| Essentially MMOs aren't just one hard problem, they are a collection of hard problems. There are some excellent game theoretic problems in there, the ecology is just one of them. One of the more interesting experiments in the StarWars universe game was the market economics of things like furs. What I noticed during my years of WoW playing was that the market functioned very much like the 'in app purchase' market of more casual games. For example you could sell magic reagents which an enchanter could use to level up their skill, this was a quick way for someone to exchange gold for skill points. It created an economic stream for players who could "farm" the correct materials to disenchant to get the most in demand reagents (as I recall Greater Eternal Essence was a big seller). Success in an MMO is in part a balance of these opportunities where a character can trade time for value. In the Ultima online case the skins were just worth essentially vendor cash, but without that market force in the middle, the economy tanked. Now if vendors paid less and less for hides as the rate of hides redeemed for cash increased, it would provide a natural limiter on the value of that activity. A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining. |
Which is what Second Life does. Land payments support Linden Labs.
There is a new generation of virtual worlds - VRchat, Sansar, Sinespace, and High Fidelity. The last three have numbers of concurrent users well below 100. VRchat had around 10,000 at peak, and is now down to around 5,000. There's also Facebook Spaces, which is a VR interface to Facebook that didn't catch on, and Decentraland, which was an excuse for an initial coin offering and whose blog is down. Those are all holdovers from the VR boom that didn't happen.
The next new technology is Spatial OS, a back-end game engine for really big MMOs and virtual worlds. A few games are just starting to use this. The company behind it is valued at $500M, which means they have to charge so much to use it that big game developers are staying away. You have to run it on Google servers, and they don't publicly disclose the price schedule. It's generally said to be high, though.