Massively OP’s 2020 Awards: MMO Story of the Year

December 21, 2020 12:00 PM

MassivelyOP’s end-of-the-year awards for 2020 continue today with our award for MMO Story of the Year, which was awarded to the Blizzard boycotts last year. This isn’t an award based on popularity as measured by hits or comments, and it’s not meant for a single article; it’s an acknowledgement of an ongoing narrative or event of deep importance and significance for the genre during the year, something different from a surprise or trend. Don’t forget to cast your own vote in the just-for-fun reader poll at the very end!

And the MassivelyOP staff pick for the MMO Story of the Year for 2020 is…

DAYBREAK’S SALE and COVID’S GAMING IMPACT

Andrew Ross: Daybreak being sold again. It’s not just that it was sold, but the sale revealed its ownership of Standing Stone Games. I feel like an MMO dinosaur at this point, because frankly ZeniMax and Square-Enix have had their A-game up the last few years and ArenaNet can’t be totally ignored, but Daybreak and Standing Stone feel like the granddads in the biz. Seeing them tied together and mistreated under their former owners was heartbreaking (RIP Warner Bros MMOs, please sell someone the Asheron’s Call IP). Maybe the new owners will bring back some innovation, or maybe it’ll be more shady stuff. I don’t know, but the news release has made me very anxious… and also really wishing those classic MMOs would get some modern love. Runner-up: COVID in general. I was kind of surprised with how some companies reacted. As MMOs had been my method of connecting with people for decades, I already felt that they were in a prime position for keeping people together. Turning up rewards, bumping people’s status to “Premium,” looking at how WoW had prepped some scientists about how people react to a pandemic, in-game parties, funerals… I feel like MMO and online players in general had a good safety net through this and could offer that to others.

Andy McAdams: I voted all the COVID because none of us expected 2020 to go anything like it did. I thought about giving a nod to the Daybreak buyout, but it was so fresh that it could have either been big news story or just something that just petered out.

Brianna Royce: I couldn’t choose between Daybreak and COVID, so I choose both. The virus has reshaped everyone’s lives and the gaming industry too. It’s impossible to ignore how much it changed us and in particular how MMOs became a place of solace for so many people. And yes, the Daybreak news is still very fresh, and I always hesitate to give a December story an award, but this was a long time coming (we started predicting it over a year and a half ago!), and it definitely feels like a major moment for the MMORPG industry, as if we’re all holding our breath to see what happens next. Even if you don’t care who’s holding the lease on the company, you have to be peeing your pants over the huge financial and metrics dump we got out of the whole deal. That’s enormous and changes my perception not just of Daybreak’s game but of the genre. If even the small, neglected Daybreak games are doing great and making bank… yeah.

Chris Neal: The pandemic ravages gaming, Ubisoft’s vile executives bail out. COVID-19 has upended a lot, but for the years I’ve been following MMOs and video games in general, I never expected an event that would shut down otherwise institutional gaming events and shift the dynamic of how games themselves are made and updated. If nothing else, this past year has been a display at the industry’s adaptability.

Eliot Lefebvre: I am personally biased toward the Elyria implosion. The world is covered in death, how could anything be bigger than that? Turns out nothing could be and we spent all year dealing with it. And we’ll still have it floating around next year. Exhausted sigh.

Justin Olivetti: From March on, COVID reshaped nearly every part of our lives — including gaming. With developers working from homes, expansions and patches got delayed and voice actors couldn’t be recorded. So much got pushed off into 2021 that it felt like this year was a big “pause” that hasn’t seen the “play” button hit yet as a result. That said, we saw some very good things emerge during this period, such as players rallying to bolster each other and studios like Standing Stone Games give away free content. The Daybreak buyout, on the other hand, came as a sort of relief after waiting to see if the studio would be sold or would fold for so long. It was fascinating to pour through now-public details of the studio and its games, and if nothing else, I’m glad this happened to illuminate what was going on behind the scenes.

Mia DeSanzo: Torchlight veering away from the MMO lane — is the “MMO” label toxic or what?

MJ Guthrie: It is hard to not put COVID down as the biggest story because it was the overarching narrative that touched on nearly every facet of the industry. So many stories are tied to it, and it upended so many aspects of gaming.

Tyler Edwards: New World changing direction away from being a gankbox. It turned it from a niche offering to potentially the Next Big Thing in the MMO field.

Daybreak’s sale and the impact of COVID took our award for MMO Story of the Year. What’s your pick?

Reader poll: What was the biggest MMO story of 2020?

Daybreak getting bought out (13%, 50 Votes)
COVID derailing and buffering online gaming (26%, 98 Votes)
Chronicles of Elyria imploding (5%, 18 Votes)
Ubisoft's being awful (2%, 8 Votes)
Torchlight III and other games veering away from MMO (2%, 8 Votes)
New World rejecting the gankbox and delaying again (5%, 20 Votes)
Crucible's failboat (1%, 3 Votes)
The Blizzard employee unionization attempt (4%, 16 Votes)
The impact of BLM on games (2%, 7 Votes)
The Epic/Apple lawsuit (3%, 13 Votes)
LOTRO's outage, comms fail, and expansion fib (5%, 18 Votes)
The Microsoft/Bethsoft buyout (13%, 48 Votes)
Camelot Unchained's second game (2%, 8 Votes)
Tencent buys the rest of Funcom (3%, 11 Votes)
The Shadowlands delay (2%, 8 Votes)
The resolution of the ArcheAge lawsuit (0%, 0 Votes)
Rend's collapse (0%, 0 Votes)
Guild Wars 2 still refusing to acknowledge MikeZ left in 2019 or tell anyone who took his place (3%, 13 Votes)
MapleStory 2 sunsetting (1%, 4 Votes)
ArcheAge's business model switcharoo (1%, 3 Votes)
The explosion of MMOs coming to Steam (1%, 4 Votes)
Population Zero's collapse (0%, 0 Votes)
PSO2's messy western launch (1%, 4 Votes)
Ubisoft fake bomb threat (0%, 1 Votes)
Guild Wars 2 finally going to Cantha (4%, 16 Votes)
Something else (tell us in the comments!) (1%, 4 Votes)

Total Voters: 261

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How does MassivelyOP choose the winner?

Our team gathers together to nominate and discuss candidates and hopefully settle on a consensus winner. We don’t have a hard vote, but we do include written commentary from every writer who submitted it on time so that you can see where some of us differed, what our secondary picks were, and why we personally nominated what we did (or didn’t). The site’s award goes to the staff selection, but we’ll include both it and the community’s top nomination in our debrief in January.

How does MassivelyOP populate this poll?

Poll options include all stories nominated plus a few others we thought should be included.