I know this sounds like a doomer take but please, hear me out. I was speaking to some friends the other day going on about this and that within WoW, mostly going over the supposed negatives and why WoW isnt what it used to be and how they would make more money if they simply produced a good game.
i then had a thought, is it possible the mmo market simply doesnt have the capacity to return wow to its former glory days? Let’s say they actually do make wow exactly the same as it was before - the playerbase have either moved on, stopped playing games alltogether or maybe are happy somewhere else. And new mmo players are super rare since the younger generations simply arent interested in long grinds anymore (on average).
It is highly possible in my eyes that the market simply doesnt have the capabilities to bring wow back, regardless of what the developers do.
Well although still technically king of mmo’s we can’t know how the playercount is doing and from experience I would assume it t be stable but at a lower spot then previously seen.
Perhaps it is doing well and already on the rise again, but I wouldnt know how to moniter that
I think even making it “as good as before” wouldn’t help, classic didn’t attract that many new players(?), it’s just the genre that is slowly dying with its aging playerbase, it happened to RTS before mid 90 till early 00 it was the most popular genre in PC gaming, these days it’s pretty much dead.
Gaming trends change and they always target the teens/tween, and that demographic just doesn’t play MMOs anymore (which is why you have Blizzard desperately trying to get the BR crowd with Plunderstorm, Arena E-Sports etc.) simple as imho, maybe the genre gets popular again in the future who knows, but I doubt that will be WoW.
The genre is not bringing new players in and I don’t see it happening to be honest.
The gameplay is not something attracting for new players (consider that you enter a 20 years old game, with all its history and complexity, when you can just enjoy a straight forward FPS/ Moba or RPG).
The only way I see them going back up is to push on the Open world concept way more and change the game to become a 5 skills per class thing. And to be honest, I doubt they will ever go this way due to the risk involved.
Define good as before because there will be 100 million different answers.
Personally i think a lot of people do not understand that its not just the game that has changed they have changed themselves.
I for one enjoy gameplay of modern wow 1000% more than old “golden age” gameplay. I tried to go back and enjoy classic butthe gameplay for me atleast is just way too dated after 20 years of updates on modern wow and after playing other games that have way better gameplay than wow has ever had.
Only thing really that i miss about old wow is the questing and i do not mean the slow boring grind i mean more about how much more grounded everything was. If i could get that back with modern gameplay the game would be perfect to me.
Also MMOs are kind of withering away because kids just want instant gratification and have no interest grinding out crap in a game that was made years before they were even born hell most people who started this game do not want to do that anymore me included.
WoW is riding out into the sunset like all the other MMORPGs.
The genre is just reflective of a different time. Over the years it has evolved and spun off into new genres like Battle Royale, Open World Survival, and ARPGs. Even social media has eclipsed the social experience that MMORPGs initially cultivated.
But just as there is still people playing point and click adventure games, so will there also be people who continue to play MMORPGs. It’ll just be a niche genre for a niche audience, if it isn’t already.
As far as Blizzard goes, then they’ve spoken big words about the next decades of WoW and Warcraft, but I don’t really believe it. Sure, they’ll keep milking the cash cow as long as they can, but it’s hard not to to see that WoW and Warcraft are slowly fading into obscurity.
If there is a future for Blizzard, it’s something else than Orcs and Night Elves and Azeroth.
Why would you want an inferior game? Don’t get me wrong, it has some things that have gone down in quality but I’ll take the current game over any other version. It’s just that the genre isn’t super popular and wow is intimidating, players are falsely giving the game a bad reputation and you pay 13 a month which makes people think they’d pay more than they do for other games. (They often pay more for other games, especially microtransactions). Wow having a million subs or whatever was leaked months ago is extremely impressive and still #1 in the genre currently. Yes, you can improve the new player experience, make some things better, like levelling, which is suffering more and more every expansion. But it doesn’t change the reputation of the game and genre, the fact the game has 20 years of history and people asking themselves if it’s too late to start playing a game that is older than a big chunk of its playerbase.
When WoW was out I was 13 and even if we put the fact that I didn’t have the money aside I did not have interest in grinding either. I’d much rather play Sonic the Hedgehog games back then. I don’t think millennials were that different than current day teens.
When I started WoW in BFA I was actually pleasantly surprised that you never run out of quests. Do you know how bad it feels when you’ve completed all the quests available and have to do dailies or outright grind mobs to level up and unlock more quests? WoW’s leveling at least is much less grindy than other games I’ve tried before.
I always have the feeling that mmo fans are desperate for a new good MMO. But all the new ones are just so generic, they look all the same. I even bet that those who will maybe come in the future like Ashes of Creations, Quinfall, ArcheAge etc will fail or not being that popular like WoW or FF (before Dawntrail).
And of course many people are done with WoW/Blizz so they don’t come back.
WoW already kinda came back. Shadowlands was awful for the Game and Blizz saved it with Classic, since then it looks very healthy from a company view.
If we look at Twitch, since Classic, WoW is very often one of the top games there. But besides Dragonflight realease and the War Wihtin for maybe 2-3 weeks, ~85-90% of the viewer are just watching classic streams and not retail.
So i would say WoW is at a very good spot. But if i only look at retail it isn’t, atleast from a player pov.
The new player experience in retail is awful, probably the worst out of all mmos i played so far.
I think WoW is a fairly comfortable spot, especially for an MMORPG in 2025.
It won’t last forever (obviously), but barring external upheaval of some sort, I fully expect that we can still log in to our accounts and play eight years from now.
I understand what you mean, and I would say it is just the genre that is slowly aging with us as we go.
The way WoW was designed simply does not attract many people from other games, as people dont really have that incentive to play time-consuming and grindy games anymore.
People just want to spend the bare minimum and be done with it.
You can even see that in our community, with the toxicity rising more and more as time goes on.
Not to mention all the drama that happens in some cases.
WoW work go back to the olde days of 10 zones per expansion with various terrain types (Forests, Frozen Tundra, Mountains, Plains et al). It won’t go back to 12 Dungeons and 6 raids (with some single boss raids). It won’t go back to older reps with Dailies that you could farm in a few weeks.
They have a new model 4 zones, 8 Dungeons, 3 Raids. A x.0.5 patch with a little island and some grind (a ring or something). A x.0.7 patch with a few chapters of a story, a x.1 patch with a slightly bigger island and another grind.
There will be timed events and weekly quests to steer your engagment.
You know what you’re getting. They have a formula now. Not one I find particularly good but my wow days are numbered for other reasons so I’ll be retiring soon. I can at least be grateful to Bliz for making the game so much easier to walk away from than in the past.
I don’t think the genre is really dying. There’s just a lot more viable options on the market at the moment, so the potential target audience is more spread out.
Aside from WoW, there’s GW2, TESO and FFXIV which each have their own communities and a whole bunch of other options that are more niche.
The genre is also still incredibly popular over in Korea, China and Japan with new MMO’s coming out over there with greater frequency than they do here.
Well yeah they still exist, but it’s still nowhere near as popular as in the past, I mean compare the number of players in these titles (which are slowly dwindling anyway) combined to something like fortnite and the difference isn’t funny anymore.
Western studios think twice about investing millions/billions into an MMO these days, New World tried it and failed spectacularly, the sad truth is developing something like fortnite is way less expensive and more profitable.