Last week, I ended the Vague Patch Notes column with something of a tease suggesting that maybe, just maybe, MMORPGs are not an unpopular genre or a genre that doesn’t sell, but that they are in fact popular. This is, perhaps, a controversial statement. I have been hearing that MMORPGs are unpopular since 2003, which is the year when I started playing my first MMORPG ever. It has been more than two decades since then, so do I think I can actually look someone in the eye and state with a straight face that MMORPGs may be popular?
Yes. Yes, I absolutely do. And I know why people think otherwise, but it’s also not true.
Of course, to explain that – and to also explain the obvious question that if MMORPGs are actually popular, why don’t we see tons of them coming out all the time – we’re going to need to do some diving into topics. So let’s do that, starting from the point of reference pools. And just to make sure we’re starting on roughly equal footing, let’s talk about music. Do you know who the Beatles are?
Odds are that you looked at that paragraph in disbelief because of course you know who the Beatles are. I’m even going to assume that you know who all the Beatles were and all there is to know about Pete Best. And you probably know who Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were, both of whom were influences on the Beatles. Do you know who T-Bone Walker was? How about Blind Lemon Jefferson? Sara Martin?
My point here is not to impress you with my deep musical history (because I had to look all of those people up); rather, it’s to point out that you can actually dive pretty far back into musical history when you start finding yourself hearing about people you’re wholly unaware of. Which makes it interesting when you consider that almost everyone on the planet would say that they listen to music.
Video games are a much younger medium than music, but there are still more mainstream and more hobby-focused niches within the video game space as a whole. MMORPGs are among the more hobby-focused spaces. Even the ones you play more casually tend to have a pretty steep time investment; that’s by design. But they’ve also, historically, held a lot of attention for a very long time.
Loads of people will talk at length about the hours they lost to Ultima Online or EverQuest or World of Warcraft back in the day. For many people those are in the rearview and the past tense, sure, but there are also loads of people who moved on from video games as a whole or just found themselves with other hobbies. And I hate to point it out, but we all know that these games make money pretty consistently; that funds these games getting ongoing development!
It might seem a bit silly to say this, but if Square-Enix consistently rents major event halls in Las Vegas (which is not cheap) and flies me across the country every couple of years to stay at a hotel it’s paying money for in order for me to play its video game, it’s not because it doesn’t make money. Oh, sure, an MMORPG might not have the widespread appeal of a Mario game, but it’s a more niche title that runs for years on end. Deadpool (the film) made less money than Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but an R-rated comedy with miniscule marketing based on a relatively obscure-to-the-mainstream comic book character making less money than the hyper-marketed new installment of one of the most defining blockbuster franchises ever with a family-friendly rating is how you expect things to go.
Heck, let’s not forget the whole reason that we got our first game called an MMORPG (UO) was that early tests of the game did gangbusters in spite of the fact that it seemed like a longshot. Popularity literally got that project saved from being scuttled before launch.
So why do people think that MMORPGs aren’t all that popular? Two reasons. The first is just the perception that this genre is deep into the video game sphere, which is… well, it’s just plain true. That’s the reality. MMORPGs can both be popular and be the equivalent of obscure musical acts that never get mainstream success but are influential and beloved despite that. It’s not quite the same thing, but it is comparable in some ways.
But we can be more concrete here. The obvious question is why we don’t see a bunch more MMORPGs in development all the time if these things are popular. And the reason is that MMORPGs are also a huge, expensive gamble.
You need to spend a lot of time developing a new MMORPG from zero, and it’s going to cost a lot of money to do so. Which means that any MMORPG is also expected to make money, get good reviews, and generally make a big impact… something that often takes a while. Also, let’s not forget that right now you have a few very big titles sitting on the top of the pile eating up a lot of the audience, and unlike single-player games, MMOs can’t necessarily count on their launch sitting comfortably in a lull.
Electronic Arts – a company that is not exactly light on funds – bankrolled two major MMOs post-WoW that were clearly meant as attempts to break into the top MMORPG spot, and neither one worked. That’s not to say either game was an unmitigated or complete disaster (that’s not true), just to point out that this is a tough industry. The margins are not razor-thin, but the cost of ongoing development can start to look awfully high if you’re starting to get down to the wire.
In a saturated market, you don’t usually want to spend money to break in unless you ar convinced you have a product that’s going to go the distance. For single-player games, there’s more leeway and more possibility to edge your way in; MMORPGs are unusual there because your chance to sense weakness has to be measured in something other than months or years. The beneficiaries of, say, WoW starting to lose players who were actually going to leave for good were games that were already out, not some new game that could swoop in and claim players.
When you add in the time cost of playing an MMORPG and the fact that some people are just never going to be into games that measure their playtimes in years? It’s kind of easier to just not. A genre being popular does not in and of itself mean that there are more people to capture. Oh, sure, you can say that baseball is popular and that your city would benefit from an MLB team, but even if you leap every other hurdle to starting a new one… if you can’t actually get talented players to join the team, will it really matter?
So what’s the takeaway? For me, it’s to remember that these games are more popular than we think, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Players do, in fact, like MMORPGs. (They may not like older inconveniences from older MMORPGs, but that’s not the same thing.) And sure, I’d prefer if there were more big new games in development to astonish everyone, but sometimes you just have to accept that’s harder to do in big, slow, expensive titles.
And… no. No, we’re not doing a third part. We’re going to leave this one here. Next week, something completely different.
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.
