World of Warcraft died because the developers only catered to casuals and world prog

[BokoToloko]

There are many reasons behind WoW downfall but catering to casuals isn't one. The only time it catered to casuals was during WoD and its all too known content drought. it's always funny that people still have the mindset about casual players=bad players. Not spending 2-3 hours a day (which is a lot as you start adding up days) and being bad at playing the game aren't correlated. At all. Player's performance is mostly up to the player willingness to actually improve. Any issues with this are completely up to the player mentality, not the time investment.

Not to mention you're making a completely made up statement about the game's population. SE philosophy has been the same since ARR. And any and all who've been playing . If the majority of the playerbase were actually "midcore", the game wouldn't even have made it past Heavensward. And, as much as I like both WoW and FFXIV. WoW has always been more time consuming and hardcore oriented at any point of both games history. If people left WoW and entered FFXIV, you can be sure it wasn't because of casuals. Because this game has always catered to them far more than WoW ever did.

Also, all comparisons made with Lost Ark fall flat when you remove any nuance to them, because the gameplay in both games is completely different (honestly, they shouldn't even be in a same category, given that Lost Ark strictly follows the ARPG formula and design Diablo and PoE do).Aditionally, it's disingenuous to argue anything about Lost Ark being better/worse than anything else while it's still on the FOMO phase. Not to mention there are a lot more important factors to its success in play starting with the fact is F2P, regardless of P2W features, thus being a more accesible game. No price means anyone can install the game at no risk at all and the company gets more chances to toss a coin for a new player staying and spending money. It doesn't matter if only 50% of the registered users stays when you can get double the amount of registered users than another game with, let's say, 70% ratio of players that stay. Accesibility is a bigger key to success than catering to ANY population will ever be and the price is completely the biggest accesibility factor, other important ones being language and the agency they provide around play time. And both FFXIV and WoW are behind regarding monetary accesibility because the paywall behind them is far greater, given there is the base game+expansions+sub package to pay and the sub won't only deter new people but also returners. Does that mean anything in terms of quality or profitability? Not... necessarily. It just changes the draw needed to get people playing.

All in all, this is just another "new game is this game's killer" post that have been plaguing both these forums and WoW's over the years like a broken watch.