Correction: "No1. reason: WE think most f2p/p2w/farm2p MMOs suck donkey balls. I think they are plain bad in comparison. "
I am fairly certain most people who still play AO didnt quit / came back for the sole reason that there is no better alternative.
Exactly. While many games receive a lot of updates and maintenance, they are calibrated to last 2-3 years tops before casual people move on to the new ones. There are rare examples of such mmos surviving for more years but I doubt it was planned. If there is a really good engaging game with great depth and enough trial options to bite the hook, people would pay even subscriptions.
The sad fact is that making a really high quality, deep and complex game is not in the interest of the purely money-motivated developers/studios because of two reasons:
- they discriminate dumb people, cutting off a significant portion of the population
- they are way too risky. Stock MMOs are cheaper to make and pay their cost back in a much shorter time frame = less risky.