I would like to see what everyone thinks caused the Downfall of MMO.
Coming from playing EQ1 and EQ2 the original games were great for years but slowly they forgot about the dedicated gamers and started giving way to players that wanted instant gratification and wanted the same gear as raiders but without raiding. I'm sure I will see a lot of blaming WOW which to an extent could be true as they made the "Smash your face into keyboard congrats you earned loot" popular.
The other part was I feel they got lazy with expansions
How are you defining downfall? If you look at the number of MMOs out there and the number of players, MMOs have never been more popular.
When you say "dedicated gamers" lets look at this in a generational point of view. With Meridian 59, Ultima Online and Everquest 1, what was the target age bracket? I'd say early to mid 20's, 30 at the outside. Did they even think that people 50 years of age or older would comprise even 1% of their playerbase? Heck no. I don't even think they thought about the 40-50 age bracket as a group to target either.
No, these early games were for college age kids as we (at the time) were the D&D players, understood computers more than any previous generation, had some disposable income and a good amount of free time.
Fast Forward a few years and the group which had a lot of free time now has a family with a kid or two, mortgage, sometime multiple jobs, etc but crucially limited time for games. So companies adapted to the majority. Accomplish more in less time.
Fast Forward again and now that same group probably has the kids out in college now, probably more settled in their career and more free time. And at the same time we have that 19-26 college age bracket who have more disposable income than we did back then and more free time. The MMO population is now so expansive the niche game can easily garner enough marketshare to remain viable.
That's where we are right now with those companies who remember the old days (because they really liked those type of games) who now run their own game companies and can build a game knowing there is enough people out there who will commit to it for a long time provided it is a quality product.
I don't see any downfall. MMOs started as niche and the mainstream came along with WoW, but the niche gameplay styles haven't ceased existence. The problem with many of the games for niche crowds has been developer incompetence (Darkfall, Mortal Online) and also sometimes some people are not as patient as they may think and won't let a game 'bake' and give up on games before the developers fix any issues and iterate on the framework of the game. It more developers do what CCP did with EVE which is constantly add new features and iterate on existing ones, then we would probably have more really good options. However you end up with developers that just seem to give up and don't update on a regular basis, or they keep stringing people along about promised great changes, but end putting out a revamped game that no one wanted (Darkfall).
If you look at the state of the industry, we have more niche games in development than ever before. So, as far as I can see, there is no downfall and we are actually in an upswing. WoW didn't kill MMO; it just brought in a mainstream audience on top of, not in spite of, the niche games.
I dont think MMO's are in downfall. I think it is in a lull of sort. There's more MMO now than there ever was and there are quite a bit of new ones on the horizon as well. One of the issue is a lot of the MMO's out there are being made while trying to please everybody! At least it was true in the last few years. The MMO's being made or in progress are trying to corner specific areas.
I think we will see more smaller and less AAA titles being made and perhaps stuff that is being made wont be so rushed.
We are in the 4th age of MMO i think,
1st age was the likes of UO, EQ
2nd age was WOW EQ2 etc
3rd age mega production such as SWTOR/ESO
4th age is a more specialized MMO such as this and Camelot Unchained etc
5th age i could say would be something that will bring new technologies such as virtual reality...
I think the downfall of mmo's is a subjective thing. I'm sure many people would disagree, but obviously plenty including myself do agree. I believe we may fill there is a downfall just based on how we prefer a niche. When a lot of us first started playing MMO's we were used to certain things etc. as time has gone by the market has proven elsewhere. Catering to a majority has been the primary goal as it yields the largest return.