The Weekly Raid: Should Old Games Die To Make Way For The New?
"Yea you old people got to go, cause I'm in charge l-o-l," said the edgy teenager while visiting the hospital. She was waxing about generational differences: evolving traditions, changes in culture, new rules of interaction. Doesn't the same happen in gaming?
Games release and they create new rules, new playstyles, new approaches, e.g. the explosion in MOBAs. The industry changes and the old are left behind. If no one got bored of Super Mario Bros. 2 why would Nintendo bother making Super Mario Bros. 3?
Old games continue to thrive, or at least developers refuse to shut them down. Look at Aeria Games. Twin Saga just released, yet the publisher continues to support Aura Kingdom, Eden Eternal, Shaiya, Echo of Soul, Dragomon Hunter, Ragnarok Online 2, Digimon Masters Online, and more.
The logic goes, if Aeria shut down some of their low population games, the playerbase would migrate to newer releases, bolstering the newer titles and breathing life into them, i.e. games with larger populations thrive longer.
On the other hand, maybe people that still play Shaiya only want to play Shaiya and wouldn't play any other game; they live for Shaiya.
Imagine if every MMORPG but one shut down. Would the majority of people migrate to the last standing game? What if the last MMORPG was MapleStory? What if it was League of Angels 2? It's a curious question.
Is it the genre players are addicted to or is it one specific game that follows the genre's rules?
Should old games die to make way for the new? Let us know in the comments below!
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From Mega Man II to Ape Escape, I've been playing games for as long as I can remember. I've spent months killing porings in Ragnarok Online and more recently lived a second life in Eve Online. I usually play as gUMBY, gUMBLEoni, or gUMBLes in-game.
