Gamepressure has analyzed the current the current condition of the MMORPG genre:

The end of MMORPG? – we analyze the current and future condition of online RPGs

The 12-year long rule of World of Warcraft is an impressive feat, but it hides a grim reflection on the current condition of the MMORPG genre. Are Asian and/or mobile free-to-play games its only hope?

Pretty much everybody has Internet access these days. The popularity of online games, including MMORPGs, has been steadily rising throughout the last few years. The problem is, the said genre is currently very busy chasing its own tail. There are no fresh titles, especially from American or European developers. Houston, does this look like a problem to you?

MMORPG is an acronym for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, which basically means that a lot a people can have fun at the same time by playing together. But the name does make it sound more dignified, doesn’t it? Well, you’ll be perhaps surprised to know that it all began as mud… I mean MUD, or Multi-User Dungeon, the genre from which all MMORPGs originated. Imagine a game implemented entirely as text, no pictures, nothing even resembling an interface by modern standards. The system provided us with information, world building, everything in the form of written description; we, in turn, controlled our character by manual command input. This enabled us to fight monsters, explore, or talk with other people. That’s how things looked around 1978–1980, making MUDs older than MS-DOS (that’s the grandfather of Microsoft Windows, in case you didn’t know).

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Thanks Farflame!