Is "MMO" Becoming a Dirty Word Among Game Developers?
For video games, it was once believed that MMO games would be the true wave of the future, spurred on by the original Everquest and the legendary World of Warcraft. However, as time went on and more MMOs were made, it seemed like more MMO games failed rather than succeeded. It got to the point where MMO-like games weren’t called MMOs anymore. Former Blizzard CCO Rob Pardo has noticed this tend and told Develop:
“What you’re starting to see now is people are creating persistent world games with lots of players. But different types of games and different types of gameplay, rather than trying to create the same type of game as World of Warcraft. If anything, I think people are even avoiding the term MMO. A really good example is Destiny. It clearly is an MMO. But they’re really trying to avoid calling it that, and obviously it is a very different type of game. But I think that’s a good example of how with MMOs, the term has been eliminated. But you kind of continue to see the influence in games that are persistent world games that have spawned out of that. It’s just people seem to avoid the term MMO now.”
It is an interesting development, and one that may be wise going forward as games become bigger and bigger as well as more interactive.