Dead MMO Society

Tobold couldn't resist giving another few whacks to a poor old, dead, horse as he passed by, although it may have been despite his own better judgment if the opening sentence is anything to go by. Jeromai provided an admirable rebuttal. It was admirable not just because he quoted me while he was rebutting, although that always helps, but for the clarity and insight of his argument.  

Syp, while not referring to either directly, was surely inspired by one or both when he offered his own, equally instructive, oversight of the situation. Finally (until I wrote this and twenty other bloggers no doubt wrote their pieces that I have yet to read) Tobold (him again) moved the discussion away from the "problem" and on to the solution.

So, what is this problem, anyway. Oh yes - just the death of the entire genre that brought us all together to begin with, without which I wouldn't be writing this and you wouldn't be reading it. The reason, supposedly at least, that anyone reads or writes any of the blogs you see descending into the past in the column to the right. The reason anyone knows who Tobold and Syp and Jeromai and Bhagpuss are in the first place, always supposing anyone does.

MMOs, that is. MMORPGs even.

It's all too easy to swing too far to the other extreme when contending with naysayers. People who don't buy into the whole doomsday scenario are apt to say things like "MMOs have been "dying" for about as long as I have been playing them". I nearly said it myself then. I'm not entirely sure it's true.


When the Everquest forums were riddled with angry threads demanding "Server Splits" (when did any MMO last have one of those?) to deal with overpopulation and SOE was adding what seemed like a new server every few months, were there really prophets of doom out there claiming the whole edifice was built on quicksand? When WoW was experiencing exponential growth long after launch, were there cynics advising us it would never last?

I really can't remember. I was having too much fun playing.

When did the rot set in? At what point did bloggers, commenters and forum warriors decide that the game, the Massively Multiple Online Roleplaying Game, was up? Wilhelm surmises that the failure of Vanguard might have been that watershed moment. There's certainly also a case to be made that the failure of Warhammer Online represents the day the idol's clay feet shattered. Maybe it was when Bizzard were forced to release falling player numbers for WoW.

Whenever it happened, at some point it became the received wisdom: the MMO genre was dying. Worse yet, each extant example of the genre was, at best, moribund: living on borrowed time, scrabbling from payment method change to game mechanic revamp, like a starving bear leaping from one shrinking ice floe to the next, in a desperate, flailing struggle to stay afloat for a few months more before the inevitable "sunsetting".

Someone (was it SynCaine?)  [EDIT - Oops! No, it wasn't. It was Keen] coined the term "three-monther" and after that we heard nothing else, ever. Any new MMO that hadn't driven WoW whimpering into also-ran status within a week of launch was "a three-monther", whose many servers, rashly opened to accommodate the launch-day crush, would be three-quarters empty in 90 days and three-quarters closed as soon as the hapless developers swallowed their pride and acknowledged the inevitable.

Which happened. Sometimes. And sometimes, although really not very often, a game actually closed down. Mostly, though, on they went. Still trading. Still adding content. For months. For years.

A list of MMOs that have closed down over the last decade and a half would be considerably shorter than a list of those that are still running. If you remove the F2P shovelware from that equation, a lot shorter. If MMOs are dying why are there so damn many of them still around?

Nope. The genre isn't dying. It's not likely to, either. It's changing, sure, and it's going to go on changing. A lot of people aren't going to like that. Some of them won't accept it. Sometimes you have to kill the father. There may be blood.

Others will just accept that it's not for them. Plenty of former MMO players are going to reach a point where they've had enough.  People go through phases. They grow out of things. It's natural if not always comfortable.

Plenty of people, like Liore, believe you can't go home again. I'm not among them. I wrote a song about it once. The chorus went like this:

"They say you can't go home again
Don't believe it
You can always catch that train
When you need it"

I didn't say it was a good song. It said what I believe, though, which is that you can find your way back if the need is great enough. MMOs are dead, yes. They're dead to those who no longer need them or believe in them. For the rest of us they're still there, still doing what we need them to do. Long may that continue.

And if SynCaine can get a second wind, surely there's hope for anyone.