Current-generation MMORPGs
The most recent generation of MMORPGs, based on arbitrary standards of graphics, gameplay, and popularity, is said to have launched in November 2004 with Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest II and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft (WoW). At the time, Sony expected to dominate the market, based on the success of the first EverQuest, and decided to offer a flat monthly rate to play all of their MMORPGs including EverQuest, EverQuest II, and Star Wars Galaxies, to keep from competing with itself. While EverQuest II was a commercial success as predicted, World of Warcraft immediately overtook all of these games upon release, and indeed became so popular that it dwarfed all previous monthly-fee MMORPGs. At present, WoW is one of the most played games in North America, and the most subscribed to MMORPG worldwide, with a total of over 10 million customers. The closest MMORPG to World of Warcraft is in terms of paying subscribers is RuneScape with more than one million subscribers and even more free players. RuneScape is also the world's largest free MMORPG, though it receives less media attention than WoW. With the release of these newer games, subscriptions began to decline for many older MMORPGs, even the year-old Lineage II, and in particular Everquest. The current MMORPG market has World of Warcraft in a position similar to the position of Dungeons & Dragons in the tabletop RPG market, with both games' market share being greater than 50% of the overall market.
In August 2005 Sony Online Entertainment acquired The Matrix Online, and the game was shut down at 11:59pm, 31 July 2009. It is the first game Sony has ended.
On April 25, ArenaNet (a subsidiary of NCSoft) successfully launched Guild Wars, introducing a new financial model which might have been partly responsible for the game's success. Though definitely an online RPG, and technically having a persistent world (despite most of the game's content being instanced), it requires only a one-time purchasing fee. It was also designed to be "winnable", more or less, as developers would not profit from customers' prolonged playtime. Other differences compared to traditional MMORPGs include strictly PvP-only areas, a relatively short playtime requirement to access end-game content, instant world travel, and strategic PvP. The game is designed around the max level cap of level 20, so players will not run into the level-spreading problem when grouping. For these differences it was termed instead a "Competitive Online Role-Playing Game" (CORPG) by its developers. With five million games purchased as of April '09, Guild Wars is still continuously profitable (due to several stand-alone games) but is still not viewed by some as a serious competitor to WoW in terms of profit and number of players. However, the alternative nature of the payment system in Guild Wars means that the game does not aim to "compete" with WoW rather than exist along-side it, and in that sense it can still be considered a large success.
There has also been significant competition (and potential for profit) among free-to-play MMORPGs. A few of the most successful of these are Silkroad Online by the publisher Joymax, the 3D sprite based MMORPG Flyff by Aeonsoft, Rappelz by nFlavor, (with Aeonsoft and nFlavor merging in 2010 to become Gala Lab Corp) Perfect World by Beijing Perfect World, the 2D scrolling MMORPG MapleStory by Wizet and finally the free-to-play converted Shadowbane by Ubisoft. Most of these games generate revenue by selling in-game "enhancements", and due to their free nature have accumulated huge numbers of registered accounts over the years, with a majority of them from East Asia.
On July 1, 2009, Ubisoft shut down the Shadowbane servers.
Many of the most recent big-budget contributions to the market have focused on giving players visually stunning graphics. In 2007, The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (LOTRO) was one of the first of these to meet with commercial success, followed by the problematic 2008 launch of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures and the Player versus player focused Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Much like LOTRO, many of the games in development with big expectations have multi-media tie-ins, such as Star Wars: The Old Republic, Star Trek Online and Stargate Worlds.
Read more about this topic: History Of Massively Multiplayer Online Games