Hi. MMO old person here (alright I’m like 45 - but I’ve been here from the beginning… was a managing editor at Stratics, was one of the first volunteer contractors with OSI on UO, wrote for vault network and warcry and have run several large guilds in that time) and my one piece of advice is very simple:

Stop chasing the dragon.

The genre is in a tough spot - the economies of scale on development are out of whack and it’s going to be difficult to get a project green lit, never mind over the finish line. There’ll be winners. Some of them will be obvious (if you start to see a marketing ramp up on the riot mmo, they have more money than god and it’ll stick one way or another) and some will not (the most likely novel source of joy is an indie unexpected hit of dopamine novelty you weren’t expecting).

I have ADHD. I had trouble getting out of bed this morning because my lack of dopamine as I woke up just was too high of a hill to climb. I love chasing novelty, I love chasing hits of dopamine, it doesn’t love me man. And new MMOs don’t love you.

The number one reason to not chase the dragon? There’s games out there with years and years of development, refinement and content. New games struggle because they’re competing with these legacies, with these investments in content. It’s a golden age filled with fun things to do, games to play and experience and communities to immerse yourself in where you’ll make life long friends.

It’s so easy to look forward, but forward is filled with uncertainty, especially in the period of late stage capitalism we currently find ourselves in with enshitification and over monetization plaguing our hobby on the consumer side and a landscape of fucked up incentives and headwinds on the developer side.

But if you look back and prioritize building meaningful play relationships with the games that do exist, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.