Quote Originally Posted by Hallarem View Post
Oh yes, it had multiple things going bad for it, a niche setting, and think WoW tanked it with releasing their expansion at the same time, but one of the killing blows was catering way too much to the hardcore audience. It wasn't' the "Time to grow" it was what it did with the time it was given plus a lot of other factors. They just leaned way too stubbornly into their whole "We are way more hardcore than WoW is" when WoW was popular exactly because it was casual and easy to approach. Because of the dev teams bad decisions plus the other factors it didn't have staying power.
It was just bad timing and a tight market issue, more than bad advertisement. It did manage to get a massive influx of player but it had no retention.... because people were too used to WoW and it's competitors. I remember it quite clearly when I asked, weren't you gone to Wildstar? And the response, "But there's nothing to do in that game". They just ate through the content real fast.

Casual players, on the other hand, and by this I mean the people who have busy lives and play on their own time, had different things going on back then, and if any of them were attracted to an MMO, GW2 fit the bill better with no subscription, WoW fit the bill better with it's massive reputation, I could go on I guess, but I think I made my point.

I can draw a parallel here with Overwatch competitors, Marvel Rivals being in the right time and place to upstage it. But boy, the amount of 6v6 hero shooters that were actively more fun to play that ended up dead might match the MMO graveyard of the early 2010s.