Online role games have been in the crisis since 2014. Before the drastic year, three to five new online role games came out of the west every year. Today, small MMORPGs that are financed through crowdfunding, and whose development often stands still for years, are still our greatest hope. But why is that? Why do MMORPGs seem to have lost their spell?
MMORPGS is not good. And that is so strange because it was the boom genre in the gaming in the 2000s. Even here in Germany.
The website “Buffed.de” was created by Computec extra to take the hype about World of Warcraft. In July 2007 it reached almost 80 million page views – mainly with the MMORPG WOW (via web.archive).
In January 2025, Buffed still reached around 4.1 million page views (via IVW). Today there are many more users on the Internet than 18 years ago.
This is nothing that could be stated in buffed. MMORPG pages are generally only a shadow of themselves, even in English-speaking countries. Some MMORPG pages have lost about 90 % of their readership in the past 10 years, many have closed.
Outlook for the MMORPG year 2025
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New MMORPGs still trigger a huge rush
The interest in new MMORPGs is still high. The few AAA MMORPGs that have been released since 2014 had a huge player storm on Steam. We see that at the 3 games that Amazon has released:
But the problem is clear: none of the games can last long and inspire his players. In any case, not as before, 20 years ago, when people played WoW and simply no longer belonged to, but for months and years nothing else did more than live their second life in Azeroth.
Games like Lost Ark or New World crashed tremendously after just a few months. The players were frustrated and scolded: once again, an MMORPG could not meet their high expectations.
How have MMORPGs lost their spell?
The Internet has become very good at solving MMORPGs
The big change that we experience today is related to how professionalized the Internet has become to analyze and dissolve new MMORPGs. And it is related to the fact that the social component in MMORPGs, the adhesive, was removed from the game.
In the past, MMORPGs were largely a black box that could only be experienced and deciphered in the game itself. Players did not get the idea of looking for information outside the game. They had all the search mechanisms to avoid supposed frustration that seems so normal to us today:
Did you want to know what was the best way to get experience points or get the equipment? Then you inevitably had to find an experienced player in the MMORPG who could explain that to you.
Or you even had to find it out through experimental and errors what went out that you ran into an even unknown zone, died there and recognized cleverly like a fox: “Oh, I’m probably still too weak for that.”
At the time, if you wanted to do more than just pulling the area alone, you had to look for a guild, build connections, to prove to be reliable and friendly so that others wanted to play with you.
Today, on the other hand, you can find out about forums or magazines via a MMORPG about YouTube or Twitch.
Long-term players were replaced by disposable companions from the group finder, by random acquaintances from a discord or in some MMORPGs even through NPCs that the game supplied so that you can save yourself the interaction with annoying other people.
For the release of a new MMORPG it has long since decrypted
A “exploration phase” of an MMORPG as a black box may still be available for a few pioneers who play on the test server or in a beta.
But to release a new MMORPG, it has long been clear what the optimal way is to reach the maximum level. Everyone can read what the perfect level path looks like, how jumping puzzles X or boss fight y and even the big secret, a hidden mount, is only secret for a few hours.
Since everyone has realized what kind of industry has become and that there are pages and people who live from it to dissolve and look after the game, there has been hardly a promising MMORPG that appears without the next webmaster its great chance Slide and create a fan side that already analyzes and brings the game in the beta. The big model used to be MMO champion and today it is WoWhead.
For the MMORPGs from Asia that appear here in the west, it is even worse:
And that’s not all: if you had to open up boss mechanics earlier, there have long been addicts in games like Wow today, who chew and roar the mechanics from the fire.
And the developers also have the trend: Instead of having to search for a group for an activity in the chat, an automatic group search is required today as a quality-of-life standard.
Ultimately, the players themselves are to blame for the fact that they can no longer play MMORPGs as long as before. Today it is possible to “optimize” an MMORPG – in the past people might have loved to do it, but there was simply no possibility.
If you wanted to play an MMORPG “optimal”, you had to invest an enormous amount of time and train yourself, search for the best people on the server and tap their knowledge, first get to the highest circles.
That was certainly elitist and much more like a life as a hobby and side employment, but it identified this MMORPG feeling that missed so many today: you were someone on a server, had developed something there.
The Internet that has learned how lucrative it is to help players optimally tackle and solve an MMORPG that has contributed to the longevity of the online role plays and that many are looking for the feeling of “earlier”.
MMORPGs are no longer up to date with their obligations
In addition, MMORPGs no longer fit our super-individualized time. If you explain to a 20-year-old today that it used to be quite normal to meet for 6:00 p.m. late, that’s difficult.
If you explain that it was part of fishing for hours because you had to brew bottles for the RAID and how important it was to farm repair costs and get optimal buff food, the 20-year-old will safely look at.
If you then start talking about DKP and that you had to save them to offer to a sword and that the Raids took hours and you had to ask for permission to go to the toilet, you finally feel like grandpa that tells of the war.
Hardcore MMORPGs as an incentive to play MMORPGs properly again
One way to find the players and developers to bring back the appeal from the past is to set the fault tolerance of an MMORPG to zero via “hardcore modes”. However, this does not happen in “New MMORPG”, but in the 20 years old MMORPGs from the past, which have already been solved.
WOW in Classic Hardcore mode is again as before, only that you are no longer allowed to make mistakes, so optimizing continues: MMO trends: Why every MMO is currently dying