Something you may or may not have known...

[Ulathskullsplitter]

It's simple numbers. There are far more players that prefer the game to be easy so they can relax while playing, get their loot, and feel like they accomplished something. It's a very small percent of players that like to bang their heads against difficult encounters for weeks or even months before being able to beat it. Most people don't find being frustrated fun. These companies are going to follow the money.

And woe to FFXIV if it follows Wows path. Peaking at 12 million subscribers and maintaining 5+ million for almost a decade. That would just be a terrible fate for this game. Clearly nobody wants easy content.

[Magis]

It's simple numbers. There are far more players that prefer the game to be easy so they can relax while playing, get their loot, and feel like they accomplished something. It's a very small percent of players that like to bang their heads against difficult encounters for weeks or even months before being able to beat it. Most people don't find being frustrated fun. These companies are going to follow the money.

And woe to FFXIV if it follows Wows path. Peaking at 12 million subscribers and maintaining 5+ million for almost a decade. That would just be a terrible fate for this game. Clearly nobody wants easy content.

The path FFXIV is "following" is post-Wrath, when WoW began dropping subs left and right. Even Cataclysm and Pandaria couldn't bring in players or sustain them long enough (just small blips). Now if XIV was more like Vanilla and TBC, well... that would be a different story.

http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png

[Ulathskullsplitter]

The path FFXIV is "following" is post-Wrath, when WoW began dropping subs left and right. Even Cataclysm and Pandaria couldn't bring in players or sustain them long enough (just small blips). Now if XIV was more like Vanilla and TBC, well... that would be a different story.

http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png

When are people going to stop using subscriber numbers from early WoW as the barometer for success for mmos? That was just one of those flukey cultural phenomenon that was never going to be sustainable and will never happen again. You can't necessarily make the connection that numbers dropped due to content. It was never going to retain that many players regardless of the path they took with it. And in this day there are far too many options for one game to gain that many subscribers again. Almost every game that releases now has some kind of online multiplayer.

[Magis]

When are people going to stop using subscriber numbers from early WoW as the barometer for success for mmos?

Wait, so you talk about WoW having 12 million players... and then say don't look at the time when those 12 million were gained? Wut....

That was just one of those flukey cultural phenomenon that was never going to be sustainable and will never happen again. You can't necessarily make the connection that numbers dropped due to content. It was never going to retain that many players regardless of the path they took with it. And in this day there are far too many options for one game to gain that many subscribers again. Almost every game that releases now has some kind of online multiplayer.

Cool beans, so then why did you bring up their sub numbers?

[Galgarion]

When are people going to stop using subscriber numbers from early WoW as the barometer for success for mmos? That was just one of those flukey cultural phenomenon that was never going to be sustainable and will never happen again. You can't necessarily make the connection that numbers dropped due to content. It was never going to retain that many players regardless of the path they took with it. And in this day there are far too many options for one game to gain that many subscribers again. Almost every game that releases now has some kind of online multiplayer.

Pretty much this. WoW at its peak was a flavor of the month with a lot of gamers, no different than Rock Band or Guitar hero. It was a trend: and you can't predict when a trend will start or end.