Quote Originally Posted by ReynTime View Post
XI and EQ are still running, but so is RO and other aged games. You can't compare RO to WoW, XIV or ESO in their present state though.
They have enough players to make profit, but if that was enough SE would never have bothered with project rapture in the first place. When those games get too old their appeal becomes too niche.

No one is saying XIV will shutdown soon. But like any online game it's mainstream appeal is directly tied to how apparent its technical limitations are.

And again, I was also saying XIV will be fine for a while, because there is no competition. What else could have the appeal? A game with horrid combat that uses its brand name to carry itself, a former king of MMORPGs that is self-sabotaging rapidly, millions of isometric/top-down hack n slash semi-Diablo clones, dozens of aggressive freemium games that always launch with promise of balanced monetization until they're not, etc.
Eventually someone will figure out the alchemical formula for the "next big thing." I don't believe that the MMORPG genre is dead or even dying - it's gone through a phase (that of the obsession of AAA companies to enter a field in which they have zero experience to dump 100+ million USD into producing a near-clone of WoW and assume the title of 'WoW killer' [and then failing]), and industry types are waiting to see where the wind blows on what's going to happen next.

The 'promise' of the MMORPG remains as alluring as ever: to create a fantastical 'second life' world where players can cooperatively lose themselves - if only for a few hours each day - while forging social bonds with other like-minded people that they otherwise would have never known. And I honestly think that the eventual future of this type of games is a sand-park that is tilted far, far more in favor of the 'sand' than the 'park' (whereas FFXIV is a themepark with just a few glistening granules [housing; glam]). People don't just want to run their own businesses in these game worlds - they want to build cities, overthrow kings, build and be part of an ever-evolving and changing legend where, even if they aren't the centerpiece of the story, they can rightly tell people that they were 'there' when 'the great XYZ went down' and saw it with their own eyes.

I remain confident that 'that game' is out there, somewhere - if not presently in development, then certainly nestled within the back of the mind of a current or future lead designer. I love FFXIV, but it's not the be-all, end-all, 'I'll be playing this when I'm 70' game that it could be. But we will get there. At some point, someone is going to unearth the game that changes online gaming forever, and it will be an MMORPG.