If you had asked me in 2020 what the MMO genre would look like in 2025, I’m not sure how I would’ve answered. It was 2020, first all, which was a dumpster fire for so many other reasons, but it was also a time when online games were booming, even if they were being built remotely. Everyone was talking up the social side of games as something to do while working and learning from home or isolating to avoid the pandemic. And of course, companies were absolutely pouring all that newly cheap borrowable money into the industry, spinning up new studios and announcing new games left and right.
We’re on the other side of all that now, of course, as money stopped being cheap and bills came due. Some of those games launched, but many more never got off the ground, with whole studios and thousands of trained devs flushed down the drain. And I’m not sure we really saw the current state of MMOs coming.
That doesn’t mean we can’t try again. From our vantage here as we near the middle of 2025, let’s try to look five years into the future. What will the MMORPG genre look like in 2030? Which games will still be on top? Which games will have sunk into obscurity or capsized? And what will we never see coming?
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog): I think we’ve spent the last decade watching the broader industry grapple with how to make longer-term money from games that are growing increasingly expensive to make, lurching back and forth between trying to monetize/support GAAS and trying to make quick money from exploiting cheap things like mobile/lockboxes. The global economy is a wildcard too as the people steering right now have no idea what they’re doing, but the dumb shit they are managing to do will certainly have ripple effects that will still matter in five years.
All of this is to say that whatever is left standing in five years will still have those same choices before it, and I tend to think GAAS – including MMOs and multiplayer online games – will continue to win out. I’m not saying that we’ll stop getting blockbuster single-player games. But I do think that GTA6 and its inevitable multiplayer platform will drive along a lot of investment, and I think a lot of mid-budget companies will continue to rely on consistent revenues from mid-budget MMOs from the still-large population of people who like to play them. I don’t really expect the genre to shift that much. But I would certainly like to see some new wildcards appear.
Carlo Lacsina (@UltraMudkipEX, YouTube, Twitch): I cannot see any way the genre is going to move forward at the moment save for some really great executions using a combination of well-treaded design norms for MMOs. Just look at Throne & Liberty: It didn’t do anything new exactly, but the way it executed on well-trodden MMO norms made it a great game. That’s where I think we’ll be. I don’t even think we’ll get a new Final Fantasy MMO just yet. Feelsbadman. I was just talking to the team about how I want to play a new-new MMO that played like City of Heroes or Star Wars Galaxies, but from the sounds of it, that’s too much to ask.
Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog): Oh no. Predictions. Facetiousness aside, I am going to hedge on some semi-safer bets here: I expect that the major players like your FFXIVs and WoWs and GW2s will move on to their respective sequels (or announcements thereof) and that will be some of the bigger news out of the genre as a whole.
Past that, it all really feels like a game about trends and bandwagons. The PvPvE extraction bubble’s thin walls will probably pop well before five years’ time, leaving us to wait for the Next Big (Not Really) Thing to emerge.
As for the industry in general, I expect that the water table of investment capital will remain thin while the eventual pummeling and forcefeeding of AI tools in gamedev will finally have the foie gras effect – and come to a similarly grim end. That’s corps killing people and eating the plumpened liver, for the record.
Sam Kash (@[email protected]): In five years, I think the genre will be about the same as it is now. I think the majority of us who still love MMOs will continue to do so. I don’t see a huge wave of new blood coming into the genre, but most of us will still be around. And if we’re hanging on now, we still will in five years.
I suspect there will be something new that takes the place of Roblox or Fortnite. Someone’s probably working on it right now. But it won’t take over until 2030.
I think we’ll have closed the book on the Star Citizen chapter of our lives. It should be that the game came out and didn’t change everything, but hopefully it’ll be something real. Like really real.
I think there will be a sequel to Albion Online and that Dune Awakening will have shut down.
And I predict I’ll be playing a new game as my real home MMO. After 10 years, it’ll happen for me again.
Tyler Edwards (blog):Â To be honest, I don’t think things will look too radically different in five years. I think we’ll continue to see a contraction in the popularity of traditional MMORPGs, and especially the usage of the term “MMORPG,” but online gaming and MMO-adjacent titles will continue to thrive. I think the big names like WoW and FFXIV will still be doing fine, but we won’t see many new games in that mould.
I’m sure there will be some latest trend that churns out a dozen titles, with only one or two actually having lasting success. Based on nothing but stereotyping of The Youth, I’m gonna say it’ll be Micro-RPGs, with dungeon runs intended to be completed in under a minute. The TikTok of gaming! (This is not a serious prediction.)
Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!
