Bree at MassivelyOP asked today if MMO studios should prioritize younger or older players. The answer is super simple.
Bree based the question off a comment by MOP reader Shay who noted, in essence, that MMO studios are flocking toward the younger customer, leaving the adults, who presumably have more money to spend and the nostalgia to lean on, out in the cold.
The predominant MMOs in the USA are World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV Online, and Old School Runescape. These top MMOs, all three of them, are targeted toward older players.
WoW had a lot of goodwill from the Warcraft series and from MMO players looking for a less drab aesthetic when they started. FFXIV has decades of nostalgic lore to mine. OSR explicitly targets the people who played the original Runescape in the browser when they were kids.
All three, mining nostalgia while being the top MMOs. Right? It’s the older gamers that MMO studios should be targeting?
Of the three MMOs above, the only one I could find figures on that broke out MMO profits separately was Square-Enix’s, which had revenue of $77.6MM for the most recent quarter, or $310MM or so if multiplied out for the year. Not so bad, except…
Here’s the top grossing mobile games from the last year:
| Title | Revenue ($bn) |
| Honor of Kings | 1.65 |
| Genshin Impact | 1.25 |
| PUBG Mobile | 1.12 |
| Candy Crush Saga | 1.00 |
| Roblox | 0.82 |
| Coin Master | 0.76 |
| Pokemon Go | 0.64 |
| Monster Strike | 0.52 |
| Romance of Three Kingdoms | 0.50 |
| Uma Musume Pretty Derby | 0.49 |
From what I understand and my own personal experience, most people do their own solo activities in MMOs, occasionally grouping with others to do instances and then going their own ways. PUBG Mobile definitely qualifies. So does Pokemon GO! Roblox qualifies and doesn’t need any handwaving. I never have even heard of the last one, but the important fact here is that each one of these games beats the annual revenue for one of the most popular MMOs in the country today, and likely the other two as well.
A game that is by any definition an MMO as we play them today, Fortnite, made an astonishing $5.8 billion in 2021. The revenue from this kid-focused MMO is worth more than eighteen Final Fantasy XIVs.
Sorry, older folks. You may have all the jobs and money, but you aren’t as willing to give it to your MMO of choice as kids are to theirs.
Back in the day, the world was a different place. Everyone had a new MMO coming out. It was going to be the multiverse, for real, a perfect place where you could find more people with all your same interests right out there in a hundred variations.
All the “next WoW” money just dried up when it became clear that there was no “next WoW”, and only FFXIV beat those odds (and this after not quite getting there with FFXI Online, and failing their first try at the sequel).
Adults may have more money than kids, but they also have more bills, more responsibilities, more of everything except time. Adults are never going to compete with kids for disposable income and infinite free time, and it’s a losing game to even try.
I’m not a kid, and I’m glad that MMO studios pay adults any attention at all. They shouldn’t! But I’m glad they do.
But yeah. MMO studios maybe were once in it for the passion of gaming and the promise of a world of their own, free of the unpleasantness of real life. Now, it’s all about the money, and has been for awhile.
The MMO we’re all nostalgic for is gone, and we’re different now, too. It is what it is.
I’m not familiar with many of the mobile titles listed but how many of them are MMO or MMO-adjacent?
PUBG Mobile is, I assume (like the main game, 100 players start a round and is there a social space before a round begins?).
Genshin Impact is not (max of 4 players and no social spaces that I’ve ever encountered)
I just wonder if the take-away is that making MMOs in general is a bad business decision…
Pokemon GO is an MMO, and one of the few where I play with other people. Just this weekend I roamed around the local park with a bunch of people I did not yet know, raiding. It’s an MMO by any stretch of the imagination. Roblox is. I haven’t played PUBG Mobile, but if it is anything like Fortnite, then there’s a huge social component outside of the battle. If that isn’t true for PUBG, it is most definitely true for Fortnite.
I don’t think the lesson is “don’t make MMOs”, but rather, “don’t make people play for hundreds of hours until they can play the current content with other people”. Grinding is for single player RPGs and who has the patience for it these days? Especially when most MMOs cater to the level capped player?
Again, FFXIV is an exception here, but it is prevalent most everywhere else.
All the games you’re listing may be MMOs but most of them aren’t MMORPGs and it’s really only the latter that almost everyone who posts and comments in this part of the blogosphere cares about. I personally stopped using the term “MMO” several years ago. It’s way too broad to be of much use other than at a macro level. All it really means is games that are online and have a lot of people, which is too vague to be useful.
Leaving definitions aside, the age demographics are both opaque and intriguing. I saw something a few weeks ago that suggested something like 90% of all current WoW players were under 30. The implication was that they were mostly not adults. It completely flew in the face of my perception but it was quoted with some authority. I referred to it in a post but I forget which one. I had assumed it was mostly old people who remembered WoW from 2004 who were still soldiering on in Azeroth, like it is in EQ and EQ2 but apparently not. I assume those people are in Classic if they’re around at all, while all the kids play Retail.
My impression from playing all the newer MMORPGs I keep trying is that most of the people around me are probably school or college age. I can only base it on general chat or guild chat in the games where I join guilds. The general feel is *much* younger than it used to be when I played MMORPGs ten or fifteen years ago. Back then, it felt like few people were much under forty! The cash shops certainly seem to be geared towards an adolescent mindset, too, that’s for sure.
We had some criteria at Massively over what constituted an MMO. Persistent world was a big one. Some large number of simultaneous players. Players confined to just one server to benefit social ties, so you would find yourself grouping with the same people over and over.
Yeah, so, none of those are true anymore. In WoW and FFXIV, you largely stay in your hub city and wait for your instance to pop, when you are grouped with people you will never see again who can come from any of a number of servers, then the instance ends and you are back in the home city you rarely leave.
Given modern MMOs, we really have to take another look at all those games we claim AREN’T MMOs, and see if they really are essentially the same?
I’m not calling all the mobile games listed MMOs, though I feel battle royale games are topologically identical to most players lived experience of MMOs in the modern era.