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As someone who’s been covering the MMORPG genre on YouTube for the past 10 years I’ve noticed that in recent years the MMO community’s attitude to new announcements, upcoming games and the genre as a whole has certainly shifted from being somewhat optimistic to more pessimistic, and who can blame them, I’ve noticed it especially in myself, a couple of years ago whenever a new MMO was announced I was excited to make content and dive into the details on basically every upcoming game in the genre, nowadays though I’m less quick to even cover newly announced upcoming releases because deep down I know there’s a high chance they either won’t make it to a full release or they’ll struggle to maintain a playerbase for longer than 1 year.
In this video I’ll talk about why MMO players are growing sick and tired of the genre as well as discuss if things will change anytime soon.
MMORPG Players In 2025 Are Sick And Tired Description
The biggest reason why I think MMO players have a less positive attitude towards the genre nowadays than say 10 years ago is that in the past 8 years not a single new MMO release has managed to break into the top 5 most played games in the genre and stay there for longer than a few months.
The top 10 most popular MMOs are WoW, OSRS, Final Fantasy 14, Black Desert Online, Albion Online, Guild Wars 2, ESO, Eve Online, Maplestory and Runescape 3, most of these MMOs are really old, Albion Online and BDO are the newest to secure spots in the top 10 with Albion releasing in 2017 and BDO releasing in Korea back in 2014.
MMOs are games that take a lot of investment so whenever a new MMO comes out these days, in the back of your mind you’re thinking, there’s a 99% chance that 1-2 years from now this game will be dead which is a really crappy feeling to have.
We’ve seen this with games such as Throne & Liberty, New World, Core Punk, Pax Dei, Archeage Unchained, Bless Online, Bless Unleashed, Brighter Shores and many many more.
I guess this is another reason why people would rather invest time into the oldest games in the genre than play newer stuff, odds are WoW, Final Fantasy 14 and OSRS will still be here 5-10 years from now.
► OTHER VIDEOS:
▶️ Bitcraft Online First Impressions “Is It Worth Playing?”
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▶️ Chrono Odyssey First Impressions “Is It Worth Playing?”
✅ https://youtu.be/8NnXKnPP3WQ
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00: MMO Players Are Sick & Tired
2:47: NO New Successful MMOs
4:25: Lack Of Innovation
7:26: Trends That Hurt The MMO Genre
9:28: Making MMOs Is HARD!
10:31: Is There Any Hope?
Tags
MMO, MMORPG, MMO Players, MMORPG Players, MMO Genre, MMORPG Genre, Upcoming MMO, Upcoming MMORPG, 2025 MMO, 2025 MMORPG, New MMO, New MMORPG, MMO Gameplay Trailer, Chrono Odyssey, Bellatoris, Architect MMO, Old School Runescape, OSRS, WoW, World Of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Guild Wars 3, Final Fantasy 14, Ultima Online, New World, Throne & Liberty, TnL, Lost Ark, Albion Online, Ashes Of Creation, Pantheon Rise Of The Fallen, Core Punk, Bless Online, Bless Unleashed, Archeage, Archeage Chronicles, TheLazyPeon, Bad MMOs, Good MMOs, Old School MMOs, Classic MMOs, Is There Hope For MMOs?
#mmorpg #mmo #onlinegaming
MMO Players Sick And Tired…
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biggest let down for me is as you say these games where if you don't play a month your BiS gear is catchup gear. I like infinite growth more than anything. It's why I quit wow because they made it even worse with the season thing.
star citizen deserve a shout. it's not your typical fantasy game and it's FPS but it does classify it self as mmo and is shaping up well and is most definitely setting new standards, but still has a long way to go.
T&L is dead? xD I just started
Guild Wars 2 is really good at one thing – old content never gets irrelevant. I think only dungeons from vanilla became utterrly irrelevant content sadly, but people are still going around the beginner areas to do world bosses for example to this day, which is literally 13 years old content.
Here’s what it comes down too for me, MMO from pre 2000, the god fathers, we’re all passion projects, zero loot boxes, zero stores, zero tolerance ornery players, foul language, bullying and harassment. All zero tolerance, monitored and maintained by GMs in the game.
Post WOW, 2003, that’s all gone, the community took a swift and terrible step downwards. Full tolerance for everything outside of actual cheating. Setting a standard for all the mmo after, and the catchphrases like “git gud” and otherwise complete lack of respect for other players. A new game comes out, the community is toxic, new players leave quickly and the game has to have all the social aspects removed. Then it’s too hard, cause your solo and the game spends the rest of its life trying to compensate for the community being too toxic to be social in a social game.
For example, WOW, it used to be good, it got thru a couple years, the community was toxic af, couldn’t get along. So the group finding feature was added, because the community couldn’t form groups on its own. Since then everything they have done is to mark accessing content or the game itself easier. Because there aren’t any groups capable of doing it. Then it’s the community, booting you if your gear of is too low, or if you make a mistake your chastised and tossed.
MMO are social games, and reflect the community that plays it, the community is toxic in the game and in real life. Toxic community leads to a failed game.
I feel like popularity of gaccha games or w/e it is, games bein Genshin Impact etc had huge impact on playerbase of MMORPGs
old MMOs are made for gamers for fun and enjoyment. Now MMOs are made to make money, maximize profits. Companies are moronic basically they fail to realize (despite tons of evidence across gaming) if you build a FUN game it makes a lot of money, you don't need to try and squeeze every cent out of people, hell people will happily spend a extra 1$-5$ for a skin or something in a game they love playing than when they feel forced to.
bro woke up and notices games made these days are trash
The MMO I'm playing is Ultima Online. I've also recently started playing Diablo 1 again. I've been playing NES, SNES, and N64 games. I'm watching 80s and 90s movies.
Everything made in recent decades is a product, instead of entertainment.
as someone who had never gotten into an mmo because of all the bs they tend to pull, guild wars 2 is golden. no pay to win bs, no vertical progression where your always playing catch up, it has great exploration, the mount system is top tier, customization is great, everything is voice acted, the art is amazing at times, and you can do what you want how you want without feeling forced to ignore things. really the only downside is just how some races have meh stories, i found the charr to have the most well constructed story of them all, but that's just me. honestly would have kept playing but my homie ghosted me and i'm not social enough to convince anyone to tag along with me or team up with others even though i heard the community is even better than what ff14 has.
slap a new coat of paint on Everquest and id play for the next 20 years
"Hytale was canceled, even with the support of publisher Riot games."
Dude, Riot games is what killed the Hytale. It was the "management" getting in the way of actually productive people that Hytale got canceled. On top of ppl having all different opinions what path the game should take.
Without watching the video… Its just that the new games feel like soulless superficial knock offs of themselves, often build around just one strong technical/mechanical selling point and nothing more, nothing complex. All show, no substance. Really feels like someone had just one brilliant idea and built whole game around it with everything else being just random hastily created nonsense to fill in blank spots. More of vending machine simulators than actual games.
Old games, albeit bit obsolete mechanic wise, they still feel whole. They have their charm that new games just dont care about anymore.
For me they became very boring and predictable. Every Game so far moved away from good story telling to good combat mechanics but nothing else besides cash shops whale paradise and game emersion breaking things inside their game. Plus when RPGs used to have a wide variety of species to be playing now it's all humans short humans humans with pointy ears short humans… just so damn boring and awful story writing all little things on their own but when you look at new game they are all there to just ruin the game itself for diving into the world and having that game actually make you believe you are there.
Especially with some of the worse MMORPGs with ingame quests to take you to use their cash shop. Also character customizations have really fallen off from PC games in general the models look bad and almost no customizations to them. Why bother with the new game when that 20 year old RPG is just better in every matric
Modern mmo's are dodgey even in mmo regards. E. G. Thrones of. Liberty is available on playstation in some countries but not steam. Since Playstation players are easier to hook into paying
New mmos are money hungry/grabbing games fileld with mtx gacha etc (why i tend to stay away from anime themed mmos like genshin wuwa etc) and old mmos have nowadays decades of content to go through plenty of stuff to do erc
ive been following you vaguely for a decade now; must be fuckin exhausting making such a similar video every year.
Not just MMOs, devs still dont understand that the people who actually spend money and sometimes years of their lives playing these games DO NOT WANT THEIR PC, MODERN AUDIENCE GARBAGE.
Several have said it but games in general are bad because they are made for riches shareholders etc not for gamers not intended to last or be quality it's like tech it's meant to become outdated by design meant to fail by design
All those Korean MMOs looked solid your exactly the problem
There are better MMOs on phones than consoles
The reason is the MMOs don't play like a classic RPG like imagine if it was a MMO Diablo or baldurs gate
If you are an MMO dev, please take every thing he's said to heart. He couldn't be more right about the direction of the genre.
lol, just started DDO having loads of fun, think its 15 years old
I can't stand most of the old ones anymore either. WoW, ESO, SWToR, they've all made such drastic changes to how the games play (the most egregious to me is removing any and all sense of challenge so you can rush to end game as fast as possible and even then, phone it in for that gameplay as well) they're no fun now.
Everyone is sick and tired of their games being turned into cash shops.
While a lot of games are coming out and being bad, the flip side of that is these days gamers have incredibly high standards that very few companies could ever meet, and quite a lot of the time standards so high as to be entirely unrealistic. I've asked for years for people to give examples of the existing perfect games that set standards so high but nobody has ever provided an answer. 6:20 You've just done similar in this video. Who cares what a dodge animation looks like, does that make a game bad or not worth playing? People are criticizing such minor things, and they have been doing so for so long that this is the norm now, people pick apart every little minor, unimportant thing about a game and then conclude that the game is bad because of those things, when it really may not be. Review culture at large is at fault here, people have been trained into being overly-critical when they forgot they could just enjoy the game, that minor things don't actually detract from how fun a game might be. This mindset has created a wildly toxic environment for a developer to even try to make a game for.
Gamers themselves are part of the problem when it comes to monetization. Heck, not even part of the problem, they are the problem. They keep shoveling money at mediocrity (or plain badness) at an alarming rate, so companies have little incentive to try and make something actually good. They see the money even so-so games make and try to replicate it, putting little effort into making a good game, but instead put that effort into how they can make a game that will profit the most.
Go to any game community and all you're going to see is negativity about anything and everything, and that also leads to players being pushed away once they see how bad the vocal community for a game is.
Another thing is we're simply busier than we were 20 years ago, and MMORPGs are and always have been huge time sinks. The economy has people working multiple jobs to be able to afford living, we're more connected to the world at large via social medias than we were back then and we're expected to spend time connecting with others that way. So now we have MMORPGs being made for players who have less time to play, which ends up giving us a worse gameplay experience.
We also have more gaming genres for people to choose from now. Things like survival games didn't exist back then, battle royals, or MOBAs. These either didn't exist or barely did (as mods for other games) back in the early MMORPG heyday, and quickly became so big they simply robbed players from other genres and thinned out the player bases. Those are simple, cheap games to make that can be heavily monetized and make billions with little effort.
Gamer mindsets have changed over the years, people want instant gratification now, you hardly ever find someone who's interested in a long haul game where they can spend months or years in a game working toward stuff, they want to do a thing for minutes to a few hours and be heavily rewarded for it.
It's a lot of things, and it isn't just MMORPGs that have fallen victim to it. Gaming as a whole has gone this way. Us old farts pine for the old days, things were not only simpler, but objectively better. But those things went away at an alarming rate and will likely never return as they were. The only thing we can hope for is another gaming crash (it's happened before), where everyone finally gets so fed up with how things are going that they all stop playing and spending money on it, and force the industry to change. That, or we all find new hobbies, which is what a lot of people are doing these days. Games and the industry kind of suck now, people are catching on, and are doing other things instead.
This is why I just stay with WoW Classic. It's what MMOs are meant to be.
I did not even watch the video but my answer is, I wanna play an MMORPG and not a gacha with 10 different currencies, timers and excessive grind.
no matter what game you play, you will never get the same filing as in 2004 when first playing Lineage 2, starting as human on talking island, or first wow character in 2004, starting as nightelf in teldrasill..
It's really quite simple. Content creators have ruined MMOs. Developers are not coming up with ways to combat the shortcuts that content creators provide.
One example of something that would help is super rare loot from a wide variety of mobs. Stuff that is actually useful. So that content creators can't just say go here get this this and this and you're good – stuff needs to go undiscovered for long duration of time, perhaps a month with just 1 drop.
GW2 is such a chill game. It's so much fun to just wander around and set yourself long term goals.
"Everyone's trying to catch up and get to the endgame as soon as possible." Lots of people say that. Still haven't seen the evidence. But I have met a lot of people who play for the leveling experience.
we need new mmo
To all OLD MMORPG players who want to feel the same experience but can't because of lack of time or friend to play with… Just try KENSHI, guys listen. Play Kenshi, it's a solo offline game but it's more a "MMORPG" than any new MMORPG.
As a professional developer but a hobbyist game dev, AI won't help. At all.
Action combat in an MMO is darn hard to do. It's more surprising that BDO managed it than no other studio managing to accomplish it.
It takes an immense amount of resources and knowledge to pull off, and I'd rather those resources be spent on doing other things. Other than its combat BDO is an amazingly thin game… and I think there's a reason behind that.
Money is a limited resource. You can't have your cake and eat it too.