Revisiting Ongoing Games

18 December, 2019

I briefly mentioned the category “Ongoing Games” in my last post (or “post”) as a potential replacement for the terms “MMORPG” and/or “MMO.” Even before I saw Jeromai’s post, which I agree with, I started to doubt my own judgment about it.

The more I thought about it, the more “Ongoing Game” meant nothing whatsoever. It might as well be “Game.” Almost any game could fit into this category in 2019.

Final Fantasy XIV? Sure. Fortnite? Sure. Sekiro? Probably. The Division 2? Definitely. Death Stranding? Absolutely. Outward? Well, maybe not that one.

I suppose “ongoing game” simply means a game that requires the developer to maintain a set of servers somewhere in the cloud for the game to work, or any game that requires the player to have a unique login to play it, or any game that has DLC released after the initial launch. Hopefully they’ve made the game in such a way that the game will still work after the servers are turned off, in some kind of “offline mode,” like Demon’s Souls, but you never know these days. The point is, this is basically every single AAA game released in the modern world. And thus the descriptor “ongoing game” doesn’t mean anything. It means even less than “multiplayer game.”

So I’m back to trying to solidify a good definition for “MMORPG” versus “MMO.”

This page is a static archival copy of what was originally a WordPress post. It was generated from Markdown files with Hugo, a static web site generator. There may be formatting problems that I haven't addressed yet. There may be problems with missing or mangled images that I haven't fixed yet. There may have been comments on the original post, which I have archived, but I haven't quite worked out how to add them to the new site.