Thread 723218698

I feel like the main reason MMOs have died is because of the rise of social media and the Internet losing its novelty.
MMOs peaked in the 2000s. At that time, the Internet was too new for someone to grow up with it, the idea of playing and chatting with your friend through the computer was extremely new and novel. It was basically treated as a second life, you'd be playing WoW and see your friend come on, then you can chat and play with them, it was an entire social experience meeting new people and joining groups too.
With social media, it took away the game part and was just about being social, basically lowering the barrier to entry. Hell, there were so many MMOs that didn't have gameplay beyond chatting and hanging out with friends.
The reason why Roblox is so popular is because they were able to combine social media with an MMO. You don't even have to launch the game to do anything, you can just treat it like Facebook

I believe there is still appeal with regards to online persistent worlds.
The problem is less that social media became more prevalent and more that developers started removing the elements that made MMOs special which as you said, was the social aspect.

In EQ it was primarily forced grouping in an open world that is shared with everyone, with lots of downtown to socialize, simple enemy mechanics that made everyone feel comfortable grouping up, few quests so everyone wanted to do the same thing, and people you would come across and play with regularly.

Nowadays, the open world is just a nuisance you pass through once which you do solo because quests are the primary leveling method instead of farming hard mobs, before being teleported into your own little pocket dimension to do dungeons with people you will never see again, who dont speak unless its to whine about something, with retarded enemy mechanics where you need 10 mods and some meta setup so most people dont want to bother especially tanks, and with zero downtown to speak of because of muh hecking mythic + keys. The genre went from glorified chat room to some shitty e-sport checklist e-peen simulator.

>summarize this dogshit into one sentence:
MMOs died because social media replaced their social novelty, turning the unique online worlds of the 2000s into everyday, low-effort social platforms like Roblox.

No its because they don't have good gameplay. Make a mmo where I don't have to fetch quest for 200 hours all solo to unlock the fun mmo raid

Noooo shiiiit you don't saaaaaay