People have been telling me to stop worrying so much my whole life, but worrying is how I cope with uncertainty, and there’s a lot of uncertainty in the MMO industry. One thing I find myself worrying about? The loss of the trivial ephemeral stuff.
For example, how many screenshots do you still have from your first MMO? All those old websites, gone. News articles, stripped from the internet. Guides lists forever marooned on abandoned Discords. Endless threads trapped on inaccessible forums. All the dank memes from dying games being buried under rubble. That actually does scare me. A while back, we even ran into an MMO whose original launch date was in dispute because almost all mentions of of it had simply fallen off the edge of the internet.
Think it doesn’t matter? Not all that long ago Blizzard weirdly tried to memoryhole the date the World of Warcraft LFG patch came out to justify excluding it. Only meticulous fansite record keeping stopped that disinformation in its tracks.
What scares you about the MMO industry?