Are new age MMOs unsustainable?

Or are heading towards a crash?

Massively Multiplayer Online games are no small business in this world of gaming we persist in, and they never really were. Pretty much since before adventure games and RPGs took their footing as genres capable of vast, sweeping narrative and spectacle, MMOs were pushing the absolute boundaries on what games even could be. Title like Gemstone IV, Merdian 59 and Ultima all call back to years before the solidification of the role playing genre, and really the entire gaming industry as it was, which may be exactly what allowed them to succeed in pushing the boundaries of connectivity, regular activity and occasionally ground-breaking feats with, for the time, mind-blowing events. Looking back from the precipice of hindsight, we can see the great world-running MMOs of their day as just mewling cubs, big by the standard of their day but only really big in comparison to the lean standards of most other games in the industry. Even the once furious and heated Ultima, Warcraft, Everquest war is now little more than a playground dispute paling when placed next to the wars of millions we see around modern franchises.

That is because we are in a new age of MMOs, one similar to the age where we began but drawn to different ends and effecting a different type of consumer, and we have been in this new space for a very long while now. One where the core values that Massively Multiplayer Games once thrived off have become tired and invigorating, and a new style of MMO, more inline with modern gaming sensibilities but sometimes still shackled to redundant philosophies, has become the norm. None of this is to say that MMO's are not as big as they were, not at all. The landscape and the number of gamers across the world has multiplied by orders of magnitude, and though the big MMOs of today are no longer ubiquitous with the very concept of video game playing like they once were, today's landscape sees more simultaneously, actively competing MMOs then we've ever before had in the brief history of our industry, and the chart curve does not look to be levelling-out any time soon. With this growth in audience and choice, comes the dissolution of that most primal of unspoken MMO rule: 'There can only be 1'.

Back in their day, the heated arguments between the various communities of MMO lovers out there were sparked by a people searching not just for an online game that they liked for the time, but encompassing online experience which would become their game. Singular. In that age it was totally normal, even expected, for players to have one title which would suck up all free gaming time as the player's 'second job', as we now coin it. Not many people jumped around from MMO to MMO, tasting the fruits of each, or even from MMO to other genres, and that was largely because these title were designed, intentionally or not, to foster the development of a particular type of player; an obsessive, hardcore. They were involving affairs of hefty esoteric systems designed to be understood only by the resolute, socially binding with groups of online friends who's only outlet was this particular game, and gameplay systems and roles specifically designed to be experienced by a specific subset of the player bas, because a lot of these games didn't design all the game to be experienced by every player.

Back in this frontier of development, it was totally acceptable to develop a job system wherein a player was expected to travel the online world as a virtual band, playing in bars to the enjoyment of other actual players who would then pay their wage. A true player driven economy, and more of a virtual second life than any 'metaverse' currently in the works can dream of pulling off. And nowadays, games just aren't like that anymore, the zeitgeist has changed, the artform has changed, and the audience has changed. There have been online titles in the modern world that have sparked angry spreadsheets detailing the fact that not all content in the game it tailored to be comfortably experienced and obtained by every player, when once that was the entire point of the game. You would be the small cog churning in the wider world of players, you didn't have to be the centre of the whirlwind: but people just don't have the patience for that sort of experience anymore.

Nor really should they. Not with the plethora of huge, quality rich, games of all genres that test and push at the zenith of the development craft every single year. I can't be spending all my time sitting down in Mortal Online in order to level up my resting so that I can recover from damage quicker; there's a 50 hour campaign of intense action waiting for me in Elden Ring. Even the intensely dedicated players, those who will look up strategy guides and scrawl spreadsheets of gear they need for a certain raid (guilty) usually have their own smaller games on the side, even if this MMO is considered their main. And these MMOs are no longer the soul form of communication with other gamers. Now even if you join a modern active MMO guild, that 'chat' function is used for perfunctory fluff; if you want to talk about serious business you'll be connecting over Discord, or any of the other much better communication tools which exist in our interconnected age. The role of MMOs as a secondary social network reaching across the inky black netspace are gone, the horizon of the undiscovered country has squashed into a thin line on the split between sea and sky, imperceptible to the supposed innovative-figureheads of today's internet.

So what are new age MMOs about then? Well a lot of them are about securing recurrent monetisation in as brief a window as possible. Typically this leads to the sorts of design fallacies that plague the larger gaming industry such as the 'create problem in order to sell the solution' paradigm; a secret to literally nobody at this point. But there's also a few lingering vestibules of the old way of doing things that were once quirks and have now bloated in tumours. Namely, the desire to be an 'everything game' and the bloating of content to keep the base locked to this game for days upon weeks. Most of the successful professional MMOs of the modern world don't suffer from these issues, recognising they just need to be the best that they can be in their field or/and share their player base with other games. Final Fantasy XIV, Lost Ark, etc. but the various new start-up MMOs fall for this pitfall time and time again.

Stubborn MMOs have a tendency to, in their 'modernisation', recede into their core base of players and insulate against potential new comers or undesirable casuals (who probably can't be twisted in spending as much) with content borne for the hardcore of the hardcore in their audience. Think World of Warcraft and their various stupid difficulty raids which require weeks of grinding to gear for and hours upon days of set-up to prepare for. Or Fallout 76 and the late game content which a lot of is balanced around depreciated broken god weapon and borderline glitch builds, because otherwise these popular playstyles would make a joke of ordinary content. These fortifications eek out any unwilling to sacrifice their every waking moment and make the game scene drab and content-free unless you become a hardcore player, and most people just don't care enough to dedicate themselves like that. So how does this equation of development work out?

Well MMOs are big games that require a regular flow of players to keep the lights on, and if the vast majority of players out there, casuals, don't feel like they're being catered for and end up leaving for a better game, or a more consistent genre altogether; then death is pretty much inevitable. New age MMOs are largely, conceptually, unsustainable; and it's the outliers, those that differ from the norm with their content strategies, who are really making their mark today and who seem to have a future for tomorrow. The novelty of MMO gaming has dissipated and the approach to building the games should shift in kind. These games can't rely on being social hubs anymore, they can't cloister solely to the 1% of the player base and favour them over everyone else just because they make the best cash cows, and they can't expect the entire world to be run my players who flock to these servers like it's their second job. Unless that game is EVE Online, because that is exactly how that game functions, as I understand it. The industry has moved on from MMOs are they used to be, now it's up to the genre to adapt or die.