Is this game slowly dying?

[Fornix]

People have short attention spans and a lot of choices. Its pretty normal in today's MMO market for ppl to play multiple games. As a result, activity always declines sharply in the maturation phase of a patch. This isn't 2001 when ppl lived their lives in MMO games. This is 2014 where MMO's are more like going to Disney Land than entering a virtual reality. I can't stress this enough.

You mention "people" as if the behavior can be generalized to all players. Not certain whether that was intentional or not. However, I don't think all too much has changed for MMO players from back in the day compared to those now. What has changed though is the number of surrounding players. Back in the day popular MMO's had several tens of thousands of western players. A few dipped into the hundred thousands. None really surpassed a million of western players. Games such as Lineage, Legend of Mir, etc. were massive. However had most of their playerbase isolated in the east.



Those tens of thousands per game were pretty active, played games such as this with a major time investment. 40+ hours per week was more of a standard than rare occasion. Did this really change? Did these players all suddenly start playing a single MMO less? If I look at myself and players I played with back then, for a big portion, it didn't.

What has changed though is the number of more casual players which stepped in over the recent years. Hopping from game to game, and coming in with the waves of content.

What you see is not a dying game, but decreased activity until the next batch of "rides" come out. That's how MMO's are nowadays, and that is how they will be until the industry is revolutionized again.

I therefore also don't think a change in the industry's approach is really going to change anything in that. As it is unlikely that those players would ever fully devote themselves to a single title. And creating content at a pace faster than they can clear it, without it being a tedious grind, is impossible till the date game development is no longer done by humans but replaced by computers. And that is something which is still going to be years away.

If anything, with MMO's being made more and more accessible to console gamers as well, I'd consider it more likely that in the coming decade we'll see the population decreases in periods of content drought to merely grow even further.

[Jim_Berry]

I don't think it's dying. People are just doing other things.

- Farming light for Nexus weapon.
- Waiting for new content.
- Doing hunts.
- Only grouped with people they know.

I was surprised to have seen people with Nexus within a few days of patch release. Now, they wait around for next phase.

[hdepaula]

guys this is SE, they never fail. People are always like "ugh this Final Fantasy sucked, FF7<3 forever, Im never buying a FF game ever again".....a new FF comes out and they buy it -.- some people hated lightning, said that they werent going to buy another FF game ever again and now they have the FF15 pre-ordered. At first all games are like whatever, but then it comes to a point where because ppl are always talking about it the game becomes famous and everyone is playing it. Like the Assassin's Creed games, it only became really famous after Assassins Creed 2(no wonder they continued with the same character for 2 more games). But this is a MMO game and yeah its slow now but with MMOs its like a rollercoaster, some days you'll see a lot of ppl, some days you'll see a few people, but in the end, you will still see people because this is Final Fantasy and people will complain, they will say "im never playing this again" they will stop for a while, but eventually they will come back.

[Nestama]

guys this is SE, they never fail.

FFXIV 1.0 says hi

[hdepaula]

FFXIV 1.0 says hi

lol oh...well...but that was their first time "failing" and I wouldn't even call that a complete fail, cuz that broken game was better than most well functioning games