Someone said something in Final Fantasy XIV the other night that just stuck in my craw: “FFXIV is kind of a niche title.” I suppose it’s vaguely true in the sense that the game is not a generation-defining game that literally everyone has played, but it’s an installment in one of the most popular video game series in history. It has a huge playerbase and hosts massive conventions every other year. Square-Enix commissioned a song by Sia for one of its expansions. That is not a “niche” title by any realistic metric.
This is true of lots of MMOs, to be quite honest. World of Warcraft had a movie based on the franchise. Fallout 76 ties into a major television show. RuneScape is apparently just something you get an account for by being British, along with a sprue of Warhammer miniatures and strong opinions on whether tea is good or not.
But some titles are genuinely niche interests. If you say the title, the odds are that a lot of people will not know they exist. So which MMOs do you consider to be truly niche titles and not just online games not everyone has heard of? Yes, you can have multiple answers. That’s fair.