Amazon's obsession with MMOs is really baffling.

[Winobot]

It's an oversaturated market and has been a downward trend for years. Even industry leaders like WoW are struggling to survive. Plus Amazon itself already had a few attempts that didnt end up well: New World has failed miserably and Lost Ark now barely peaks 20k players. I don’t understand why they keep doubling or even tripling down on this seemingly losing strategy.

Thoughts?

[Baphomeat]

Oversaturated?

Depends on your meaning of the term...

If you mean over saturated in GOOD mmos you're wrong... there are only a handful of MMOs worth playing depending on your priorities.

WoW, FFXIV, GW2, Runescape, Black Desert, Everquest, SWTOR, and EVE Online...

There are a lot of FAILED ones out there... but we are in dire need of something new and fresh in the space.

GW3 is coming out soon(ish) which is one of the only highlights I see in the near future... Apart from that most of the existing ones have been around to 10+ years and are getting stale.

WoW is stealing content from other MMOs to make their updates.
FFXIV is losing steam and is kept alive almost exclusively by it's housing market players.
GW2 has been near dead in the water since EoD launched 2 years ago.
Everquest is still trucking but a dwindling playerbase.
Black Desert is... black desert honestly don't know much about it.
EVE is super niche same with SWTOR (which is also on a near life support state).

We need a new WoW but the issue is FOMO for WoW and FFXIV which have monopoly on the market.

[Sacred Heart]

I'm afraid we'll just have to accept that MMOs are dead now, don't hope for any new GOOD ones, all that is released is just pay to win trash, mobile game style monetization that keeps people away. and does just enough to keep the FOMO to log in every day or not give it up completely.

But the days like how WoW and FFXIV started are over, we're not getting those anymore. so you either stick with those 2 or give up MMOs, and even WoW has went down the p2w path and has gotten stale, 14 is mostly fine, but it's structure is getting stale and it's starting to show.

Amazon is just trying to cash in on an already dead market., every MMO they have published has been a flop. with 1 of them being utter trash, while the other 2 are just ported from another region where it already existed for years.

[GermanBarbarian]

its an easy quick cash grab ? since amazon owns a huge part of the world wide server structure, setting up the servers and keep them running costs nothing so what.

ppl spend crazy ssums on cosmetics this and that and battlepass and whatnot. Its very lucrative. The main goal is not to keep the game alive for years, the main goal is to farm the initial hype and generate cash and then let the game die

and with throne and liberty , a game that proven already to die fast in korea, they found the perfect game

farm that 300k playerers and next year its 5000 players left ez

[YumboYack]

IMHO it is because they cannot nail down their audience. New World is "okay" as far as MMO's go, but the weird weapon/skill dynamics coupled with the "obviously made for console" interface makes it hard for any MMO lover to get in to. Depth of character design, depth of skills, depth of content.... those are whats needed. Quick leveling, bland everything, lack of any accomplishment, watered down skills and weapons, etc... not gonna sell IMHO.

[Nipply]

I think the issue with the MMO genre is the innovation is gone. Nobody wants to attempt something new and interesting.

The medieval high-fantasy setting is done to death. that only leaves 9 million other settings to explore.

People just want something different. OSRS, EVE Online, Ultima, Everquest etc all thrived due to their difficulty and sense of achievement, not despite it. Every developer wants to cater to the anti-social "let-me-clear-the-whole-game-myself" mentality. Make ♥♥♥♥ actually difficult, make systems that reward skill. Make systems interact with eachother meaningfully.

[GK]

Originally posted by Winobot:

It's an oversaturated market and has been a downward trend for years. Even industry leaders like WoW are struggling to survive. Plus Amazon itself already had a few attempts that didnt end up well: New World has failed miserably and Lost Ark now barely peaks 20k players. I don’t understand why they keep doubling or even tripling down on this seemingly losing strategy.

Thoughts?

i wouldnt say wow struggling when you have over 1 mil still subbed

[YumboYack]

Originally posted by Nipply:

OSRS, EVE Online, Ultima, Everquest etc all thrived due to their difficulty and sense of achievement, not despite it. Every developer wants to cater to the anti-social "let-me-clear-the-whole-game-myself" mentality. Make ♥♥♥♥ actually difficult, make systems that reward skill. Make systems interact with eachother meaningfully.

So perfectly said. The days of grind = difficulty and the any character can be any class have ruined many promising MMO's imho.

[Korben Dallas]

Imma drop a bombshell.......check out world of warcraft ascension. It is essentially whats going on.

fans making what they love about the game and making it their own.It's WoW but classless. Not to be a shill but it's solid, and free.

[Reaptor]

It's kind of how 4Kids invested in anime back in the early 00's. They see dollar signs. The difference is that 4Kids took successful things and made them worse. Amazon is taking failed things and just redistributing them with a new coat of paint.

They see this market of Korean mmos with absolutely vile p2w shops and they know the western market whales will eat these games up, so they are investing in these failed mmos or mmo ideas from eastern markets and bringing them here for profit.
They don't actually care about the game's success. They will see a return investment in days. They don't even need to invest in server infrastructure, they already have it, it's Amazon. Something like 80% of the surface web is hosted on AWS.

[Sacred Heart]

Originally posted by GK:

Originally posted by Winobot:

It's an oversaturated market and has been a downward trend for years. Even industry leaders like WoW are struggling to survive. Plus Amazon itself already had a few attempts that didnt end up well: New World has failed miserably and Lost Ark now barely peaks 20k players. I don’t understand why they keep doubling or even tripling down on this seemingly losing strategy.

Thoughts?

i wouldnt say wow struggling when you have over 1 mil still subbed

Are you serious, that is terrible for an MMO as known as WoW, and those subs aren't counting people who barely play, there are plenty who stay subbed, seemingly forever but never play the game.

WoW is indeed struggling, and barely hanging on by a thread, it's mostly played by people who simply have no where else to go, deep in sunk cost fallacy, and those who ONLY play WoW and nothing else.

Special Edit for WoW fanboys: I'm not going to bother responding to the usual WoW copers that snarl and rush to defend their clearly dying game.

WoW is almost dead, No amount of your coping, bringing up fake numbers, counting dead subscribers or the massive amount of bot accounts and pretending those are actual numbers, will help with that.

dead does not always mean 0 players, it means that no body talks or cares about the game in mass anymore, the people who can't move on still play it and can't accept it's on it's last legs, your favorite streamer playing it and doesn't play anything else also is not an indicator of it "doing well"

WOW IS STRUGGLING TO STAY ALIVE, you'll just have to get over it, Learn to let go and move on, WoW is not coming back, ever. doesn't matter if it gets a 0.5% player increase every so often, No body cares, the game is played out, stale, dull and long past it's prime.

If you are desperate to disprove this, then get blizzard to release accurate numbers of people who are actually playing it regularly and not bot accounts or people who log in once every expansion for a week and then stop playing after they realize the game didn't change or actually got worse, but still subbed.

Oh, and saying "i'm a hardcore player" before stating your made up numbers or claiming it's NOT struggling makes you even LESS credible, because i already know you have a hard denial on admitting the game you depend on is dying. so i'm just going to laugh at you if i see that line.

You'll be lucky if even 1-2 mil are actually playing, and half are probably bots.

Month later edit:

I came back to check and saw this little delusional gem lol....

Originally posted by Reaptor:

Originally posted by Toast3r:

these sites are mostly clicbait made for people like you in search of an argument when they try to win the internet on a random forum

Sure thing, bucko.
World of Warcraft is still the most populated mmo, despite what you think.
Deal with it, I guess?

See, this is a WoW fanboy in denial that his only MMO he depends on is infact dying, not only is it not the most populated MMO it was beaten by FFXIV years ago, it hasn't been the most populated in a decade at this point, this is pure copium.

So for anyone who refuses to accept reality, WoW is close to dead, YOu are the one who will have to deal with it, as i said above in my earlier edit, get blizzard to show you the real numbers or you're making numbers up.

It's a dead MMO, Get over it. ok, topic closed.

[Reaptor]

Originally posted by Holyna, The High Seraph:

Originally posted by GK:

i wouldnt say wow struggling when you have over 1 mil still subbed

Are you serious, that is terrible for an MMO as known as WoW, and those subs aren't counting people who barely play, there are plenty who stay subbed, seemingly forever but never play the game.

WoW is indeed struggling, and barely hanging on by a thread, it's mostly played by people who simply have no where else to go, deep in sunk cost fallacy, and those who ONLY play WoW and nothing else.

I'm a hardcore WoW player and I can tell you WoW isn't struggling. One of their more recent shareholder meetings was leaked and they have about 7.2 million subscribers. This was before the launch of The War Within, so likely much more currently.
Adding to that, they had to go through several unexpected maintenance a couple weeks ago because the Auction House wasn't able to handle the tens of millions of listing being placed and purchased, and the Auction House kept crashing.

Not only that, but you can find these numbers yourself by going to a site like WarcraftLogs.com and looking over the total amount of unique raid logs across all difficulties and that average is still way over a million.
That's not counting the unique logs from raider.io, as there is an entire section of the community who doesn't raid and only runs mythic plus dungeons.

[Gias]

Originally posted by Reaptor:

Originally posted by Holyna, The High Seraph:

Are you serious, that is terrible for an MMO as known as WoW, and those subs aren't counting people who barely play, there are plenty who stay subbed, seemingly forever but never play the game.

WoW is indeed struggling, and barely hanging on by a thread, it's mostly played by people who simply have no where else to go, deep in sunk cost fallacy, and those who ONLY play WoW and nothing else.

I'm a hardcore WoW player and I can tell you WoW isn't struggling. One of their more recent shareholder meetings was leaked and they have about 7.2 million subscribers. This was before the launch of The War Within, so likely much more currently.
Adding to that, they had to go through several unexpected maintenance a couple weeks ago because the Auction House wasn't able to handle the tens of millions of listing being placed and purchased, and the Auction House kept crashing.

Not only that, but you can find these numbers yourself by going to a site like WarcraftLogs.com and looking over the total amount of unique raid logs across all difficulties and that average is still way over a million.
That's not counting the unique logs from raider.io, as there is an entire section of the community who doesn't raid and only runs mythic plus dungeons.

They dont even count subscribers anymore... they count MAU's aka monthly active users and count same player on different wow versions multiple times... they have been making up metrics to look better on their investor reports since they released classic. And this is mentioned in the reports in fine print. Also chinese got back into wow for more number padding.

tldr: 1-2m is realistic.

[Harley]

Maybe Jeff Bezos is a mmo addict and just wants to play mmos with other people.

[Toast3r]

i stoped to read after 3 words when my eyes sighted "oversaturated".

the genre is so "oversaturated" that any top 10 mmorpg will lead you to half dead agonizing mmorpg that are at least 10 or 15 years old mostly , if not 20

there is clearly a huge players pool waiting for a REAL good mmorpg to attract for the one who will release the next GOOD mmorpg.
including older players like myself who struggles to find anything else than fastfood F2P that dies after a few month.

the only problem is that most companies trying it right now are just greedy asian companies trying to min/max the investment/gain ratio at your expense , betting on whales , and player turnover , not on loyalty.

thats why it fail everytime , not because its over saturated , but because the player base expectations is at the total opposite of the mmo editors desires.

lots of us are waiting for a 3 stars Chef gourmet recipe , and they just keep throwing at your face the cheapest cheesburger you could find

[PlogusNotVerySorry]

execs trying to find material and reason to please shareholders about "healthy growth"