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Active MMORPG Subscribers and Industry Stagnation
Lucifrank
Member Posts: 355
I was just perusing the MMORPG.com polls and was amazed to see that 23% of the people on these forums are not currently subscribed to any games. At the same time, the forums overflow with discussions about how stagnant the industry has become and how everything is pretty much the same old genre and/or same old game mechanics with a different skin.
Is there really nothing out there at the moment to satiate nearly a quarter of us? If anything, you'd think this would indicate to developers that there's still room for growth if they start thinking outside the box and start taking some chances. Think about it--a quarter of the market is a significant amount of monthly subscriptions SOME developer would love to get in their pockets.
Are we just becoming grouchy, jaded jerks who take our play time too seriously, or have developers indeed turned into the equivalent of top 40 radio? Are we just chasing our tails and idealizing the past, hoping to have a gaming experience as magic and new as the first time we logged into an MMORPG, or are our critiques valid? How do you speculate the industry will eventually answer the needs of us in that marganilized 23% (if at all) with something that'll make us want to turn off our phones, shirk social obligations, and sit in front of our computer screens until 3 a.m. again?
Comments
The end of 2007 and start of 2008 are going to be some great times for MMORPGs. All it takes are a few great heavy hitters to vitalize the market.
WoW brought a ton of potential customers to it, no we need games such as AoC and WAR to bring something fresh.
~Greatness~
Currently Playing:
Nothing
As the OP says - the stuff coming out is complete tripe, the gaming industry is forcing us all outside - Its almost asif the world health organisation has bought all the gaming companies and is deliberately producing crap to force us to exercise.
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Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
The problem is that as players' tastes have evolved, developers' ideas have failed to keep up with that evolution. Unfortunately it's much more difficult to keep advancing the MMO genre than it is other computer games. I'll never forget when I first played Civilization. I loved it. My mind almost immediately began wandering as to how to make the game even more fun. I wrote a letter to the company telling them how much I loved it and made some suggestions on how I thought it could be improved. I thought of new units, new technologies and new improvements. When Civ II came out, they made many changes to the game. The company wrote in the manual about how they received thousands of letters and added many of the ideas to the new game.
But MMOs are much more broad and much more expensive to make that it's not as simple to update them. And gamers also have a much broader taste in what they want in an MMO. I think Devs are just a little overwhlemed about which direction to go to advance the genre.
I'm thinking that there are just more games than there are players to support them and new ones coming out every day. Look at the list of released games mentioned on this site alone, and that doesn't even ecompass the entirety of what's out there.