Isoke posted:
Sometimes I think gamers have more fun posting "OMG THE GAME IS DYING" than they do actually playing
A strong free trial game is pretty much what any company has to do these days in order to attract new players, and anyone who's been following gaming in general on more than a very casual basis has seen this trend settling firmly into place.
The MMO landscape is changing, but it's like turning a big ship around. The change is so incremental (at least in my opinion) that you almost can't see it. But it's happening. Smart companies will adjust to those changes. Blizzard is smart, even though I may not personally care for some of what they're doing.
I dunno. Maybe I'm crazy, but it just feels to me like MMOs are on the cusp of a change, and until that change can manifest through a creative breakthrough or by happy accident, those of us who still enjoy gaming are expecting less, finding other stuff to do, and gaming with a different mindset when we do game. Or we're posting "OMG THE GAME IS DYING" comments whenever a company does anything focused on promotion or on attracting new players =P
I suppose there's always the chance that the MMO industry will completely collapse into a black hole of mediocre products that all have basically the same grind, but games are just too expensive to produce to allow that trend to continue. The same old grind won't hold enough customers to make the huge investments reasonable. Something's got to give, and I don't see the industry giving up and turning its back entirely on the basic concept of MMOs. The genre still holds incredible potential. It just hasn't been tapped yet.
That was the thought behind my guildmate's comment... concern for direction of the genre overall. NOT: the GAME is dying, but the SUBSCRIPTION Model is.... and WoW being the last of the big ones to head in the direction of f2p.
With the cost of production these days, and a lack of discretionary VC funds, it's going to be harder to bring new smaller and potentially ground-breaking games to market and sustain them. Watching what's happening with MMO's is similar to watching the changes in the car industry in the 70s. But that's a topic for another thread.
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There are endless possibilities ..and what we THINK is "phase 1" ..could just be a boring endless free trial. 
