Since 2014, online role-playing games have been in crisis. Before the groundbreaking year, three to five new online role-playing games were released from the West each year. Today, small MMORPGs, funded through crowdfunding, and whose development often stagnates for years, are still our biggest hope. But what is the reason for this? Why do MMORPGs seem to have lost their magic?
MMORPGs are not doing well. And that is particularly strange because they were the boom genre in gaming in the 2000s. Even here in Germany.
The website “buffed.de” was created by Computec specifically to ride the hype of World of Warcraft. It reached nearly 80 million page views in July 2007 – mainly due to the MMORPG WoW (via web.archive).
In January 2025, Buffed still achieved about 4.1 million page views (via ivw). Today, there are many more users on the Internet than there were 18 years ago.
This is not something you can blame on Buffed. MMORPG sites are generally just a shadow of their former selves today, even in the English-speaking world. Some MMORPG sites have lost about 90% of their readership in the last 10 years, and many have closed down entirely.
New MMORPGs still cause massive surges
Nevertheless, the interest in new MMORPGs remains high. The few AAA MMORPGs released since 2014 have had a massive influx of players on Steam. We can see this with the 3 games released by Amazon:
- New World reached a peak of 913,027 players on Steam upon release in October 2021 – and that as a paid title
- Lost Ark even reached 1.3 million simultaneous active players in February 2022 as a Free2Play title
- Even Throne and Liberty, which had already failed upon release in its home country of South Korea, still reached a maximum of 334,000 players
But the problem is clear: None of the games can hold and excite their players for long. At least not like before, 20 years ago, when people played WoW and simply couldn’t stop, spending months and years doing nothing but living their second life in Azeroth.
Games like Lost Ark or New World crashed significantly after just a few months. Players were frustrated and complained: Once again, an MMORPG failed to meet their high expectations.
How have MMORPGs lost their magic?
The internet has become very good at dissecting MMORPGs
The major change we are experiencing today has to do with how professionalized the internet has become at analyzing and dissecting new MMORPGs. It also relates to the fact that the social component in MMORPGs, the glue of the game, has been removed.
In the past, MMORPGs were largely a black box that you could only experience and decipher within the game itself. Players didn’t even think of looking for information outside the game. They hadn’t learned all those search mechanisms to avoid perceived frustration that seem so normal to us today:
If you wanted to know what the best way to gain experience points or get equipment was, you had to find an experienced player in the MMORPG who could explain it to you.
Or you even had to find out through trial and error, which led to running into an unknown zone, dying there and cleverly realizing: “Oh, I’m probably too weak for this.”
If you wanted to do more than just wander around alone, you had to look for a guild, build connections, prove yourself to be reliable and friendly so that others would want to play with you.
Today, however, people inform themselves about an MMORPG via YouTube or Twitch, through forums or magazines.
Long-term players have been replaced by disposable companions from the group finder, random acquaintances from a Discord, or even in some MMORPGs even by NPCs that the game provides, allowing players to completely avoid interaction with annoying other people.
By the release of a new MMORPG, the secrets are already solved
A “discovery phase” of an MMORPG as a black box may still exist for a few pioneers playing on the test server or in a beta.
But by the release of a new MMORPG, it is already clear what the optimal path is to reach the maximum level. Anyone can look up how the perfect leveling path looks, how jumping puzzles X or boss fight Y work, and even the big secret, a hidden mount, is only kept secret for a few hours.
Since it became clear what kind of industry WoW has become and that there are websites and people who make a living dissecting and managing the game, there is hardly an auspicious MMORPG that appears without the next webmaster spotting their big chance and creating a fan site that analyzes and breaks down the game while it is still in beta. The great model was once mmo-champion, and today it is wowhead.
For MMORPGs from Asia that are released here in the West, it is even worse:
- There are already all the content and guides in Asia that only need to be translated
- Some have even played on the servers in Asia and start here with a huge knowledge advantage
And that’s not all: In the past, players had to painstakingly figure out boss mechanics; in games like WoW, there are now addons that chew through the mechanics and shout at you to get out of the fire.
And the developers have also succumbed to the trend: Instead of having to search in chat for a group for an activity, today, an automatic group finding is expected as a quality-of-life standard.
The players themselves are ultimately to blame for not being able to play MMORPGs for as long as they used to. Today, it is possible to play an MMORPG “optimized” – in the past, people might have liked to do that as well, but the opportunity simply didn’t exist.
Anyone who wanted to play an MMORPG “optimally” had to invest an enormous amount of time and educate themselves, seek out the best people on the server and tap into their knowledge, and first gain entry into the highest circles.
That was certainly elitist and much more a life purpose than a hobby or side activity, but it created that MMORPG feeling that so many miss today: You were someone on a server, you had earned something there.
The internet, which has learned how lucrative it is to help players approach and solve an MMORPG optimally, has contributed to the decline in the longevity of online role-playing games and to many longing for the feeling of “earlier”.
MMORPGs are outdated with their commitments
In addition, MMORPGs no longer fit our super-individualized times. If you explain to a 20-year-old today that it was once completely normal to arrange to meet at 6:00 PM because you had a mandatory appointment with 39 others and it was considered very rude to be even 5 minutes late, it is already difficult.
If you explain that it was part of the game to fish for hours because you had to brew potions for the raid and how important it was to farm repair costs and get optimal buff food, the 20-year-old will surely look puzzled.
If you then start talking about DKP and how you had to save that to bid on a sword, and that the raids lasted for hours and you had to ask for permission to go to the restroom, you feel like Grandpa telling stories about the war.
Hardcore MMORPGs as an incentive to play MMORPGs properly again
One way that players and also developers have found to bring back the charm of the past is to set the error tolerance of an MMORPG to zero through “hardcore modes.” However, this does not happen in “new MMORPGs,” but in 20-year-old MMORPGs from earlier, which are already solved.
WoW in Classic Hardcore mode is like it used to be, only that you must not make any mistakes, so the optimization continues: MMO trends: Why every MMO is dying right now
