Where have all the players gone?

MMO subscription numbers from 1997 to 2012

Looking at the graph on the right you can see that MMOs have been in decline for the last few years.

There's no one good answer but part of the reason is because of the type of different players that makes up the MMO player base.  To keep it simple I break them into two types - hardcore and casual.  Hardcore gamers are about 10 % of players and were the ones playing Ultima back in 1997.  Then the 2nd wave of MMO's came out it attracted the casual gamers and this was especially true in the World of Warcraft.  When WOW was launched in late 2004 there were about 6 million people subscribing to an MMO of any type.  Fast forward a year and the total number jumps to over 12 million with about half of them playing WoW.

Keep in mind that during this time we also saw the release of games like City of Heroes and EVE Online which attracted players that had never considered playing a fantasy based MMO in the past.  The one thing about all of these players had in common was that they were "noobs" and had no preconceived notions / experience playing an MMO.  I remember this time very well and someone I used to raid with summarized it very well in the quote - "There will never be another time in gaming history like Molten Core."  I've repeated this a few times since then and many people misunderstand it as an insult.  What it means is suddenly there were thousands of players on ever server in the game that not only wanted to raid but were willing to do what ever was necessary to "beat the game".  To beat Molten Core it meant countless hours of menial tasks so you could acquire the stats needed to beat the individual bosses.  Many of the buffs were small incremental adjustments that didn't matter much but the playerbase attacked them with a vengence.  My personal favorite time waster was a shoulder enchantment that probably took 10 hours to grind and gave you around a 2% reduction to fire damage.  The toughest was grinding an entire set of pre-raiding Best-in-Slot (BiS) gear that could only be attained by running the same 4 dungeons over and over and easily took 100 hours in total to complete (lfg ubrs/lbrs/scholo/strat).

The key to finishing Molten Core was getting into a good guild and guilds made players jump through all sorts of hoops to gain entry.  The most common was to require applicants to have a set of BiS gear and this had all sorts of implications.  The most important was it made the end game dungeons extremely popular and it was easy to find a group.  No other game had made playing an MMO that was as approachable and this fact drove the game's success.  Every month WoW added another 300-400k players which was the fuel for the whole engine and it gave guilds incredible power but in the end it was exhausting and not sustainable.

Ultima and Everquest vets scoff at the notion that WoW was difficult but that's only true if you are a hardcore gamer.  Hardcore gamers don't mind running dungeons over and over.  Casual gamers do it for fun and to noobs, Molten Core was an adventure on a grand scale.  Even with all the hard work many casual gamers never finished Molten Core or ever beat the first boss in the next raid, Blackwing Lair.  By the launch of the first expansion, the game had grown to 8 million subscribers and while some casuals were determined to do what was necessary in Burning Crusade many more had determined that it wasn't worth the effort and started to treat the game as a social event instead of a raiding game.  WoW didn't hit a wall though because over the next 2 years they added another 4 million subscribers hitting a peak of 12 million subscribers by the end of 2009.  It would be pretty easy to argue that WoW hit its saturation point at this point.  Everyone that was interested in a game like World of Warcraft had tried it which meant that most anyone that was interested in an MMO had gone through an MMO grind.

MMOs live on grinds.  Grinds can be equipment, levels, materials or things that don't help you raid like achievements or in-game pets.  Computer gamers vary greatly in age but are centered from 16 to 48 and a large portion of this group went through the MMO grind in 2005-2009.  From that point forward most of the new blood were in the 16 - 22 range and entered either during their high school or college years.  The key takeaway is as time goes forward the player base has gotten increasingly tired of grinding.

Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, noticed the trends and worked to make the game less grindy in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.  Once again they were ahead of the curve and any game that ignored this lesson paid for it with poor sales and a quick exit.  Despite all the complaints on the internet, the majority of gamers want to maximize their fun to time played ratio and most don't find grinding a good use of their time.

Looking at the growth graph I put at the top of this article, you can see that MMOs are at a cross road.    Part of the reason is after 7 years of playing, people are really tired of the World of Warcraft and nothing else has come close to duplicating its features.  Games like SWTOR, Rift, and Warhammer hoped to do this but so far WoW has lost more subscriptions than these games have in total.  While it is possible that a mega hit could change this trend my suspicion is the number will continue to decrease until someone figures out a way to make the genre fun again.

PS - A few years ago I ran Molten Core with a friend and regaled her with tales of all the different bosses when I first ran the game.  I'm sure she was bored to tears as it is hard to imagine a place being tough when you can run it solo.  As we killed boss after boss without losing even a fraction of our health it began to make me sad and was another reminder that MMOs are more about the online friendships and less about the pixels.  If more developers realized this we'd have less game failures.