MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: MMO Story of the Year

December 26, 2024 11:00 AM

Welcome back to Massively Overpowered’s formal end-of-the-year awards!

Today’s award is for the MMO Story of the Year, which was awarded to the Activision-Blizzard/Microsoft merge 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 2024 is…

THE GAMES INDUSTRY’S DEVASTATING LAYOFFS

Andrew Ross: Cryptic’s collapse

Brianna Royce: The industry layoffs, CoH’s license, the demise of Cryptic. There are lots of big stories that affected the MMO genre this year, as you’re about to see in our massive poll list below, but none was as big as the fact that over 17,000 people were laid off in the games industry in 2024 alone, even as the industry sees record profits. Corporate greed got us here, and corporate greed won’t get us out. And while this may be a gaming-wide story, it most definitely affects us, as MMORPG live teams were butchered along the way – yes, Cryptic, but even World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online dev teams were hit. Many of the MMORPG devs who were hit will leave this industry and never come back, meaning we’re suffering more than any other genre as braindrain harms not just our present but our future.

Carlo Lacsina: Our MMOs are getting way too old, we need new MMOs. It doesn’t help that developers and publishers are shying away from the term MMORPG. I wouldn’t exactly call the term a stigma, but it’s become such a broad term that it’s getting more and more difficult to define what a real MMORPG is.

Chris Neal: Layoffs across the industry. The massive number of workers who have had to be slashed in order to pay for executive-level mistakes is, frankly, disgusting, especially when so many great games across many genres came out. This industry is fetid and it needs to be cured.

Eliot Lefebvre: Layoffs-a-go-go

Justin Olivetti: New World Aeternum. If you wanted your fill of drama, victory, and defeat, you got all three with the months-long saga that was the Aeternum announcement and rollout. Amazon mishandled this console (re)launch in about every way possible, including running away from the long-established MMO moniker, yet it kind of ended up becoming a net positive for the game. Also, Warcraft Direct’s “anti-BlizzCon” was actually pretty awesome. Blizzard didn’t have a huge convention this year, electing instead to condense a ton of announcements into 45 minutes of livestreaming. The end result was a lot of great news for the studio’s gamers, from Warcraft Rumble’s PC version to WoW Classic fresh start servers to Mists of Pandaria Classic.

Sam Kash: Layoffs

Tyler Edwards: The continued struggle for a new generation of MMOs to establish itself. New World is struggling, Blue Protocol was canceled, Corepunk released to the public well before it was ready. It’s distressing that the genre is still so heavily centered around games that are ten to twenty years old.

The industry’s layoffs crisis took our award for MMO Story of the Year. What’s your pick?

Loading ...

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 commentary from writers so that you can see our thought process. 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. Reader poll options include all MMO stories nominated plus a few others we thought should be included.