I’m going to start this article by asking a question I don’t actually want an answer to: How long has Minecraft been popular?
Objectively there are obviously dates and times you can look at to arrive at a window. The game came out in 2009 in a public alpha stage, it hit 1.0 in 2011, and it was clearly popular enough in 2014 for Microsoft to decide that buying it was a good idea. But when did it trip over the barrier and become popular? I am sure dedicated fans who have been invested in it since its launch can give me some dates and times, too, but I also know that those dates and times might not actually… y’know… agree with one another. There’s no obligation for them to do so.
Because here’s the question I actually want the answer to, and the answer to that first question matters only insofar as it influences this question: When is Minecraft going to stop being popular? The answer to that ties into why we’re getting a movie about this game, and it also ties into Ultima Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and even New World, all on the simple fact that everything ebbs – but not on the same schedule.
We’re just a couple of years out from UO hitting the 30-year milestone, and that’s significant, but I also don’t think anyone would argue that the game is still a titan of popularity. It’s able to support itself just fine, but it isn’t a big deal beyond that historical importance any more. And what led to its slide is a lot of things that took place over many years, but there’s an interesting side effect in there that gets elided: I don’t think most people care about the Ultima series any longer.
That’s not to say the series is bad or no one cares; people who know of it still care, and YouTuber Majuular is doing an amazing series retrospective going through its history that you should absolutely watch. Rather, it’s to say that if a new Ultima game were announced tomorrow, people would not be falling over themselves with excitement, especially if it were announced just as a title. The series is most remembered now because of the online game. There’s just not an active new fanbase rotating in for these titles.
And that’s not entirely a bad thing.
We tend to feel as if a lot of our favorite old video game series are permanent things, and some franchises have definitely managed to pass the test of time from early installments to modern ones. But not every franchise maintains a consistent popularity, and even those that manage to stick around sometimes take interesting turns. Wizardry Online is the inheritor to the legacy of an American series that actually became a big deal in Japan and produced several titles that never made it over here, to the point that it’s almost two different franchises. Might & Magic has been wholly supplanted by an auxiliary spin-off series. Does anyone outside of retro gaming fans remember that Super Mario Bros. was named that to distinguish itself from the earlier Mario Bros. game?
Fortunately for a lot of games, none of this necessarily matters all that much. Oh, sure, you might want a new Kings Field game that you are unlikely to get because development priorities are not aligned that way at From Software, but the lack of a new title in that series does not impact the existing titles. It was a thing and now it isn’t.
But it becomes an issue when you’re dealing with online games, which literally do live and die based in part on popularity.
And it’s here that I find things truly fascinating because while League of Legends made tons of money and still clearly bankrolls Riot Games and its various projects, it is definitely not as popular as it used to be. Oh, sure, it didn’t experience the precipitous drop-off of games like Overwatch, but there is still a fade there. Something that was popular has become less popular. How do you manage that?
Every franchise in a macro sense manages this in a different way. FFXIV is definitely going to fade in popularity, for example, but from Square-Enix’s perspective, as long as the franchise itself stays strong, that’s just fine. But there is also a question of balance. If Square-Enix wants to continue being a major player in the MMO field, it wants to have the next game in development before that happens. It wants people to be excited for the next MMORPG in a Final Fantasy game. But it doesn’t want to cannibalize the success of its existing popular game.
This is a much harder prospect with games like New World. There is no existing scaffolding in place to support that game; there’s just the game itself. It’s why you see things like Amazon trying to wedge the game into the company’s prestige series about popular video games, to create a narrative and a cultural footprint beyond the game itself. It’s about establishing the game itself as popular and worth caring about.
At some point Fortnite is going to hit diminishing returns, and to be honest, that point may have already happened, considering how many spinoffs Epic tries to sandwich under that banner already. You can argue it should have already happened, and I’d agree with you, but the point is that eventually people are just not going to turn out for the game.
There’s been a topic bouncing around in my head for ages that we’ve already seen this happen with something of a generational shift in MMORPGs as it stands. It’s not that, say, the name EverQuest is unknown, but there aren’t a whole lot of people who don’t already play those games who would be excited by a new installment in the series. It keeps bouncing around because its owners never managed to expand it into a larger franchise, just spinoffs of the online game.
Sooner or later, people find themselves less interested in things. Sometimes, yeah, that happens because to outside forces (people didn’t get sick of Captain Marvel; DC Comics sued to get him out of circulation because he was cutting into sales of Superman comics, and it worked in a tremendously underhanded maneuver). But other times it’s just organic. Popeye was an incredibly popular character until he wasn’t. Frasier ran for 11 seasons but the revival series couldn’t make it past two. Audiences turned out for four Transformers films directed by Michael Bay, but they’d had enough, and the fifth one ran into a wall.
The tricky part is figuring out when it’s going to happen, trying to predict the moment that the wave is going to crest so you don’t jump over too early or too late. It’s an art of knowing exactly when it’s time to move on, and honestly it’s a gamble every time.
This is why the question is fascinating to me in the first place. We have all these games that are completely built around the idea that they will eventually stop being popular, but they can be very popular until then, and we’re wondering when they’re going slip over in one direction or the other based on intuition, history, and factors outside of our control.
But I won’t miss having to see Fortnite ads when that goes away. Seriously.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
