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Are MMOs a Dying Genre? | Design Delve (Patreon)

Published:
2026-03-02 16:03:49
Imported:
2026-03

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This week's episode of Design Delve is now available!

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Are MMOs a Dying Genre? | Design Delve

This video is brought to you by GameMaker, the free, fast, and easy-to-use 2D game engine that’s helped power modern classics like UFO 50, Antonblast, and Yahtzee’s Starstruck Vagabond – https://opr.as/GM-SecondWind4 In today's episode, J & Ludo delve into the misunderstood successes and failures of the MMO genre. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup Second Wind Merch: https://store.dftba.com/collections/second-wind https://sharkrobot.com/collections/second-wind Music used in order of appearance: Intruder - Stray OST The Abyss - Hyper Light Drifter OST Checking in - Celeste OST The Notebooks - Stray OST Greenpath - Hollow Knight OST Secret Lab - Stray OST

Comments

SCP 3887B

I will say, for my go to MMO, Star Wars the Old Republic, got hamstrung with their studio change from Bioware to Broadsword, going right into the VA strike that was extremely under reported until it was finished, absolutely hamstrung all of that games momentum. The latter bit especially, because SWTOR had been a fully voice acted game (the only MMO I know of to be), but leading up to and during the VA strike they had to almost completely stop key story development. Beacause they knew for something that important to the game, it had to be VAed. And since the was next to no reporting on the VA strike most people assumed the game was being dropped.

rhekke

Want to make one nitpick - the "Fortnitefication" is just MMOs going back to their roots before WoW. Early EQ, UO and the like had almost no features, but they also were not designed to push everyone to raid - mostly because no one knew what the lifecycle of a gamer in an MMO would look like. The social aspects players themselves created were the selling points, as well as player created content. Camps were a thing, as were raids, but they were not the be-all or end-all. There was a huge roleplaying community in those early days which kept the numbers stable just as much (if not more so) than the hard core raiders.

Insomnia Inc

I appreciate that they voice act everything, even when you could tell during the pandemic for sure that the actors recorded everything from home, it was still great to hear it, it's one thing that's kept me playing it for years, and the cast is stellar.

Max Goldstein

Did I miss the part where you told me what USP stood for?

LookItsChefEric

As a total outsider who has never touched any MMO for multiple reasons, most of them monetarily.... One of the things that made a lot of sense to me in this video for how the genre keeps afloat is the financial and revenue aspect. One of the things that I've noticed quite a bit in multiple genres of multiplayer games, specifically the rise of hero, shooters and other. What I would call Nick games... Is that they have the ability to make mistakes and they have the ability to take dips in revenue without it being catastrophic to the studio and or the purse Holders. Whether or not the experimentation is truly experimental or drastically changes the way that the game plays is permitted from a business standpoint from the sheer amount of money that these games are able to bring in.

A

“unique selling point”

A

Still dreaming of that day when we can get Yahtzee to review LOTRO. If he wants story-rich and reasonably immersive, there’s quite a story there. Hell, at 18 years of operation, it’d probably qualify for an industry retrospective too! Along those lines, I’d give another shoutout to Myst Online/Uru Live, which pioneered a lot of interesting concepts and was probably just too ahead of its time to succeed. Still available to play for free and with a small but loyal community. If you want story, there’s a bucketload here too.

SCP 3887B

Agreed. I won't spoil who for anyone that hasn't played the newest story update, but one of the new villains is voiced by Samantha Béart, the VA for Karlack in Baldur's Gate 3

Ronny Cook

I suspect the gacha games have stolen part of the MMO audience. The entry point is low cost, the social aspects are less forced - much MMO content requires a group, preferably a group of friends, and so some coordination. The eye candy aspect is likely not insignificant as well. There is much less depth to the social dimension, but modern social media fills that need.

Caerdwyn

The WoW style games? Yes, from two bullets. The first: microtransaction greed and pay-to-win. There was nothing wrong with the monthly subscription model; it made money, it made sense, it was fair and up-front. But along came the Bobby Koticks of the world whose limitless greed killed the games that laid the golden eggs. The second: we did it to ourselves. We, the players. The horrible behavior, the cheating, the botting, the account theft/strip mining (there would be no supply if there were no demand), the soulless arrogance of "how dare you stop to smell the roses" that destroyed the escapism. Whatever the genre has evolved into, it's unrecognizable from the standpoint of someone who got into it before 2010 but is seeing the marketing departments cling onto valor stolen from Wrath of the Lich King. Yeah, I'm salty about it. I get to do that.

Jason Youngberg

IMHO what makes/breaks an MMO is the community. I played City of Heroes from opening weekend to closing night. I went back when I found out about Homecoming and quit that last October when I had a falling out with my group. By then I played it through so many times that I was just there for the group. I play ESO now and I like the idea of other players around in the world, I don't see myself as becoming as engrossed in the setting as CoH and replaying it again and again. I feel I go out of habit and that MMOs have been a big part of my life for decades now.

Michael Bruner

My eternal problem with MMOs I've tried, which is a sad thing given how much I enjoyed the people I met there, is that inevitably you hit "endgame", and endgame turns it from a game to a job for me. Everything became a grind if you were going to do high-end content. With WoW for example, I had to get rep for various items, I needed to stock up for repair fees and consumables, and then I had to smash my face against content for hours where I could easily fail again and again even if I personally was on top of my game because you needed a lot of other people to also be on top of their game and often a little luck as well. The "required" playtime to keep up with the expected performance sucked the joy of playing out of the experience inevitably. I miss many of the people tremendously, but to maintain a performance where I could help those people play left me very little "breaktime" in what was supposed to BE my breaktime. And if you can't keep up with endgame performance (or have a game that avoids it somehow), then in my experience the social aspect is a lot less intense, to the point you are basically solo playing with chat. And outside content drops (which will never keep up with you leveling through them), that solo play becomes repetitive and pointless and mere chat doesn't save it for me.

Swift Justice

If anything it's been more damaging to MMOs to focus on the hardcore raiders, especially with the way they do content which apparently means that old raids or whatever become redundant and abandoned when the shiny new raids come out, but also because catering to small communities of the hardest of the hardcore means you're putting your time, effort and money into content that less than 1% of your players will ever actually see.

A

I think that’s one reason LoTRO has been able to stick around — a healthy focus on the story and community, and not making endgame raids the end-all, be-all. The devs would much prefer and suggest you roll an alt instead.