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We judge our favorite MMORPG heavily off the emotional experiences we had within it, and we judge newer games off the mechanical experiences we had within them.
The MMO genre is designed to keep players.
The MMO genre is an oligopoly with a few legacy games like WoW, FF14, ESO, having a stranglehold on the playerbase due to entrenched network effects and switching costs. There is little competition, and even the competition themselves consist of players switching from one oligopolistic firm to another.
Single player, non live-service games are designed to be fun, since their sales depend on the quality of the game. MMOs are designed to trap you within its network. As Josh Strife Hayes says, sometimes it even breeds a parasocial behavior in its players where its players treat the game as their personal identity.
What is ultimately so ironic is that we aren't getting better games in the MMO genre because ultimately the consumers have a preference for those networks. They want a second life. They want to treat the game as a social hub over making friends IRL. That's what creates this non-competitive oligopolistic equilibrium, and why these games don't care about innovating. They don't need to. They have trapped you here since you want to escape into a second life. They have found a group of players who are very easily exploited and are now defaulting to rent-seeking behavior. They have breeded a codependent, parasocial relationship with its customer base, which is the ultimate dream of every billion dollar company.
FF14 will never have the best gameplay CBU3 can pump out. It will never have the best story that its writers can write. It will never have the best, innovative content that its designers can make. Because its core playerbase will never quit no matter how bad this game gets. What is sad is that this also means the entire MMO genre will never allow for an innovative game to succeed because the playerbase want comfort over novel experiences, over quality gameplay, and over thought-provoking stories.
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