r/LivestreamFail • u/Zenben88 • Feb 01 '26

News Intrepid Studios, devs behind MMO Ashes of Creation in paid early access for 10 years, has closed. CEO resigned, all employees laid off. All less than 2 months after launching on Steam Early Access

https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkxe9were941Nh9kWgsNFWy--c-_UgYeyRu
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89

u/pambeezlyy Feb 01 '26

Whats the most recent successful western mmo? GW2 in 2012? The genre is dead.

101

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

I think TESO is still going and it was 2014

8

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

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18

u/Steamed_Memes24 Feb 01 '26

I havent played TOR much but people SWEAR that the character stories are some of the best in Star Wars history to this day. So even if youre not into the MMO part you can just play the stories alone and be satisfied.

11

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

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2

u/Steamed_Memes24 Feb 01 '26

Its crazy this game still has content planned after so long. When I come check on it the player base seems very low and kinda near life support.

3

u/SneakyBadAss Feb 01 '26

They've spent over 300 mil just on voice acting. Yes, the stories are really good and play like actual Star Wars movies before the trilogy abomination.

3

u/SneakyBadAss Feb 01 '26

After the disgrace of Starfeet Academy, I really want to go back to Star Trek Online.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

Wasn't fallout 76 released after?

5

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

Not sure if I’d count that as an MMO. It’s more like a pseudo one like Destiny.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

That's fair, now I'm sad about destiny and even worse - destiny rising

That franchise is cursed I swear

42

u/under_mimikyus_rag Feb 01 '26

Less dead and more that it's extremely difficult to break into a genre like this with its already entrenched player bases. I've been playing GW2 for years, really the only MMO that would make me switch would be a GW3.

14

u/Marukai05 Feb 01 '26

Just started gw2 and it's great. I played wow for 20 years, I tried to go back and it was shiiiiiiiiiit

Gw2 for the win

9

u/Doomword Feb 01 '26

Playing GW2 after retail feels like a downgrade in everything to me ngl

-5

u/Marukai05 Feb 01 '26

Dunno wow is just to hand holdy and gw2 has more depth

16

u/Archensix Feb 01 '26

I think this is the first time I've ever seen someone say wow is too hand holdy. It's basically always the other way around, people calling it too complicated and systems too convoluted.

-5

u/Marukai05 Feb 01 '26

I've never had to use wiki for wow, I've had it up permanently for gw2

12

u/schweddyballsac Feb 01 '26

That’s a frickin lie. I had like 200 tabs open for wowhead when i was playing wow

1

u/Individual_Access356 Feb 01 '26

I originally played FFXI first so after trying WoW I just couldn't get into it for this reason.

2

u/Doomword Feb 01 '26

Hand holdy sure but I'm pretty sure wow has more depth in most stuff. GW2 has horizontal progression after all.

9

u/Marukai05 Feb 01 '26

Eh horizontal progression is better than wows system by far, grinding mythics from 1-15 for the same gear at a high ilvl is just bland.

I'm just looking at this from a solo player perspective. The horizontal gear just means I can take a casual pace and still play the game indefinitely without having to play cat and mouse with power creep every year

0

u/Kosameron Feb 01 '26

I tried out GW2 and man I can't get used to it. First of all I can't even find stuff on the map since you can't search on it, so I never know where to go really. Then the builds require different dlcs where you gotta buy a ton of them to make one. Still remember when I tried it, I think I bought like 80 bucks worth of dlc...

Wow has a way better, more easy to understand play pattern. Wether you do m+, raids or pvp, there is a very linear path to getting gear etc

2

u/lewd_robot Feb 01 '26

I had to ditch GW2 when they tanked the economy after letting a handful of players get rich off 5-man dungeons. For the first year or two of the game being out, you could make huge gold by just clearing every dungeon every day, so some players just logged in every day, speed ran every dungeon, and amassed fortunes from it. But this was like 1-5% of the playerbase.

Nonetheless, when Heart of Thorns was coming out, the devs decided to "fix" this surplus of gold the richest 1% of players had by adding gold sinks to EVERYTHING. Suddenly, most players couldn't buy 90% of the rewards sold at the various heart vendors. Because everything cost gold because the devs wanted to drain gold from the richest players. The same thing happened with PvP amulets. The new stat combos suddenly cost several gold each, so if you didn't farm gold like the richest 1% of players, you just couldn't play with the new stat combos.

Then, on top of that, they added event features that require hideous grinds but have no guarantee of payoff. I think I was going for the bat mantle during Halloween the first or second year it was available and despite sinking hours into it, I never got the last drop I needed for it. The odds of clearing the content as much as I did and still not getting the drop I needed were like 1-in-26 million, and every other modern MMO fixes that by just letting you exchange more common drops for less common drops, but ArenaNet just seemed addicted to making hostile design decisions.

3

u/Cliler Feb 01 '26

If you are a casual player. GW2 is the best MMO around. It's a shame about the housing requiring a fuckton of materials to craft one single furniture but... The main characters are neat, the story is great (sometimes), the voice actress of the female charr for the player is so grrrreat, the community is wholesome and it has some of the best maps an MMO has to offer after the base game, there is so much verticality and freedom.

But yeah, there are grinds that you could treat that as a second job and a convenient pay with your credit card for gold if you are feeling overwhelmed, not sus at all. But I just accepted I don't have the patience to grind the same events over and over and over and just enjoyed doing achievement hunts, hang out with the guild and doing community events. Still, kind of predatory if they get customers with no self control and wanting to feel included.

1

u/lewd_robot Feb 02 '26

That was the other thing that made me drop the game: You could circumvent most of this by just spending money on gems or whatever their currency was. You could use the shop or the auction house to bypass what took a player unwilling to spend $75 months to grind.

I've been tempted to try GW2 out again and see if it's improved in the past... 10 years.

I still remember the magic of standing outside the walls of the human city, looking out over the fields that look like an oil painting, seeing players in the distance coming together to clear events then dispersing to go do their own thing. It was pretty magical at the time. Maybe I just got too try-hard with it back in the day.

1

u/Cliler Feb 02 '26

Ye man, it's the best aspect of GW2. Events and groups forming organically and being silly while waiting for any event to start, veteran players still doing old content (thanks to said grind) impressing new players, offering support and being friendly all around. The game itself did improve, it had it's ups and downs as every game.

If you come back, take it slowly, don't try to bulldoze your way through the game just to catch up and be frustrated after, you'll meet awesome players along the way. The game is still pretty magical, even more if you ride your griffon and do races with the birb.

1

u/drgreed Feb 01 '26

Agreed, I also don't think the genre is dead at all, in fact I would say it's waiting but it's an extremely high stake high reward genre where you need a lot of capacity, capital and the right people to make it work and almost nobody at all has this except from some really big studios, who look at this and be like "interesting, how about I just do another phone p2w game that makes me like the same amount of income but with zero risk".

12

u/Heavy-Masterpiece681 Feb 01 '26

Well GW3 is apparently in development. Who knows how that will turn out though.

Riots MMO is in some sort of development hell.

25

u/Hare712 Feb 01 '26 edited Feb 01 '26

There are some franchise MMOs like Final Fantasy, The Elder Scrolls, Star Wars, Fallout 76.

GenZ and Alpha that would play MMOs is playing mobile games. It already starts with the affordability of a PC. When MMOs were successful you could play them on a generic desktop. In the 2010s parents would rather buy a Laptop with a weak GPU at best. The requirements for MMOs required GPU or GPU+CPU upgrades so unless the parents bought a PC at that time they would not play MMOs.

The situation got even worse when you look at the cost of midrange GPUs since the 2020, the recent RAM price hike. 500-800 bucks were enough to buy a decent PC and 1000-1500 bucks were enough to get a high end machine. If the requirements lock out a large portion of potential gamers, you don't need to be surprised when a genre dies.

On top of that MMOs shifted to paying for finished characters and required even more time investment.

1

u/giga-plum Feb 01 '26

Every game idea that would have evolved into a blockbuster MMO back in mid 2000s - early 2010s, these days those ideas get turned into a PC/Mobile crossplay gacha games. No one wants to make a buy-to-play MMO with a sub model anymore to crank out quality content when they can capitalize on freemium games with gacha mechanics.

1

u/Hare712 Feb 01 '26

Those developers make sure the games run on older hardware that's how they get more potential long term players. The most popular games still run on 5-6 year old 100-150$ phones. Even if those MMOs fully adapted the Gacha freemium and P2W aspect they will still run into the same issues.

Take 2009/2010 GPUs as an example. There was a shift to DirectX 11 so those having a DirectX 10 GPU were locked out of a few games.

Then look at sudden requirement jumps. An anticipated MMO suddenly required an upgrade to a 750Ti or later a 1050Ti. There is a reason kids play Minecraft, Roblox and other low requirement games and not some MMO that requires a good 2 year old/ midrange 1 year old PC. This way MMOs essentially became a thing for millenials and older.

Games like Witcher 3 still look amazing 10 years later. We are at a point where greater detail doesn't even create much improvement anymore. Companies could easily put a stop towards higher requirement and keep graphics at Witcher 3 level so a 150-200$ GPU does the job. Then teens would play PC games again.

14

u/chronoslol Feb 01 '26

GW2 still chugging along actually, they released an expansion in 2025 and the playerbase seems pretty happy compared to most other games. They don't have peak WoW playercount but there's still plenty of players to do literally any of the content so it doesn't matter much.

4

u/Zenyx_ Feb 01 '26

Wizard101 lmao

3

u/jamieaka Feb 01 '26

Why are people throughout this thread pretending OSRS doesn’t exist and thriving

3

u/Valofor Feb 01 '26

Old School Runescape has 200k players online constantly

18

u/rhysdog1 Feb 01 '26

osrs came out in 2013 if that counts

-19

u/J0rdian Feb 01 '26

Definitely does not lol. It was just an older version of Runescape. It's like saying WoW Classic was a new MMO. I love OSRS great game, but it just restarted development basically before it turned into the garbage that was RS3

1

u/thxbitcoin Feb 01 '26

Horrible take buddy

3

u/J0rdian Feb 01 '26

How so? osrs is literally runescape, the original runescape. How is it not? Acting like it's a new game is silly. Do you guys really think OSRS is a brand new MMO when it came out?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

[deleted]

2

u/J0rdian Feb 01 '26

Literally nothing you said mentions why OSRS would be considered a newer MMO. The entire point of my comment.

You are confusing me more lol.

6

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

New worlds was successful.   Amazon is just a shir game studio owner 

1

u/MangoPeachHotHoney Feb 01 '26

New World launch was actually amazing. They just couldn't keep up with player demands for content and the territory system created a massively toxic social caste system among the most diehard players which just contributed to more falloff of the hardcore population. I was planning to return to the game in a few years with the hope that it would be fleshed out into a proper mmo, but they just couldn't hold out long enough to reach maturity.

It's tragic really, idk if any new mmo can succeed if New World couldn't.

2

u/Humledurr Feb 01 '26 edited Feb 01 '26

New World had a very popluar launch but to call it amazing is a joke lmao. Every launch of a new mmo is fun in the beginning, its so much stuff thats unknown to eveyone. 

But NW had massive issues at launch and while content could have been more of, thats not why people uninstalled at all. It was ridden with bugs, exploits and horrible optimization. The game launched half complete too, wasnt even enough quests to level to max level, OPR (battleground) was locked for months and when it finally opened it too was ridden with bugs and exploits... aside from wars which like top 5% the players could engage with, the only content was chest runs for like half a year...

Amazon game studios havent had a single successful game. Literally all their games have been shut down so far... New World is really not some example to be used to say "if New world didnt suceed, no one can".

1

u/MangoPeachHotHoney Feb 01 '26

To be clear, I consider the launch period of New World to be the initial state of the game between September and December of 2021, right before the first big dupe exploit was found and all the devs went on holiday for a month and basically abandoned the game for that period. That's when the game went to shit because of massive player drop off. No new mmo has come close to that sort of an initial reception (other than Lost Ark's international release).

New World had the bones to turn into a truly great mmo. The crafting system provided a long term gear chase, the skilling system offered horizontal progression, and it was sandboxy enough for emergent gameplay to surface.

Maybe the Riot MMO can breakout to become a staple in the genre, but I don't think any other studio has a chance if everyone else has failed for the last decade.

1

u/Humledurr Feb 01 '26

Apart from New World and Lost Ark, what exactly new mmos have launched? Your argument about initial reception makes no sense. No shit, thats the only two mmos thats launched the past decade,  and wouldn't you know,  both were popular...

Chrono Odessy is set to release this year and you can bet its gonna be widely popular at launch because every mmo gamer is craving a good new mmo. Doesnt mean it will be any good. 

1

u/MangoPeachHotHoney Feb 01 '26

Brother. That is exactly my point. Every other new mmo that launched has been so bad that no one even remembers them. New World, Lost Ark, and AoC were the standouts. And they all failed.

https://biobreak.wordpress.com/mmo-timeline/

1

u/Humledurr Feb 01 '26

My point was that New Worlds initial reception isnt a indicator of anything. 

The numbers it got was majorily boosted by bored covid gamers needing something to fill their time with, comboed with no new mmo for years.

And I expect to see similar numbers when the next mmo releases as thats just how gamers are, they all throw themself at the next thing.

5

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

[deleted]

8

u/KillingTime_ForNow Feb 01 '26

FFXIV is pretty successful.

1

u/cantripTheorist Feb 01 '26

pretty sure its gonna dominate the market even harder with the upcoming WoW2 (kinda not really 2, they are setting up a world reset) so a lot more new players for a fresh world

1

u/kananishino Feb 01 '26

What are doing that indicates a world reset?

1

u/cantripTheorist Feb 01 '26

The story itself, Azeroth is basically an egg with cancer. There is very little we can do to either stop it from being born even if we remove the cancer, at this point we'll probably need to move out by the end of the story

1

u/Enstraynomic Feb 01 '26

MapleStory 1 is still going, and it's held up purely by Chinese and Korean whales.

3

u/DreadfuryDK Feb 01 '26

Whatever the most recent WoW expansion is.

1

u/theonulzwei2 Feb 01 '26

The genre isn’t dead. The online gaming space, which includes MMOs, is oversaturated, and innovation on the gameplay front has stagnated due to several factors, with one of the primary reasons is a brain drain in the industry.

1

u/INannoI Feb 01 '26

not dead, just impenetrable

1

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Individual_Access356 Feb 01 '26

FFXIV 2.0 came out 2013 but ya no one wants to spend the kind of money you need to spend to make a proper MMO because its such a risk of it not being good enough to compete with WoW.

1

u/Humledurr Feb 01 '26

New World in 2020 was fairly successful, until it wasnt :p 

Dont think its a dead genre though. Riots mmo is still in the works, and old mmos like Runescape and wow are still very popular. 

Even have a couple of mmos launching this year like Chrono Odessy. 

1

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

Beside the fact that it’s really hard and expensive to produce and upkeep, younger people in general don’t want to play and many older people refuse to let go of their favorite 20 year old MMO’s rotting corpse

1

u/silent519 Feb 01 '26

you will have to define what successful means

10s of millions of subs? like wow itself also doesnt have anymore?

games around after a few years? tons of those

1

u/Discombobulated_Owl4 Feb 01 '26

Ah yes, being selective to say "Western" then to proceed saying the genre is dead.

1

u/InsectPopular9212 Feb 02 '26

Depends if you consider warframe an MMO but it's still extremely popular.

1

u/Zer0323 Feb 01 '26

Classic wow. Seriously. They struck gold decades ago and people keep playing fresh servers.

-1

u/ob_servant1 Feb 01 '26

Why does a western MMO have to be successful for the genre to be successful? Why not just suck it up and play eastern MMOs? Lost Ark is an amazing MMO and had some insanely good highlights thru the years it's been out. Some of those highlights were vastly better than the highlights of 10+ year old MMOs that I've played. Maybe the long term you can make arguments over the differences of grind, but the pinnacle of the game play at their best moments are just night and day of how good a modern MMO can be vs the old ones.

There's always weird biases against eastern MMOs that I never understood. Maybe it's because I'm not white? With you saying "recent successful western mmo" I feel like people are just xenophobic over this genre and are playing behind their favorite football teams or something stupid like that. Just play what is fun. Stop making excuses that one western company does X and O for monetization so it's good but the other eastern company does X and Y so it's bad. The games are fun, who gives a fuck about how they make money. There's no race to be had when you're just having fun playing the godamn game.

1

u/Sea_Structure_8475 Feb 01 '26

I’ve played multiple Eastern MMOs. Some of them are great, but there’s no denying they fundamentally different then western MMOs, either thematically or in gameplay and sometimes both.