It's time to put XIV to rest....

[Selvokaz]

MMO aren't the golden eggs that it was 15 years ago.

I mean, look at the top 5 most played MMO :
1) WoW : 20 years old
2) FFXIV : 12 years old (counting 1.0)
3) BDO : 9 years old (KR release)
4) GW2 : 11 years old
5) ESO : 10 years old

MMO is almost a dead genre.
It's not worth develloping a new one (a lot of promising ones stopped their dev because nobody wanted to fund them anymore)

its true the next generation of gamers aren't exactly interested in those types of gaming, even from the player point of view,

1.) Time investment, many of us players have well over 1000 hours in this game. Someone said if you did just the core MSQ in ARR that's over 40 hours of game and that's skipping cutscenes. So yeah ask a Valorant or some other COD-like game player if they want to talk to an npc and return to the waking sands for 40 hours and I'm sure they'd tell you to back off. Kids these days want their games to reward them within the first 20 minutes of gameplay, no time for 12-year-long game development with trickle-down storytelling, and so on. Also I only recently heard this but 14 is now being called the retirement home for fighting game players, it's for the aging gamer demographic apparently, not necessarily retirement home age, but middle-aged gamers. So perhaps that was the outgoing demographic of when MMOs were the top dogs, MMOs used to be the best way to interact virtually but now we have VR Chats and Facetime, and whatever else kids these days prefer for interacting digitally.

2.) Graphics, Kids ourselves like the prettiest shinies, they always have, and despite the graphical update, ff14 isn't the spring chicken it used to be, games like First Descendant walk all over 14 graphically, however, the difference in graphics in 14 is still closer to the latest anime-looking games than say Wow is to 14. In other words, there is a ceiling cap to graphics depending on the visual aesthetic one is going for, if the goal is 2nd anime looking games then you can only go but so far, and I think we're reaching that threshold now if not already hit it like a truck into a brick wall, now its about making the environmental worlds look as crisp as the characters that inhabit it.

3.) Monetization, kids want their rewards faster I already said this but it begs to be repeated cause when you look at the spending in these newer games, its kids who want to be cool with the cool rich kids who are begging their parents to give them 20 dollars for the newest character or weapon skin, ain't no kid these days grinding Bozja for 100s of hours trying to get field notes for a damn hoverbike mount that resembles one from another almost 20-year-old game in the franchise when mommy and daddy can just buy them the newest cool gun skin, or character skin for the big boobie anime waifu they have.

[FuwafuwaMii]

(...)

There's still a market and huge demand for the classic MMORPG. XIV alone has a large user base, and other games, while maybe not as big, have players that've been with their games for years. The next bigger title in the pipeline is Ashes of Creation, and a number of others are also being made.

I wouldn't say the MMO genre is dead. The problem is that MMOs tried to be everything to everyone, and that just doesn't work. When WOW switched from what it was up to WoTLK to the mobile clicker it is today, it alienated a large part of its fandom. XIV is still in a comparatively good position because it has so many rides in its theme park, but you can tell from the constant conflict between the more casual folks who want to dive into a fantasy world and chill with their friends, and the more competitive audience who finds content too easy, that the people playing this are more diverse in their interest than XIV in any phase of its development has been "made for" specifically.

I'd guess the future of MMOs is the smaller niche game that caters to a specific audience and sticks to it, rather than the Happy Meal model the older ones tried to be. But the genre itself isn't dead.

[tsuchii]

They literally just had a massive and ongoing graphics update. The playerbase is still massive and growing.

Just play a different MMO tbh. It is clearly no longer a game for you and that's okay.

[Delsus]

its true the next generation of gamers aren't exactly interested in those types of gaming, even from the player point of view,

1.) Time investment, many of us players have well over 1000 hours in this game. Someone said if you did just the core MSQ in ARR that's over 40 hours of game and that's skipping cutscenes. So yeah ask a Valorant or some other COD-like game player if they want to talk to an npc and return to the waking sands for 40 hours and I'm sure they'd tell you to back off. Kids these days want their games to reward them within the first 20 minutes of gameplay, no time for 12-year-long game development with trickle-down storytelling, and so on. Also I only recently heard this but 14 is now being called the retirement home for fighting game players, it's for the aging gamer demographic apparently, not necessarily retirement home age, but middle-aged gamers. So perhaps that was the outgoing demographic of when MMOs were the top dogs, MMOs used to be the best way to interact virtually but now we have VR Chats and Facetime, and whatever else kids these days prefer for interacting digitally.

2.) Graphics, Kids ourselves like the prettiest shinies, they always have, and despite the graphical update, ff14 isn't the spring chicken it used to be, games like First Descendant walk all over 14 graphically, however, the difference in graphics in 14 is still closer to the latest anime-looking games than say Wow is to 14. In other words, there is a ceiling cap to graphics depending on the visual aesthetic one is going for, if the goal is 2nd anime looking games then you can only go but so far, and I think we're reaching that threshold now if not already hit it like a truck into a brick wall, now its about making the environmental worlds look as crisp as the characters that inhabit it.

3.) Monetization, kids want their rewards faster I already said this but it begs to be repeated cause when you look at the spending in these newer games, its kids who want to be cool with the cool rich kids who are begging their parents to give them 20 dollars for the newest character or weapon skin, ain't no kid these days grinding Bozja for 100s of hours trying to get field notes for a damn hoverbike mount that resembles one from another almost 20-year-old game in the franchise when mommy and daddy can just buy them the newest cool gun skin, or character skin for the big boobie anime waifu they have.

I rolled a new character to speedrun the MSQ on the EU datacenter (My main is on NA) and it took me well over almost 200 hours to beat the post endwalker story to get ready for DT, that was with no extra content just playing the story and skipping all cutscenes (except post endwalker because I hadn't seen that) I can't remember exactly how long. as has been said most people don't have that kind of time to commit to a new MMO.

[Mapleine]

Square is broke, the tech market is damaged and Japan hurting in terms of recruiting talent.

Probably not the best timing for an expensive new gamble in a problem plagued genre.

[Zarkovitch]

Let's be for real. To all peeps who wants a new mmo there be none until someone change the mmo meta, like how wow did it. Until then nope.

[Lorika]

Let's be for real. To all peeps who wants a new mmo there be none until someone change the mmo meta, like how wow did it. Until then nope.

The only thing WoW changed at release is : Blizzard took all the good idea from all others succesfull MMO and did a game with all of them in it.

And don't say no, i was there, and i was already playing MMO for a while at that time (a bit over 5 years)