The Business: The MMO Business Has To Adapt To Survive, And Some Already Have

Josh Strfe Hayes suffers so you don't have to. This is his video on Lord of the Rings Online.

TLDR: It's better than he expected, and likely the best LOTR videogame out there.

What I am seeing with commentors and developers--the better ones, anyway--accepting that the MMORPG business has to accept that the past is gone, that new genres arose that better satisfy certain segments that fell away, and therefore what must happen is to make a virtue of necessity and incrementally change the games to deal with reality.

Take a look at what Josh liked about LOTRO. Its single-player experience was one he liked, albeit with caveats. He didn't play long enough to do multiplayer content, so that's still unknown, but this is indicative of a larger trend.

On the dev side, we have FF14's new patch turning a huge amount of the base game into something you can do solo- including instanced dungeons. This is the start of a long-term project to make the entire game into something you can play as if it were any other title in the franchise, titles that (barring 11) are stand-alone single-player games. Feedback to date has been positive; those who truly do not want to deal with people are increasingly able to disregard them entirely, play until they're satisfied, and go away until there's more.

Unlike Blizzard, Square-Enix is fine with players coming and going because the latter company isn't so focused on quarterly reports and similar short-term thinking at the cost of long-term, year-on-year retention of existing audiences while attracting and recruiting new ones. Not everyone likes to race chocobos, go fishing, or slam their heads against the wall on one of the most difficult encounters in the game.

The MMO developers and publishers need to accept this. They have to make the cyclical nature of MMO player attention an ally, and the sooner the first big player does this the better everyone will be due to witnessing the impact and wanting to exploit it themselves. You can do it wrong, as all Western MMOs have done so far, but you can also do it right; 14's approach so far has worked, with no timegating and cursory bitchwork to provide narrative cover for the activities.

There needs to be more information gathered, analyzed, and publized before a truly useful solution can be implemented; at this time, actors are iterating around the edges because that is all they can really do to address the matter, hoping that the tinkering does more good than harm. 14 has hit this so far, but there's a lot going into that success which does not transfer to other MMOs. Until solid data applicable across the field is made available, this is as good as it gets.