Just Who Are the MMO Players, Anyway?

Ben Milton, of the YouTube Channel Questing Beast and the creator of the RPG Knave, had a video up a couple of days ago that got me to thinking.

It's about 21 minutes, and he does a great job
discussing this particular topic.

The big theme that he had in this video was that D&D is going to be the top dog in RPGs not because of a superior ruleset but because it is the game people think of first that satisfies what he calls Rule 1: "To play the game, you simply describe what your character is doing, and then that conversation, that description affects the game world."*

Ben references Mike Mearls, one of the major creators behind D&D 4e, and even provided a clip of a recent video Mike had released concerning why D&D 4e failed. What Mike discovered during playtesting for 4e was that people would have these character sheets full of powers, and they'd look down them and say "I swing my sword," instead of using said powers. This led Mike Mearls to the realization that the majority of D&D players aren't there for the ruleset, but for their friends and to have a good time.

While watching this video, I swear you could have swapped D&D for WoW and a lot of this stuff would still track.

There are the people who want complexity and all the crunch and huge rotations and mechanical difficulty out of their MMOs, and then there are the folks who are just there to chill, slay a few internet dragons, and enjoy the show. Those who are into min/maxing, utilizing all their abilities in interesting ways, are a minority of players but a majority of the crowd found on the company forums, on Reddit, and on the hardcore websites.

WoW will always be the number one MMO, and in general it remains so, because people will equate MMO = WoW in the same way RPG = D&D, and it satisfies that itch to allow you to pretty much go wherever you want to go in a massively multiplayer world that makes MMOs a distinct genre from other video games. You're not going to "beat" WoW by having superior raid fights or ability combos, but rather you get enough people who just want to chill with their friends to come along and hang out.

Now, this doesn't exactly map to WoW, because I believe the WoW Endgame playerbase comprises a larger portion of WoW players than the hardcore RPG crowd does to D&D, but that's also a function of WoW catering to that crowd as the more ephemeral casual crowd ebbs and flows over the course of an expansion. D&D itself was temporarily eclipsed by Pathfinder in the early 2010s because, well, RPG players wanted to keep playing D&D 3e and Pathfinder was essentially D&D 3e with some minor changes. Once Wizards of the Coast pivoted back to a more traditional design for D&D with 5e, they reclaimed their top spot and kept it as of date of this post. 

The video does strike me as having a salient point: don't shoot for the Moon, shoot for a niche. That is something that both tabletop RPG and video game designers can heed, particularly AAA designers who think that they'll make World of Warcraft amounts of money by creating their own WoW-killer. You're much better off carving off a niche and making a somewhat smaller amount of money. 

*From "It's time to face reality..." by Questing Beast, at the 6:18 mark.