on, i'll get to that too) that have popped up in the past decade. There's hundeds of them and though few are smashhits the number of them has meant that the playerbase has spread thin over all of them. This causes the numbers to go down for the playerbases on all mmo's ofcourse. Also a factor we can safely attribute a hand in the mmo extinction event.
But the most evil and damaging factor in what we are witnessing today is the one that s only now starting to gain awareness. It's the one who was once heralded as the savior of the mmo, the future brightening of the mmo industry and believed to be the best thing to have happened to the casual payers of mmo's ever.
The free to play mmo.
Sure, the way it was implemented in STO was a good thing. Everyone could play for free, become a maxlevel admiral and compete on equal terms with anyone no matter how much they have spent on microtransactions.
Paying would make you look a lot more awesome, have the coolest looks, coolest pets and you name it but the stats of their ships were no better than anyone's who hadn't spent a dime. The way SWTOR did it, though already on the slippery slope to doom, was also pretty much a descent model. The subscriber's advantage, the only way your money can get you higher level faster, allows you to get better gear and take part in the gameplay that makes playing the game after reaching maxlevel having played through all pve content, worth logging into yjis so great and emphasized at every opertunity that it is clear that playing unsubbed is not going to get you "the full experience" and a sub is really the only way to go. All orher buyable things are only cosmetic and will offer almost no advantage in the gameplay.
But the free to play model, however well intended it might have been, has released the plague of death into the mmo world. Relying on the microtransactions for their profit it forced and inspired publishers, developers too but less so, to get creative and find ways to tweak that system further and further. This has begun the process in which slowly but surely things went from good to bad.
One factor in that process has to do with what you mentioned: Destroyed in game economies because of gold farming scavangers, trying to make a few bucks off the less wealthy, less intelligent, enthusiast mmo player with less integrity who'll spend 10 bucks for 100 million.
The prices shoot through the roof on the marketplaces placing the items honest, law abiding mid income players want/need out of their reach.
The effect has been that those players were more willing to accept the publishers starting to sell starter packs, veteran packs, elite packs, collectors packs and so on with which they got stuff they couldn't get by normal gameplay, or were too rediculously priced.
In the case of SWTOR this became the cartel market packs which landed them as one of the first onto the bottom of the pit of death, becoming pioneers of what is now known as the loot box.
But they were not the first, the last, or the worst. The myth says those things started on the mobile game scene but like i mentioned before, the first microtransactions started in the 70's and have been cancerously spreading and growing ever since.
Well, to make a long story a little less long, as i notice i might be ranting a bit..... What started in the mmorpg genre has slowly eaten away at the pleasure players have playing their games. It spread into other mmo's soon, with player progression becoming more grinding or more buying.
Then the random factor was introduced into the dna of that cancer by selling boxes of which the buyer has no idea of what's inside, except for a certain minimum.
What you get each time comes down to luck and can either be awesome or totally sucking so hard it creates a vacuum. Players who can't or won't pay have less pleasure as they're constantly confronted with the paying players and their advantages (by design as it might frustrate you into buying something after all)
And ofcourse we all know what that has lead to don't we.
The mmo playerbase is dying off rapidly. WoW has already stated the last expantion will be the next one, SWTOR just went from 17 servers worldwide to 8 or 9 and 4 of those are for other languages than English (German and French). So there's 2 servers for the us, 2 for europe english, 2 for europe german and 2 for french.
I heard that Blizzard has reduced their server number but i haven't confirmed that personally as i've never played WoW myself.
But not only is the mmorpg genre effected. The other mmo's are following it's example. Everywhere, in all the mmo game subspecies.
like MMOFPS, MMORTS, MMOwhateveryouputbehind it they are now lootbox/dropcrate/package selling utilities out to prey on your money and tickling the human "gamble bone" to entice the player into buying something.
And whether you're aware of it or not, this has a massive impact on the joy and pleasure you experience while you play. And that causes the current decline, as people are quicker to exchange one game for another. The microtransaction pay2win, lootbox gambling business model has spread to AAA now and the videogame player base, ie. the entire base of gamers on the planet, are waking up to the smell of rot... and pulling their noses in disgust.
Unfortunately the cancerous spread has nestled itself so deep that it will take more than one AAA publisher getting the playerbase so insurgent-ish their stocks dropped and they spanked by Micky Mouse.
The myth, fueled by the cancerous success in terms of money for the publishers, that the old way of making profit in the gaming industry isn't viable anymore and to survive as an industry another way has to be found to make money from games has almost become accpted gospel by publishers.
This was demonstrated perfectly by EA when they released their UFC game in Beta not even a week after they had to remove the lootboxes and stuff from their StarWars Battlefront II game, which has even more and more evil pay 2 win (and gamble) features built into the player progression than any game ever!
This plague which has been killing the mmo for some time now, and is slowly starting to kill off the rest of the gaming industry might not be curable, at least before the mass extinction of most of the species of game developers/publishers/genres and yes; players.
The way i see it theres two ways the future can unfold. One is the scenario i've been building up to throughout this, much much much larger than i intended piece i've written so far.
Eventually the players will stop buying the lootboxes and paying for content of the game they feel should be included in the initial purchase. This will be a slow and painfull process but in the end the business model will collapse and the publishers and devstudios will collapse with it.
The players will turn to what is now the "indies" niche market for their gaming needs which will be where the next big players in the gaming industry will arise out of.
None of the names we know now will have made it then.
No more EA, Activision, Blizzard, Ubisoft, NCsoft and so on.
Somewhere, in an attick or spread across a couple of bedrooms, the next AAA publisher is now trying to get noticed as indie developer with great talent and ambition but without greed (yet).
The best case scenarios here would be that the outrage we see now, against Battlefront II, Need for Speed, UFC and the Ubisoft games does not relent. That the publishers will keep having to deal with the bad publicity of that, and eventually are faced with dropping stock prices.
which in turn will ignite the shareholders.
Only then will they, reluctantly and kicking and screaming all the way, will stop trying to make money off their products by having the players pay as they play.
PLay to progress, play to finish, play to win, play to gamble variations have all not been explored to their full potential, in the publishers minds but no matter how they try to work it, they're simply unable to grasp the factor that will, in the end, be the only true decider of their fates.
The joy and pleasure a gamer, any gamer be it casual or pro, experiences after they bought the game, during gameplay.
Anything else is depended on that factor.
And continuously being faced with the need to buy something to be able to enjoy a game does not make a gamer feel joy i think.
Wouw..., sorry about the length of this post.
I had no idea it would turn into this behemoth of a reply.
But at least i'm sure that everything that i wanted to say is in there, and that there is little that i should have mentioned that i havent gotten in there.
Now it's waaaay past time for me to start playing that other MMORPG.
The Massive Multiplayer Offline Reallife Playing Game.
Regards,
Christ van Silfhout
Lieutenant deuZige of the Ares Division
(deuzige.is-great.net#twitch.tv/deuzige#youtube.com/deuzige)