Young players are not going to play FF14

[Atelier-Bagur]

Nah, WoW got popular because Blizzard gave their marketing team an infinite budget to work with resulting in them flooding every magazine and website they could find with ads, flooding TV with celebrity commercials, and stores with any kind of merch imaginable... including "adult" toy stores... >.>

Basically it was a massive hype engine pushing a mediocre to decent product.

I would also argue the game came at the right place at the right time when online social interaction was starting to boom. That in of itself caused so many casual people who didnt even fully play the game but instead used it as a medium to interact and hang out with friends.