Quote Originally Posted by Jeeqbit View Post
I disagree. The type of people that play MMOs were almost the only people using the internet in the past, whereas now those same people are a minority of internet users thanks to the iPhone. In raw numbers, the audience potential for MMOs is far bigger than it used to be. New MMOs are just costly to make. You can argue they don't innovate much, unless you expand the definition to cover other live-service games, and by that definition they have innovated and are wildly popular.
They genuinely aren't that popular, though. And we haven't had a decent new MMO in about a decade. What MMO is there to play, even, if you don't wanna join any of the big 4 of FFXIV, WoW, ESO and GW2? Plenty of MMOs with great ideas like Rift have been left behind. Some are on life support, some have since been shut down.

Every time something looks promising, it turns into a garbage fire or just ends up being vaporware (hi, Ashes of Creation) I wish it wasn't like that because I like MMOs but the genre is definitely not doing any kind of well and hasn't in a long while. And I do think it's partly because they desperately cling to a lot of conventions that just hurt them.