Are MMORPGs an evolutionary dead end? Where they came from and where they are (part I)

This post over at Inventory Full, got my wheels turning.  Well, it's actually about three posts, the middle one is the one I am talking about.*  The premise is that big budget MMORPGs are pretty well dead, and that going forward the only new and successful ones we get will have small budgets aimed at a niche audience.  While I feel that the Asian "big budget" MMO market may still have some legs in it, by-and-large I have to agree.  Further, the few Asian MMOs I have tried (most recently one on my phone) really were not enjoyable to me .  While often pretty games with visually interesting settings, they mainly seemed designed to get you to pay to bypass various grinds. 

This also seems like a good opportunity to step back and think about where shared digital spaces are at in general.  However, I feel like some context helps with that, at least if you want to do it at a really high level.  So let's back way way out, and think about the history of online multiplayer games and virtual social spaces.  At first just having any kind of shared digital environment where there were avatars run by other players was quite novel.  Games doing that with honest-to-Christ graphics are way older than most people think.  However, during the 1990s is where we can see evolution of shared digital spaces really start to take off. A bit of an adaptive radiation in the parlance of evolutionary biology.  

Message boards, social spaces where you can hang out and have an asynchronous conversation,  had been going strong for a while.**  MUDs had also been going strong, but the two had really remained largely distinct entities though most of the 80s, or so I have read (I was in middle school in the mid- 80s and didn't even dial into my first local BBS until around 1989). However in the 90s with much wider adoption of the internet, and especially the popularization of the web around the mid 90s, shared spaces on the internet really began to take off.  Message boards started to become really mainstream, with a lot of websites built for other purposes even embedding some kind of message board into themselves (back then every single news story on the internet didn't have a comment box at the bottom . . . different times).  For example, IGN is a direct descendant of a N64 gaming focused news site with integrated message boards I used to hang out on around 1998.  This was all obvious to pretty much anyone on the internet back then.

However, much less obvious, save to fairly hardcore PC gamers, was all the innovation going on in shared virtual playgrounds.  There was a real hunger for places to hang out in that felt like actual physical places rather than a disembodied asynchronous conversation on a BBS or Usenet, and a lot of people were trying to figure out how to deliver that. In the MUD space all sorts of bizarre experiments were attempted.  MUDs were an especially fertile ground for experiments because coding up new rules for environments described by text is pretty straight forward (at least compared to building your own shared graphical environment from scratch!).  Programs to implement basic MUD architecture and modify it as you see fit were also really common and well documented back then.  For example by the late 80s you could hardly download a big IBM game compilation without at least one being in there, or at least that was my experience. MUDs also worked well with primitive 1980s and 1990s tech because the human imagination can be a pretty powerful graphics processor, as anyone that has ever read a book is likely aware.  

The mid-1990s is when things began to really accelerate. Suddenly almost everyone had at least heard of the internet, if not headed there themselves to hang out on message boards, set up a primitive website or track down kinky images.  During this time the game graphics needed to represent a world also evolved at a startling pace.  In console space, the progression in graphical fidelity from the Super Nintendo (1990) to the PS1/ N64 (1994) to the PS2/ Gamecube/ Dreamcast / Xbox (1999) was absolutely flabbergasting.  Each generation made the one before it look positively primitive.  While a little more granular on the PC end, as better and better hardware become standard equipment a similar progression was also happening there.  In the background data compression algorithms that would allow a server in one place to keep track of more and more information about the characters being run by players on multiple systems all over the world also continued to improve.  Back in the parlance of evolutionary biology, key innovations that would allow games to fill a new market niche were being developed.  There were early forays into online PvP, some of which like Doom, Quake and Half-life became wildly popular even in the 90s.  However, those represented baby steps, and were still quite removed from a fictional world you all hang out in together (unless by "hang out" you mean run around a small map and shoot each other in the face).  Regardless, it become very clear that it was only a matter of time before we would get shared virtual spaces that felt like some kind of alternate reality.   Science fiction authors like Donaldson and Gibson saw it coming, and had been telling us how awesome it was going to be for years.

While Meridian 59 and a few others came out first, arguably the games that first delivered on the promise of a shared virtual reality in a really rich and immersive way were Ultima Online and Everquest at the very end of the 1990s.  The way that they delivered that "virtual world" feel was pretty clever.  They took the rich mechanical detail of PC roleplaying games, Ultima VIII in one instance and DikuMUD in another, and used that to breath life into the somewhat simple shared graphical user environments that technology of the time was capable of rendering and keeping track of.  The worlds themselves were fairly primitive, if sprawling and filled with a lot to explore, and even for the time the graphics were pretty basic.  However, when you are in a world that is thought out in such detail, where there are hundreds of vendors to interact with, entire poorly rendered continents to explore, piles of loot to dig through, and even books to find and read, the fact that the graphics weren't cutting edge didn't really matter.  Those games felt like real places whether they looked like one or not.

Of course Everquest was insanely successful, and that let to the next wave (DAoC, Anarchy Online, COH, and many others).  Then WoW iterated on EQ, smoothing out the most punishing mechanics of the first generation, and was an order of magnitude more successful than EQ.  This led to many big budget MMOs chasing WoW sized audiences with a similar design that basically be summarized as  "DikuMUD mechanics stuffed into a shared 3D  rendered world."   Some like LoTRO, SWTOR, EQ II and even the original EQ remain among my favorite games to this day.   Up through at least 2012 these games were thriving, with what seemed like an endless variety of new ones to try out.  Even back in 2008 I had spent time in more than a dozen of them.

The modern era: where I hope the long rambling intro starts to pay off. 

However,  more recently we have seen this lineage of games start to die out.  Since Elder Scrolls Online, which came out in 2014, the only even moderately successful new western big budget MMORPG I can think of is Amazon's New World.  And even that us regarded as an overall disappointment by many.   I have to agree with Bhagpuss's take that the only successful games in that genre going forward are likely going to be ones that aim for a niche audience and budget accordingly.  We have even recently had a very dramatic example of a game crashing and burning on launch because the developer hallucinated that they could expect a large audience for a game that costs $60 to get into.  It really feels like there just isn't a big enough market for that kind of game to generate a return on investment for a budget in the tens or hundreds of millions any more.  When the new ones come out and flop onto the beach to die a painful death  while the internet watches, I honestly kind of feel bad for the developers at this point.

Yet, surely the appetite for shared digital worlds and virtual playgrounds hasn't diminished?  For example, based on audience size, the manga and anime Sword Art Online seem to envision a world that many find compelling, and one would assume that developers find aspirational.  Fortnite and Roblox are two of the most successful games in human history, and it is as hybrid gaming and social spaces that they really succeed for a certain audience.  So it seems like there is still a very large consumer niche that can be profitable for anyone that fills it.   So what is behind this change in fortunes for MMORPGs?

I decided to split this post up since it was way too long for me to expect someone to read in one sitting, though if you did make it through the full version I posted yesterday, congrats!  Second half to be reposted tomorrow.

*And his response to my response below.

**These are obviously still going strong in the form of Reddit, Discord and a whole host of message boards like GAMEFAQS and MMORPG.com.  You could even argue that blogs are part of this lineage.

***I stuck my head in a few MUDs back then but the few I tired seemed pointlessly clunky and slow paced compared to the ascii graphics roguelikes I was into at the time.