Do you think about Mad World? I really don’t. It didn’t look particularly interesting to me before it came out, but let’s be real here, that was not helped substantially by the fact that it spent something like five years in development and re-development before it finally launched. And then it made it 15 months being online before shuttering altogether. It’s unlikely to be remembered for very long, save by those of us who have this as part of our jobs, and even we aren’t perfect recall engines.

Of course, it’s hardly alone in the realm of not really lighting people on fire. Dreamhaven and Fantastic Pixel Castle both appear to be having some funding issues with their development, with the former just apparently not selling enough titles and the latter maybe losing some of its primary funding. And I find myself thinking about Equinox: Homecoming, too. And the upcoming launch of Ship of Heroes. And weirdly, The Sims 4.

This is not a review of the Dreamhaven games that have come out, to be clear. All of them look fun and neat. However, two of them, Wildgate and Sunderfolk, are also games that are not just capable of being multiplayer experiences; they absolutely require it. You really cannot play them unless you have a group of people who are all there to play the game. In a way, they’re closer to board games in that regard, except they’re sold as video games because that’s what they actually are.

I get that. I think it’s a nice idea and a nice use of technology. But I also can’t help but think about the fact that there was a point when video games were designed with the expectation that these are things you play when sometimes you are not hanging out with your friends. That’s kind of the point! The nice thing about an RPG is that you do not need to have a GM ready to whip up an adventure and adjudicate the play; you can just sit down and start playing by your lonesome.

But that’s only some of the problem. At this point, MMORPGs (which are more popular than you might think) are no longer a new concept. And I think The Sims 4 actually provides an important distinction here as the game hits its 11th anniversary in a few days.

For most of the series history, The Sims got a new version every five or so years. This made a certain amount of sense. You would get a new version that could do fundamentally new things that the old one couldn’t, and so you sort of accepted that in the process you would buy all the expansion packs over again because there would be a pet expansion and a business expansion and so forth. It was predictable and functional.

However, The Sims 4 has been running now for much longer than that – more than twice as long, in fact. The official line, of course, is that it’d be unfair to ask people to re-buy all of the DLC they’ve bought over years for the game… a fact that dovetails nicely with the game having gotten far more DLC types and offerings than any prior version of the game (almost 100 now!), but that’s neither here nor there. I think part of the issue is also just that it’s hard to really do much more with the game beyond allowing seamless neighborhood sharing.

Why is this relevant? Well… it’s not exactly news that the big MMORPGs that are out now are all a bit long in the tooth. And yet these games kind of are the lifeblood of the industry in a lot of ways. You don’t need to build a game to be a World of Warcraft killer; you need your new MMORPG to stand up to at least four major titles and be better than all of them while also delivering a novel experience that is enhanced by being online all the time but also lets you play solo because some people genuinely prefer that but also encourages grouping.

That’s kind of a tall order. It’s an even taller order when the games you are competing with have more than a decade of development, dedicated players, and existing structures. We have passed out of the realm of having low-hanging fruit that’s easy to snap up for hungry developers, and I feel like there’s a certain problem you encounter when what you are selling is partly built on a fundamentally different landscape.

The reason Mad World stood out to me was that the game didn’t really have a chance. It barely got out over the finish line, and then it never really answered a gaping hole in the market. People didn’t need another loot-fest grindy ARPG in their lives, especially when the market had already provided plenty of other options. But by the time it was ready for release, there just wasn’t much to be done but release what it was and hope that it connected with players.

And it did not.

This is something that I’ve touched on before when talking about how authenticity alone isn’t really enough to lead to success. I have no doubt that Equinox Homecoming is an authentic product. I know with absolute certainty that Ship of Heroes is a labor of love. It’s very clear listening to Greg Street talk about his upcoming game that he is doing this from a place of passion. But it’s also very clear that some of this is coming from a desire to have that name be a mark of quality on a game, to associate it with past success.

And the fact of the matter is that the current world is not the one that used to be here. There are lots of people who have fond and positive memories of Greg Street connected to World of Warcraft, for example. But those memories aren’t actually about Street himself or even about WoW itself. It’s about a time and a game that existed at that time which was the product of a lot of people who all wanted to make a thing and worked together to bring it to a certain point.

You cannot pretend that all of those factors don’t matter. You can love a game and an idea passionately and really want it to exist, but you cannot pretend that you are not launching in an environment where the most popular online game already exists and it’s Epic Games making the most soulless cash-grab imaginable which does, in fact, grab truly enormous amounts of cash. You do not have one monolithic MMORPG to challenge but several, and we are past the point where a couple years of development time means going from isometric pixel graphics to 3-D graphics.

I don’t usually think about Mad World. But sometimes I do because I know that people really wanted it to be a thing, and I think about how little an impact it actually made because it launched into an environment that was not receptive to it and it crashed hard against those shoals. And I look at indie outfits putting out their own passion projects without anything approaching a compelling reason to play, and I understand why. I get what it means when development money is running out and you need to have something, anything in the hopes of getting traction.

And it breaks my heart.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.