Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

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In a lot of ways, World of Wacraft survived because it perfected the genre, and in doing so, kind of killed it. Final Fantasy 14 is successful because it copied a lot of WoW's patterns.

Today, though, it's really hard to sell a game that requires such substantial amounts of time to progress. Lobby games, team shooters, battle royales are popular today because you can sign in, play, and be done in your time with no requirements or expectations. Also, trying to make a successful "live service" game (recurring revenue via subscriptions or microtransactions) is nigh impossible because you're fighting against the biggest hurdle of all: making a game good and interesting enough to convince entire friend groups to switch together.

It's no longer "hey this game looks cool lets give it a try" it's "why would I play that game when I've already got X hours in this and I play with my friends?"

Yet people put hundreds of hours into their favorite video games and story-based games are still doing really well.

WoW puts 95% of the game at max level requiring players to invest dozens of hours just for table stakes. A well designed MMO doesn't have to do that, but the game needs to have enough content to have a thriving midgame, which is something that runescape does really well, except RuneScape's issue is to get out of the midgame requires hundreds of hours of grinding to get out of the midgame.

I think the biggest difference between battle royals and team shooters with MMOs is the online shooters are funded mostly by aesthetic packs, and a new and old account have the same gear available to them, while MMOs allow older accounts to unlock better gear. Nothing is stopping you from playing with your friends, while you can still invest into a character.

The barrier to entry was the point, it's what created community. There is really no such thing as a durable community without entry and exit friction.

But games that rely on community are thus generally less scalable and profitable than games that don't. WoW was an aberration (partially because it had almost no competition at the time it was building its player base). It set profoundly unrealistic standards for the genre, and the gravity of community building in a contested space kind of killed off the rest of the genre because no one else was able to do it at 'WoW-scale', which was held up as the benchmark for what good looks like.

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