Bree at MassivelyOP asked today if MMO studios should prioritize younger or older players. The answer is super simple.

Bree based the question off a comment by MOP reader Shay who noted, in essence, that MMO studios are flocking toward the younger customer, leaving the adults, who presumably have more money to spend and the nostalgia to lean on, out in the cold.

The predominant MMOs in the USA are World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV Online, and Old School Runescape. These top MMOs, all three of them, are targeted toward older players.

WoW had a lot of goodwill from the Warcraft series and from MMO players looking for a less drab aesthetic when they started. FFXIV has decades of nostalgic lore to mine. OSR explicitly targets the people who played the original Runescape in the browser when they were kids.

All three, mining nostalgia while being the top MMOs. Right? It’s the older gamers that MMO studios should be targeting?

Of the three MMOs above, the only one I could find figures on that broke out MMO profits separately was Square-Enix’s, which had revenue of $77.6MM for the most recent quarter, or $310MM or so if multiplied out for the year. Not so bad, except…

Here’s the top grossing mobile games from the last year:

**Title****Revenue ($bn)**Honor of Kings1.65Genshin Impact1.25PUBG Mobile1.12Candy Crush Saga1.00Roblox0.82Coin Master0.76Pokemon Go0.64Monster Strike0.52Romance of Three Kingdoms0.50Uma Musume Pretty Derby0.49

From what I understand and my own personal experience, most people do their own solo activities in MMOs, occasionally grouping with others to do instances and then going their own ways. PUBG Mobile definitely qualifies. So does Pokemon GO! Roblox qualifies and doesn’t need any handwaving. I never have even heard of the last one, but the important fact here is that each one of these games beats the annual revenue for one of the most popular MMOs in the country today, and likely the other two as well.

A game that is by any definition an MMO as we play them today, Fortnite, made an astonishing $5.8 billion in 2021. The revenue from this kid-focused MMO is worth more than eighteen Final Fantasy XIVs.

Sorry, older folks. You may have all the jobs and money, but you aren’t as willing to give it to your MMO of choice as kids are to theirs.

Back in the day, the world was a different place. Everyone had a new MMO coming out. It was going to be the multiverse, for real, a perfect place where you could find more people with all your same interests right out there in a hundred variations.

All the “next WoW” money just dried up when it became clear that there was no “next WoW”, and only FFXIV beat those odds (and this after not quite getting there with FFXI Online, and failing their first try at the sequel).

Adults may have more money than kids, but they also have more bills, more responsibilities, more of everything except time. Adults are never going to compete with kids for disposable income and infinite free time, and it’s a losing game to even try.

I’m not a kid, and I’m glad that MMO studios pay adults any attention at all. They shouldn’t! But I’m glad they do.

But yeah. MMO studios maybe were once in it for the passion of gaming and the promise of a world of their own, free of the unpleasantness of real life. Now, it’s all about the money, and has been for awhile.

The MMO we’re all nostalgic for is gone, and we’re different now, too. It is what it is.