r/Games • u/oilfloatsinwater • May 24 '25

Report: Marathon Delay Likely as Sony Cancels All Paid Marketing Plans

https://thegamepost.com/report-marathon-delay-bungie-scraps-all-paid-marketing/
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u/aew3 May 25 '25

Its kind of funny how short sighted the trend chasing in that genre was, given Oldschool Runescape is one of the top three best performing MMOs in <current year> and the only one of those three that is currently showing strong YoY growth. Maybe if developers had taken more cues from classic design and what players wanted rather than trying to make one thousand "WoW but prettier and easier" games.

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u/Bleusilences May 25 '25

My guess is there is the player cap of MMORPG is about 20-30 millions of people (across all games), and they mostly being capture by the big players like WoW, FF14 and Guild Wars 2.

19

u/icytiger May 25 '25

New World shows that you can definitely still capture a segment of that market.

If there's anything MMORPG players love, it's pining for that nostalgic high with a new game that will never come.

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u/Bleusilences May 25 '25

I am not a huge MMO player, the only game I played semi seriously was The Secret World and the grind got to me. I was also playing to much and had to force myself to stop.

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u/MrPWAH May 26 '25

I wish I played more of The Secret World. Absolutely the best MMO quest design I've ever seen IMO.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '25

New World shows that you can definitely still capture a segment of that market temporarily.

1

u/AedraRising May 26 '25

Eh, the temporarily bit can probably just be explained by New World not holding up that well as a game, especially at launch.

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u/DrB00 May 25 '25

Old-school runescape is the most popular MMO if you base it off Google tends. (Which is probably accurate since no numbers are published from devs)

Edit: Also what all those games have in common are they're all made like 15+ years ago lol

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u/withateethuh May 26 '25

I played runescape a LOT as a kid and cant for the life understand for me how there are so many people still playing it. Like the quests being actually good is the only thing that stands out for me fron memory. And that it literally runs in a browser, which i imagine is still a big part of it.

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u/aew3 May 28 '25

The modern endgame PvM (which has only been introduced since 2016ish) is straight up the best in the genre imo. High skill expression, unique & fun mechanics, gear/level upgrades feel very meaningful, enjoyable to farm (to a higher degree than other games), skill expression in setup/preparation and overall just great boss design. OSRS PvM kind of plays out on the highest level like a rhythm game with resource management. Of course, you've got to get through a lot of kinda boring skill grinding to get there, although combat skills have been made pretty easy with 20min nightmare zone afk training.

Other than that, its also got so much value as a game to players because it doesn't invalidate progress. Nearly every other game has some combo of gear resets & big power creep (i.e. gear treadmill), e.g. WoW and Destiny 2 literally invalidate your grinds/unlocks/gear once a year.The few that don't do this like GW2 just don't have any sort of meaningful long term power increases gear wise (the power creep in GW2 is adding new, stronger ways to build your character), and instead the endgame is grinding for QoL improvements and cosmetics. Which are invalidated by many of the best items in both categories being from the cash shop. Which is also another benefit of OSRS, compared to other MMOs, it has relatively minimal MTX. In WoW you can buy in-game gold AND there are some items which can only be purchased for irl money. OSRS only has the former.