Joccaren

Not OP, but I'll comment.

Most MMORPGs are in a bit of a rut ATM. MOBAs and survival games aren't killing them - I'd generally expect them to have different audiences - but they are exploding into popularity thanks to being relatively new multiplayer experiences.

The biggest problem with most MMOs these days is that they feel kind of stale and old, and struggle to find their place in the market.

WoW has been going on for years, and it slowly loses its playerbase as Blizzard is forced to choose between several different subgroups that enjoy the game for different reasons with each expansion, alienating one while supporting another. They also need to release such content expansions in order to keep some of these sub sections, so slowly but surely the game that millions loved and had the potential to go anywhere, is forced to alienate parts of its community constantly, reducing its size as it tries to provide a game still enjoyable for most players.

Other MMOs run into a bunch of issues, but I'll list a few here:

-WoW syndrome. WoW was and is immensely popular. It is the Titan people aim to topple. How to do so? Why, create another WoW clone with a different setting of course! This usually fails as WoW has already captured that market, and many people who aren't tied into WoW are just tired of the general formula present there. Without innovation, the games just stand no chance.

-Being too niche. Being niche is a good thing, the only surviving MMOs have their own niches, but picking the wrong niche, or being too niche, is a surefire way for an MMO to die. Picking a niche guarantees you some level of audience, provided your game is actually well made, and the innovation outside of WoWs formula means you can bring in people who aren't tied to WoW, or who get tired of it. The problem arises when this audience isn't enough to sustain your game though. MMOs are ungodly expensive to create and run. If you only have a small number of people playing it, you need to be making a fortune off them in order to keep afloat. One way to do this is with subscriptions, but with thousands of free games and tens or hundreds of free MMOs around, good luck getting an audience with that. The alternative is free to play, which turns into pay to win when you have a small audience, further alienating new players. This leads to a decline in the population the pay to winners get their enjoyment from, and thus leads to a decline of enjoyment of P2W players, and the eventual loss of them and death of the game. Even assuming you do manage to find a good niche, you're not likely to be seen as a wild success story. EvE Online has been going for decades and is slowly growing, but because it isn't huge like WoW, many simply haven't heard of it, and many others simply don't care.

-Not an MMO syndrome. Games decide to try and cut away from the problem of low playerbases by designing content for single player, rather than group activities. Put simply, this entirely misses the point of why people play MMOs rather than single player games, and usually leads to a bunch of people jumping on the likely F2P model for a short time, playing through the content once, then leaving. Such games don't have a lot of staying power.

-Bandwidth death. Do you want a massive multiplayer online shooter? Planetside 2 managed it but in general good fucking luck. The amount of information that needs to be constantly exchanged between the server and literally every single other player in the game is insane, and means that many such ideas run into incredible simplicity, or massive lag, because they simply can't keep up with the amount of Info Battlefield sometimes struggles to send between 64 players, but instead between 200+ players. Even Planetside cheats a bit with actually culling how much info is sent to you in massive combat situations, with only the closest x players appearing, and everyone else just being ignored in order to save bandwidth. Its a major problem in the innovation department for MMOs

Any successful MMO has to avoid these pitfalls. Add this high chance of failure and relatively limited design space to a $1-200 million dollar budget, and very few companies are game to actually take on the challenge of making a great MMO. Compare to MOBAs and Survival games that can easily be pushed out for under a million, and you've found yourself the problem. MMOs aren't dead, but presently it isn't worth trying to take on WoW. Its insanely expensive, is nowhere near guaranteed success, and you have limited options in how you can do so. Its much easier to make other games, and so that's what companies do. The day an Indie dev can make an MMO is the day the genre resurfaces into the public consciousness. That, or until WoW dies, and we have 5-10 years for people to miss the promise of the game, and want something old but new to replace it.

Shame I got on so late, hoping you're still replying.

As someone working on making a game more in reverse to you; go through board game test stage then program it to be an actual game, two bug questions:

Motivation. Even on pet projects it can be extremely hard to keep up motivation for several years, especially alone, and hitting writer's block or failing to come up with an appropriate idea has been the death of a lot of people's dreams over the hears. While there's a lot of general advice for dealing with this, how did you go about it?

Art. I can write, program and design if not brilliantly, at least well enough for my purposes. I have never managed to get a hang of making art for any game though. How did you get the artwork for your game done? Did you learn and do it yourself, and if so do you have any good advice? Or did you bring someone else on to help with that side of things, and if so, where do you find these people?

Thanks for any response, and good luck with the game. Its nice seeing one if these big, detailed projects actually getting completed, so my congratulations there as well ^{.^}