Last year, Massively OP commenter deekay_zero proposed this topic as a joke award, but when we ran it as a Daily Grind, it prompted really great responses (in spite of the obvious trolls). As we observed at the time, how you answer depends on what you think actually ails MMORPGs (assuming you think the MMO genre is in trouble to begin with) – whether it’s business model shenanigans or bad design pushing people and companies away, or other genres pulling MMO players out, or something else entirely.
So we wanted to pull the topic out again to see whether the answer has changed. 2017 was a big year for gaming, after all, as we saw the (re)birth of an entire spinoff genre. Did that influence our home genre in a good way or bad? Which game, MMO or otherwise, made the biggest contribution toward killing the MMORPG genre specifically in 2017?