What's the average lifespan of an MMO? If you look it up online, there are lots of blogs about individual games and a few rants about how developers should pay more attention to the players in order to extend a game's lifespan. Nobody's published a comparative of all the MMOs, their running time, and their player-count during that time; I wish there WAS one so I could pull a Kirith and put up a shiny graph.
I remember seeing the first ads for Eve back in 2002/2003 and going, 'Ooooooh!'. Then the 'online' part hit me and I didn't look further into it, because I wasn't keen on online gaming at the time: I was a tabletop player, a LAN-party CounterStrike camping bitch. Watching friends disintegrate in front of EverCrack made a bad impression, I guess. In August, I'll be celebrating my third Eve-birthday, and that... makes me feel like I've been playing for a long time. Three out of seven years. Good lord. And sometimes it feels like I missed the best part of those seven years, too.
Seven years for an MMO... that seems like a long time. Longer than many MMOs that were widely anticipated and fell flat against all expectations. And if there ever will be an endgame, it's not yet started to lurk in the corners like one last closet-monster waiting to frighten you on your way for a mid-night glass of water.
Here's to seven years, and here's to seven more, if we're lucky.
