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Comment by cdmoyer | Hacker News Reader

I really enjoyed this article, but the interesting thing to me is the need to rationalize why things like MMOs fade away. It seems like they have a natural life cycle. This guy didn't bring Star Wars Galaxies down. The developers adding New Game Experience (NGE) or the Combat Update (CU) didn't destroy the game. The world went on.

The game was released in 2001. In 2003 it had 400,000 subscribers. They released the controversial NGE/CU changes in 2005. It wasn't until 2009 that they shut down about half the servers. And they didn't shut down the game until a new Star Wars MMO was imminent.*

I can't image that most of the market for a Star Wars MMO hadn't tried it, maybe played it quite a bit, and then moved on in the space of 10 years. I understand the desire for things to last forever, but I don't know that most things will.

* Numbers to be taken with a grain of salt, they were culled from wikipedia.

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Not all MMOs fade away. WoW still has over ten million subscribers and doesn't seem to be fading at all. And I'm not surprised changes they made in 2005 took so long to kill SWG. People who have put literally years into a game are emotionally invested and have online relationships they don't want to abandon, at least not casually.

What actually kills a game is the lack of new serious players to balance out the slow attrition of the veterans. The temptation for companies running these games is to make them more "accessible" to more casual gamers. But there's a fine line between "accessible" and "not addictive enough to flip people into paying customers".

SW was a case study of what never to do in an MMO. Its pretty much necessary knowledge when designing a game of the type.

Yeah, he seems to forget that it's just a game, and after a while people want to play new games. Games, by their very nature, appeal partly for the novelty (who wants to play a game if all the challenge is gone?) which means that when the novelty wears off, people will go elsewhere. Nothing wrong with that. It's like thinking a movie is leaving the theater because the popcorn is getting stale.

I'm not sure that is inherent to games. Many people devote a lifetime to mastering games like Chess or Go.

Its a little more true of video games, but even there the lifetimes can be quite long. The original StarCraft was relased in 98 and is still being actively played even with StarCraft II out.

Of course, the thing all these examples have in common is competition with other players, but that is true in all MMOs as well.

That's true, but I still feel like the nature of MMOs encourage the "novelty factor", even if it's longer than many video games. Chess, Go, Starcraft, Sim City and other timeless games share the characteristic of being different and continually challenging. Most MMOs have a tendency to get repetitive. Sure, you can go on raids, trade, etc, but there's not the continually evolving strategy and new challenge of a different style of play, new sequences, etc. The games engine simply isn't that rich, it's underlying structure is still limited.

Not all MMOs die off so quickly, so I would attribute developer carelessness as contributing to a game's decline.

Take Gemstone, it's still around after 24 years and still earning money. http://www.play.net/gs4/

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