Quote Originally Posted by Nephera View Post
It's an industry where most development focuses on innovating slightly while ripping off your predecessors. To the point where if someone truly does have an innovative idea for an mmo it sounds like they've gone off their medication.This has created a pretty large bubble that is eventually gonna burst.
I've seen this statement before, and it's usually lobbied at Apple when they announce a feature that's new to iOS that has been in Android for years, and it represents that same level of misunderstanding about innovation. Innovation is not creating some completely new idea, that's invention. The reason people are wary about invention is because it's extremely risky; plenty of people have great ideas, yet very few actually test them out. In a sense, each idea a person has is a hypothesis about what customers will like enough to pay for. The usual way to do this is to create an MVP that can be used to test your ideas against your target audience, but that's not common (or easy) in the MMO market. The other way to "test" your idea is to look at similar products and see how well they're faring. For MMOs, that's basically WoW, which moved MMOs from niche markets to the mainstream. This creates the problem you mentioned, lots of poorly done clones that are rushed to market.

FFXIV stands alone in the MMO as the other successful subscription game for several reasons. They did use a successful model (WoW) as their basis, and they did add their own twist to it. The ability to switch your job, the heavy emphasis on story, the intricate crafting are the ones that come to mind. For SE, these ideas had already been validated in FFXI as features customers liked. It also helps they stated they're not aiming for WoW level subscriptions. I think I read that 100,000 was all the game needed.

A few more comments. Truly sandbox MMOs are hard to do right for several reasons. The first is the sheer time investment. A big part of Eve is the metagame, and a lot of the game is "played" in Excel. There's also the "king" premise. People like sandbox games like the ES series because it lets them play king, construct their own kingdoms, and then burn them down. In a sandbox MMO, someone else can burn down your castle. That doesn't appeal to the majority of gamers, especially when people will kick your castle down when you can't retaliate.