Do you think the genre is held back by the economics of the genre?
I might be extra salty about winterberries, tears of guthix (honestly the least guilty), and general psychological warfare to manipulate engagement in MMORPGs, but I’m curious if the community sees these things as a means to an end for the insane funding being dumped into new games.
I really like efficiency and optimization so logging in and feeling, even for a second, a pressure to drop what I’m doing or what I want to do to engage with X dailies/weeklies/limited event is painful. The engagement and greed is draining.
Pay for convenience, advantage, loot boxes, and straight up replacing player progression visuals with cash shop packs seems to be the normal. The fact that Gatcha game isn’t just a normalized term but becoming normalized for the genre.
Every game has massive art budgets for music, animation, modeling, and so much else that I don’t think MMORPG players even really care about that much. Personally, I’d give up a lot if it meant the company is actually able to offer the game without feeling the need to squeeze every dollar out of it.
I think OSRS is the most iconic and best and the reason is that their development team is small, costs are low, they don’t have engine overlords, and most attempts to do something greedy (which unfortunately STILL come up) are reeeeeee’d out of existence.
Conversely, it would take a team of absolute units with high paying day jobs, specialized knowledge, and a passion for solving this to do anything about it (shameless plug for ShadowDanceStudios and VestraCoda), but I really hope such a team would find success.
I’m curious what everyone else’s thoughts are!