The Business: Look Ye Upon The Ghost of MMOs Past And Rejoice For Their Demise

No Gab today, so here's Josh Strife Hayes talking about another example of terrible RPG design in the MMO space.

If you want to hurt yourself, Steam has you covered.

It's not surprising that this game isn't tearing up the charts. It's got the presentation of Daggerfall and the grind of a Korean MMO, neither of which is appealing to the Normies that you have to attract and retain to make even Free To Play games viable commercial endeavors. You can tell from this video alone that it survives solely off a handful of hapless whales that haven't yet figured out that they don't have the mass of Normies to flex upon to make their habit worthwhile.

This was acceptable 25-30 years ago. This was tolerable 20 years ago. It is neither now, and I can summarize why thusly: Bitchwork.

There is way too much bitchwork going on here, and none of it is transparent. Normies are likely going to quit within their first 30 minutes of playing this game due to how much of a pain in the ass it is to complete the gameplay loops that it offers. When folks talk about how Everquest and later World of Warcraft revolutionized this market niche, this is the competition they were up again and have all but wiped out by about 2010; titles like this persist only because they are sufficiently cheap to keep running if they have enough whales, and they don't need many to have that revenue.