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Moving into 2021, I was interested to see which MMORPGs are truly the most popular on the market. With the help of https://mmo-population.com
I compiled a list of the biggest MMOs leading into 2021 and gave my own reasoning as to why they are doing as well as they are. We will discuss their successes and failures of 2020 and guess at their plans moving into 2021.
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I used https://mmo-population.com/top/2021 to create this list.
^ Be sure to check out their site if you haven’t!
Top 5 MMORPGs in 2021:
1. WOW (WOW Classic)
2. FFXIV (Final Fantasy 14)
3. Old School RuneScape (OSRS) / RuneScape 3
4. The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO)
5. Black Desert Online (BDO)
6. Guild Wars 2 (GW2) — Honourable Mention
Now before we get into it, let me tell you where I am coming from. I have been playing MMORPGs for a while now. I played World of Warcraft (WOW) for the first time about halfway through Wrath of The Lich King and played until the end of Catacylsm. I then left WOW to go play games like Guild Wars 2 (GW2), Wildstar (RIP), and Black Desert Online (BDO). I’ve always paid attention to the new expansions WOW released but never felt very interested in returning to the game. Even during legion, when it looked like WOW had really turned the ship around (we’ll talk more about this in a second) I wasn’t convinced. It was Battle for Azeroth, an expansion focused on exploring, adventure, and world PVP that convinced me to come back. We all know how BFA turned out. Finally, in 2020 I decided to give Final Fantasy 14 (FFXIV/FF14) and The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) a try, but ultimately, I love making content for any MMORPG I’m interested in discussing.
👀 What are you excited to play in 2021?
✌ Please be sure to Like and Subscribe if you want more MMO content!
👍 Next video: TBA
🔥 Related videos that you might enjoy:
◾ GW2 vs ESO | in 2020
https://youtu.be/As9tL5AfPaM
◾ WOW vs GW2 | in 2020
https://youtu.be/1NnPos7RSSc
◾ Final Fantasy 14 Has One Of The Best MMO Communities | FFXIV in 2019
https://youtu.be/OE4ifyIQt_A
🎧 Music:
Outro: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kevin_MacLeod/Jazz_Sampler/AcidJazz_1430
Background Music: Flecks_of_light
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Lets hope the GW2 expansion will be booming, so many things i love about this MMO.. i recently returned to play the latest season.. and falling in love with this game all over again. GW2 needs 2 years expansions, and a good season in between the expansions
How? How can you not put FF14 on first place? It's the only intressant one, all the others don't even have good writing
Love the quality of your content! 🙏
In my mind there's a few things Anet could do better. The main one being better advertising, since that'd bring more people to the game just in general. Cuz rn their advertising kinda sucks. There's a lot of people who're like "Wait GW2 is still around?" since Anet doesn't really advertise or when they do it's kinda bad (I'm thinking of the taxi and Quiznos).
I think they also need to be more concrete on what they wanna do in terms of group content. Cuz they change their mind a lot. Like they started out with dungeons and haven't really made a new path for one or a new dungeon since the Aetherblade path in Twilight Arbor back in Season 1. Then they made raids and fractals, and while they added a new fractal recently it was years between the old ones and Sunqua Peak. As for raids the last one for that was Key of Ahdashim back in 2019. Then we got Strike Missions when the Icebrood Saga came out, and Anet has seemingly already moved past those to the new Dragon Response Missions with the newest chapter of Icebrood.
Like I understand wanting to put out new content that everyone can get into. But they change their minds so much and they have a tendency to just forget about things. So long time players always worry about them abandoning things, and then never speaking about it again. Since there's that precedent that's been set.
love that ff14 and wow are still the most popular mmo on the market and both of them are p2p lmao.
It's honestly sad to see Guild Wars 2 off the top-5, it's such a unique and high quality game. But then I look at it and I don't remember if I even played GW2 in 2020 outside of the Winter's Veil jumping puzzle, so I'm part of the problem. I wish their expansion brings them back in the spotlight.
Great video, but I would have to disagree about Shadowlands "respecting your time". Gear (PVE) has much lower chance to drop now , world quests are longer and less numerous, and just getting around the new zones is a slog within itself because of no flight whistle/flying and incoherent flight paths. Also the Maw is the literal definition of not respecting your time on how it is designed.
I am enjoying Shadowlands though lol
FFXIV has a really good track record of regular content patches. The only time they ever missed one in the entirety of 2.0 to present was in 2020 because of the pandemic, and I think they missed the target by 2 weeks. otherwise its like every 4 months on the dot I think. It certainly helps 🙂
As far as I know, OSRS is actually the second biggest mmo behind WoW. Still, the list is pretty much spot on else.
Well, we will possibly be getting news about the next expansion for FFXIV on February 6 which will launch towards the second half of 2021. I can't wait to see what we get. 🙂
I just found this channel last week. Just started playing FF and I love your channel. I’m sorry I didn’t find it sooner.
I have been playing Guild Wars 1 again so I can get the GWAMM title and man am I falling for that again. Such a unique game and surprisingly a larger population than I was expecting. Sucks that Guild Wars 2 is losing population as the game is great with many unique features but their marketing as well as the game's direction for the players is pretty meh. There is a ton of stuff to do when players open the achievement panel and look at all the stuff to do there, much of which isnt really off the wall content but actually engaging storylines and essentially quests. I know you focus on fantasy mmos but an honorable mention should be EVE Online. Its a fantastic game and the most sandbox of all MMOs that I can think of, plus its ancient AND looks fantastic.
Youtube videos talking about MMO population are a problem because they are often (if not always) false. People probably don't know it, but it's nearly impossible to know the exact population of many MMOs unless you work in one of the studios or for one of these publishers. As players or professionals in the online games market, we hardly have access to this information except in a few very specific cases: FFXIV with LuckyBancho and WoW thanks to the leaks of Blizzard employees and documents given during meetings investors (or document sent to them). That's all. Everything else, sites like mmo-population, all WoW / FFXIV "census" are at best inaccurate, poorly explained, or just completely wrong.
I've been interested in the subject during these last two years and the observation is simple. In general, in terms of population, the market leader is FFXIV and it's only exceeded by WoW during the expansion launch periods or the release of major patches comprising a raid in mythical difficulty. When the new content is completed, players leave WoW and the population drops drastically and quickly. For example, WoW BFA was released in August 2018 and reached 3.4 million subscribers during the launch period. Two months later, the game had lost 1.7M players (figures given by Blizzard to shareholders and information having leaked thanks to a job offer to recruit an API developer). If you look on MMO-population they are talking about … 4.2M subscribers. Which is completely false. The estimated population in 2019/2020 actually varied between 350k and 650k at its peak (also confirmed by numerous leaks, in video, internal press releases from former and current employees).
When we compare the figures of the two games using these and those from LuckyBancho, we see that contrary to what is said in Chris' video, the population after the release of Shadowbringers was not decreasing at all, it was increasing and this even more than a year after the expansion was released. This is because many disillusioned BFA players migrated to FFXIV attracted by the success of Shadowbringers. The extension of the free trial period, the coronavirus and the many sponsored operations on Twitch have accentuated these phenomena and the finding is quite crazy. On average FF had for two years about 1.5x to 2x the population of WoW. If we compare the minima and maxima, we realize that FF has reached up to 4x the population of WoW in a short period. (Wow Minima: ~ 350k FFXIV Maxima: ~ 1.4M and not 1.78 as MMO population saying…)
Today with ShadowLands, World of Warcraft is certainly back at the leader's position and that's normal, an MMO population is never flat. What's interesting to watch is if the population will stabilize or if it will further collapse like BFA.
So why the editors do not communicate on these data ?
Square-Enix and Blizzard do not communicate in the same way. Blizzard only communicates when the numbers are good and can reassure investors. That's how we learned that ShadowLands was "the best-selling PC game in history during day one".
– 1) This is false: Pre-orders for ShadowLands lasted 13 months, extended by game delays and the Covid (November 1, 2019> Nov 23, 2020). We are therefore talking about 3.7M over 13 months and not the first day at all. In comparison, Battle for Azeroth had a window between the opening of pre-orders and launch of "only" 7.5 months, almost half as much as Shadowlands and yet peaking at 3.4M players at launch. The figures of Shadowlands are therefore to be put into perspective.
– 2) This is no longer the case since the "record" was broken two days later by CyberPunk 2077 which communicates in the same deceptive way to grant itself false sales records.
Square-Enix communicates only on the "more than 20 million players". It is also misleading because we're talking here about players who have played the game. Does this only include players who have been subscribed at least once or also those who have an account on the game even if it is inactive? ? No idea. They also do not communicate that they have more players than their main buyer because:
– 1) They must be able to prove it and reveal the figures of the competitor can lead to prosecution for industrial spying given the confidential nature of these datas.
– 2) Square-Enix and Blizzard try to be courteous to each other in order to maintain their images of "cool guys" with the gaming audience. Although Naoki Yoshida and Blizzard's developers once visited their competitor's studio out of courtesy, the relationship ends here. Some testimonials from Blizzard US former employees indicate a certain jealousy regarding the population of their game during the period 2019/2020 and which would have affected the atmosphere within the studio during the development of ShadowLands.
In short, all this to say that the figures you can see on the net are false in 95% of cases. The only advice I can give you is not to believe all these sites talking about population. They have no more access to this confidential data than you and do not explain to you how the information is collected. The ideal is to find out for yourself by searching elsewhere than on the sites giving you everything and immediately. Reddit, Resetera, blogs and modders twitter accounts are full of much more reliable information than these websites. Every single information i gave on this message can be verified by searching on the web but identify reliable sources, gathering and comparing data takes a lot of time. That's why almost everybody's wrongly thinks that Wow is the leader since 2009. Reality is quite different and i only talked about the last two years…
Sorry if i made some grammatical error. English is not my native language.
How about a video of the top 5 MMOs you haven't played but are interested in?
If you never played any older Final Fantasy games, have you tried Final Fantasy XI? Has some of the charms of old skool MMOs but with the backdrop and trimmings of FFXIV.
I don't know if we are talking about the GOAT that is Wizard 101… she is popping!
A always, a vunerful video UWU
Comparing Shadowlands to BFA is unfair. BFA was just plain bad, so when comparing SL to it, ofc it would appear better. Comparing it to Legion and the other expansions, SL is definitely not up to par. I let my sub run out after the first month into SL, because it's just degenerated into this system-based nonsense rather than a proper MMO experience. In that sense, I'm a bit surprised you even put it where you did.
Where WoW can, and should, truly shine, is using Chromie Time to make ALL the content ever made relevant again at a level 50 'synched' difficulty. The fact that Blizz hasn't used its New Game+ potential is just a massive fail in my eyes.
I've been playing GW2 for like a month and a half and it's so much more in depth then ESO. ESO is praised for it's pay once then play. Except for endgame content you need to have sets from trials in Chapters, so you either stay out of the meta for a year until it goes onto ESO+ or buy a chapter which costs 3-4x the amount of the original game in order to go into it. However, this brings me to my next point of that ESO+ is extremely necessary specifically for the craft bag. The amount of materials which you get every single kill will flood your inventory and without craftbag it makes daily writs extremely difficult. Daily writs being the #1 source for passive gold gain due to legendary materials dropping. ESO is "free to play" but at the end of the day you pretty much get backed into a corner to pay for the subscription. I know myself and my other friends who play ESO can't play ESO anymore without ESO+. Also you said that ESO is consistent, yeah sure they release a chapter every year, but my lord is the quality inconsistent. In my opinion Summerset was the last time they actually made me feel something in the story, it made me feels upset and happy. Elsweyr was ok, I only really liked it because Khajiit are my favourite race, but Greymoor was a disaster, I know they released at home, but the story was extremely meh and predictable, the soundtrack missed because it didn't have any exploratory themes so it felt too much on edge 24/7, the storms are littered with undodgeable one shots, while also dipping fps to 10. ESO's a great game sure, considering I've spent 3000 hours in it. But I just get a bit annoyed when people don't talk about how its become so far away from free to play to free to play, until you get to max level.