Why MMO's Fail

Not being one in the industry, but someone who enjoys the games as a whole, I find it remarkable that game companies continue to repeat the same mistakes over and over. At least in my mind they do. In the early days of MMO's it might have been acceptable to release a game that contained bugs, gameplay issues, and missing content. But the rules of the game changed when WoW hit the market. Was WoW particularly innovative? Bug free? Completely balanced? Not at first but there was a degree of polish that was placed into it that made it easy to overlook, combined with a live team that moved to address these issues folks came to WoW by the millions.

Game companies however see WoW's amazing success and want a their own stellar hit in order to hang their hat on, but continually make the same mistakes over and over.

• Know your competition - If you are designing a MMO, you need to be a fan and a player of the current MMO's out there. You can't be a good chef if you don't love food and appreciate the different flavors and combinations of other chefs and styles of cuisine. In that same vein, MMO designers who are designing for end game content but have never experienced that type of content let alone play MMO's should never be allowed to design in the first place. WoW is very quick to pick up good ideas in competitors games and implement them into current content, WoW that we know of when it first launched and the WoW of today are very different.
• Don't listen to marketing / Don't release early - Marketing will tell you that holiday season is when to launch, or based on market research your game needs to launch in such and such window. If the game isn't ready, it isn't ready. You have one month in order to impress the people who will buy your game and get them to talk about your game to their friends. Anyone who has ever worked in the service industry has watched the training video about the customer and how word of mouth can affect your bottom line. You simply can not ship a game that is unbalanced, buggy, unpolished, and missing standard MMO features. The set of features that are expected of MMO's has risen due to the popularity and years of work Blizzard has placed into WoW. Your potential customer base is more than likely to be either currently playing WoW or has played WoW and will like dating a new girl and comparing it to your ex, compare your game to the WoW.
• Don't lose your reputation - Blizzard has a very strong reputation behind them, the could probably release a game called "Blizzard Steals Money from Starving Children" and people would buy it simply because Blizzard developed the game. What can be said about your game company if your games are less than stellar comming out the door? Now any game you put out subsequently will still reek of the pile of crap you tried to sell us before.
  
• Get a good IP or make one - Movies like mmorpgs are a big investment and as you've seen recently by the influx of sequels to establish IPs, creating something that sticks to consumers is a big gamble. Thus the sequels. So as a game company you can either try and bet big by releasing a brand new IP or find something that will resonate with your audiences. You either decide to spend alot of marketing dollars to help push your new IP, buy an IP, or do something compeltely different and not make an mmorpg at all. Why not make an mmorpg if you don't have a good IP? Think of it as the first movie with a decent ending that sets itself up for a sequal. The Episode 4 to the Star Wars universe. Lower cost, faster turn around, and if you capture the public's attention you can continue the story through .. you guessed it an mmorpg.