I just don't get it.

[Jetstream_Fox]

Snip

We haven't changed, the people who make games have changed. There are still tons of games that aren't "instant gratification" games, many hack and slash and standalone rpgs like Fallout still require you to work and progress yourself. Mainly the FPS genre is the main culprit of being subjected to instant gratification because of how easy it is to lock down that market. People in marketing want people to buy those games so they make them look easy and fun to play with their friends, selling you on a product that is less quality then a game that requires you to not just click/push a button and win.

This is why the MMO market has never really expanded and has more or less been on a merge with mainstay games, why waste hours of getting that one piece of gear, when I can grab 5 new pieces of gear immediately in The Division? Why waste a month trying to clear 4 raid bosses, when I can clear 2 other games in that time frame? Developers don't care about things such as skill and ingenuity, if they have a model that works they stick with it as long as it makes them money.

Look at Call of Duty, say Modern Warfare was a mmo and World at War, Black Ops and Ghosts were patches like we get on XIV. They didn't do much in those games from what I heard, just a bunch of reskins, bad multiplayer tuning and a sloppy story, yet they sold millions. XIV follows this exact same format and you're correct by saying if they changed the way they do things they lose money.

The game is on a treadmill, eventually the motor will burn out and it become to costly to fix and it will die, but that doesn't mean SE should continue the same pattern until it dies.