Ruin LinkedIn Decision Maker Brief – Vol. 1 | Issue 9December 08, 2025 – Long-form edition Evergreen Endgames: The Only Sustainable Future for Theme-Park MMORPGsMichael Heising – CEO & Guildmaster, RUIN Gaming (est. 2004) Twenty-one years ago, on November 23, 2004, Molten Core opened its gates for the first time. Tens of thousands of players poured in, chasing Tier 1 set pieces that felt like artifacts of legend. Today, in December 2025, you can count the number of meaningful retail clears of that same raid on one hand — outside of the annual anniversary event. The same fate has swallowed Black Temple, Ulduar, Firelands, Siege of Orgrimmar, Antorus, Castle Nathria, and almost every other pinnacle of World of Warcraft’s storied history. Over ninety-five percent of the most expensive content library ever created in gaming is functionally dead. This is not an accident of player taste; it is the direct, predictable, and entirely avoidable consequence of vertical power creep — the genre’s original sin. The MMORPG genre has seen a brutal wave of failures, with at least 25 major titles or projects (AAA/AA from notable studios with significant hype, budgets >$50M, or peak players >100K) either fully shut down, transitioned to maintenance mode (no new content, sunsetting imminent), or outright canceled since 2020. This excludes minor indies, mobile-only, or non-RPG “MMOs” like battle royales (e.g., Concord, Warhaven counted only if RPG-core). Data from MassivelyOP’s annual “MMOs We Lost” series, MMORPG.com, Giant Bomb, and recent news paints a dire picture: live-service bloat, vertical progression traps, and post-pandemic layoffs have decimated the pipeline. Reform is necessary The data is merciless. Retail WoW raid participation has collapsed eighty-five percent from its Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands peaks. Meanwhile, Legion Timewalking weeks — 2016 content — routinely outperform current mythic progression in raw clear volume. RUIN’s own streaming metrics tell the same story: Star Citizen now commands seventy percent of RUINTV hours, Ashes of Creation alpha weekends spike concurrent viewership past anything retail WoW has achieved in two years, and Dune: Awakening test events are pulling numbers that would have been considered launch-day miracles a decade ago. Players are not abandoning MMORPGs. They are abandoning disposable worlds. World of Warcraft already contains a fully functional proof-of-concept for the solution — and it has for twenty-one years. Alterac Valley, Warsong Gulch, and Arathi Basin remain in the top five most-played battlegrounds in 2025 because honor and conquest gear scales every single season. A map released when George W. Bush was president is still best-in-slot relevant. The technical implementation is trivial: a vendor, an item-level sync, and a currency. If Blizzard can keep a 2004 battleground alive with a few lines of scripting, there is zero excuse — technical, creative, or financial — for letting Ulduar, one of the most celebrated raids ever designed, gather dust. The industry does not need to theorize about alternatives; it only needs to copy homework that has already received an A+. In 2016, ZeniMax Online Studios launched One Tamriel — a single patch that removed every level gate in Elder Scrolls Online and battle-leveled the entire continent. Population doubled within six months. New player retention skyrocketed because the world no longer funneled you through a linear corridor and then abandoned you at the end. Guild Wars 2 has operated on horizontal progression since day one: every raid wing from 2015 still drops weekly currency toward legendary armor in 2025, and Tequatl the Sunless still has hourly spawn timers that draw hundreds of players for meaningful rewards. Final Fantasy XIV’s roulette and tomestone system turns ten-year-old trials into daily currency faucets that queue in under three minutes. Old School RuneScape — running on an engine older than most of its players — regularly hits 250,000–300,000 concurrent users because a drop from a 2001 hill giant can still fund best-in-slot gear in 2025. These are not happy accidents. They are deliberate design decisions that produce the best financial and creative outcomes the genre has ever seen. Evergreen leaders operate with development teams of 120–350 people at peak. Vertical-treadmill studios balloon to 800–1,400 and then lay off half of them the moment the expansion cycle ends. Evergreen titles have suffered zero to one major layoff wave since 2021; the vertical side has endured four to six. Revenue per employee in the evergreen cohort sits between $1.4 million and $2.3 million. The vertical cohort struggles to break $680,000. The market has already voted with its wallets, its playtime, and its refusal to tolerate another $300 million corpse. No post-mortem in the genre is more surgically precise than Taugrim’s July 2012 video “WTF Happened to SWTOR.” BioWare spent an estimated $200 million and fielded a 650-person team to create the largest fully-voiced MMO in history. They delivered eight class stories that remain, to this day, some of the best narrative content ever shipped in the genre. Players flew through levels 1–49 in a state of genuine awe. Then they hit 50 and discovered the game was eighty percent story and twenty percent endgame. Vertical gear tiers invalidated every previous operation the moment a new patch dropped. EA, staring at a $200 million hole and no recurring revenue, forced a launch six months early — without a customizable UI, without a functional auction house, without a group finder. Subscriptions collapsed from 1.7 million to under 300,000 in nine months. The studio suffered two rapid layoff waves, executive producer Rich Vogel departed, and the game limped into free-to-play on life support. Taugrim’s conclusion has aged like fine wine: “Only Blizzard has ever successfully fed the vertical progression beast. Everyone else dies trying.” The path forward is no longer a suggestion; it is an ultimatum. Every raid, dungeon, and world boss released from this day forward must drop a single universal evergreen currency that always purchases current-tier or best-in-slot items — the Guild Wars 2 Legendary Insight model or the Final Fantasy XIV tomestone model, battle-tested and profitable. Gear tiers per expansion must be capped at four, eliminating the 30–40 item-level jumps that bury history overnight. One Tamriel–style world scaling and weekly legacy vaults must become table stakes. New power must come exclusively through horizontal prestige layers — titles, mounts, cosmetics, achievements, and mastery systems — never through raw item level that obsoletes the past. All new theme-park projects must ship in Unreal Engine 5 with battle-leveling and evergreen currency systems baked in from day one. And studio headcount must be hard-capped at 400 developers at peak — a ceiling already proven more than sufficient by Square Enix, ArenaNet, and Jagex. The timeline is non-negotiable. In Q1 2026 live-service flagships must pilot full evergreen vaults and One Tamriel scaling. In Q2 2026 we need UE5 remasters of flagship legacy raids — Molten Core, Ulduar, Icecrown Citadel — with weekly lockouts and meaningful rewards. By Q3 2026 the first next-generation AA theme-park MMORPG must launch with evergreen DNA from day one to avoid power creep-based obsolescence. The $189 billion gaming market is not shrinking. It is rejecting landfills disguised as worlds. The studios that choose to treat their twenty-year content libraries as gold mines instead of graveyards will not merely survive the next decade — they will own it. Michael Heising CEO & Guildmaster – RUIN Gaming (est. 2004) ruinnation.com | @RuinCEO | RUINTV #EvergreenEndgames #MMORPGReform #ThemeParkRevival |
