When we first started running this annual Daily Grind, MMO players were most likely to point to the likes of Blizzard and Tencent. Then the angst shifted to Kickstarter frauds as the MMO Kickstarters of the early-to-mid-2010s started flopping or malingering. The last two years, our readers turned their anger on metaverse and crypto hucksters – all worthy recipients.
This year, though, my nod goes to the corporate greed that is propelling braindrain, not just from one company but from the MMORPG genre itself. Hear me out: Even if you have no heart at all and don’t care at all about the humans who work to build the games we play, you have to sit up and take notice when the dreadfully managed games industry screws the pooch so badly that it has to shed thousands upon thousands of game devs in a single year. All of those people go elsewhere, some into tech, some into other fields. Most of them never come back – and everything they learned goes with them. Not only is the pool of MMORPG developers smaller now, but for those who remain, the collective wisdom is that much smaller too. It makes for a lot of critical lessons that the new and remaining developers have to learn all over again, the hard way, and often at the expense of the games and of us. It hasn’t killed the genre, but it’s certainly hobbled its growth and development – and that should make everyone sad.
But I’m all ears for something more catty. Lay it on me: Which game, studio, or idea was the biggest contributor to killing the MMORPG genre in 2023?
At the turn of every calendar year, the MassivelyOP team assembles a traditional feast of annual content for your table. We recap the year, issue awards, highlight our favorite (and least favorite) stories, and gather your opinions together to send off the last year and welcome the new one. Grab a plate and take a bite out of this year-end Daily Grind!
