Nostalgia can be a powerful influence on people. We all seem to have within us to desire to go back to some illusory “simpler time” when everything was better, more fun, less stressful, and didn’t cost so damn much. The problem is that only one of those items is consistently correct.
That doesn’t stop businesses from preying on that desire to turn back the clock, though sometimes it is we, the customers, who end up banging on the door begging to be preyed upon.
I think my earliest direct experience with this was Coca-Cola Classic.
A registered trade mark of the Coca-Cola Corporation of Atlanta, Georgia
Coke, having secured domination of the cola market, was now involved in the “cola wars” where Pepsi, pretender to the cola throne, was doing all it could to chip away and Coke’s market share. For some reason, Coke lost their minds and reformulated Coke to be more like Pepsi, thinking this would put Pepsi in it place. And so we got New Coke, which will live forever in business texts as an example of bad ideas.
Coke, seeing their market share drop on the move, introduced Coca-Cola Classic. This set off a mild wave of nostalgia, as the company framed it that way, and we all ran to this new version of Coke and, for a brief time, Coke had even more market share with New Coke and Classic running in parallel. Then most people just picked Classic, sales of New Coke tanked, it was removed from the market, and we were back to just on core version of Coke. After that the company mostly ignore Pepsi and Pepsi scaled back their own costly assault on Coke somewhere around Crystal Pepsi and now we just have flavored versions of either as our variation.
Not the last time I would see a nostalgia play, nor a nostalgia play that wore itself out as it simply became the new normal.
In particular, for this discussion, there are MMORPGs that seem to rely pretty heavily on nostalgia after a certain point in their life cycle.
EverQuest springs pretty readily to mind on that front. The game, coming up on its 27th year in a few months, took its first dip into the nostalgia pool 20 years ago, rolling out the first of what would become a long line of servers promising something akin to the first day experience.
But it isn’t just the special servers that try to create a vision of the original. The expansions on the main servers… the “live” servers in EQ parlance, which translated to “retail” over in Azeroth… start to go back to old favorite locations in an attempt to capture a bit of that nostalgia magic.
This same thing has been going on with World of Warcraft as well. In fact, Blizz was a little late to the party, taking 15 years to get there when titles that launched after WoW had been there already. But when Blizz finally got there, WoW Classic was a rousing success.
It might even be considered a critical moment for the franchise as WoW Classic arrived just in time to save the game… financially at least… from the huge fumble that was the Shadowlands expansion on the retail side of the house. I am probably projecting my personal experience when I say Shadowlands broke the connection with retail for some… but the success of WoW Classic in that moment sealed it as a permanent fixture on the WoW agenda.
The problem is that nostalgia is somewhat predicated on that past happy/better/ideal time being unavailable or unreachable. The whole point is that it is something in your personal story that you can no longer do.
But what happens when that old experience is suddenly readily available again? What if you know that every spring the EQ team is going to roll out some minor variation on a fresh start, special rules, classic server. What happens when every expansion is going back to some old location?
Or, on the WoW side of the street, what happens when you don’t understand that progress in old content is extremely accelerated so you let old expansions sit on the classic server long past their freshness date? What happens when your classic team’s monetization goals mean selling conveniences that were never in the original? What happens when you try to solve the “freshness” problem of old content by just cranking the difficulty dial one way or another while dumping modern features on top of the old content?
And WHAT THE HELL happens when your retail team just gives up once and for all on being able to create two years of new content and decides that THEY TOO are going to spend the back stretch of every expansion cycle ALSO running old content, undermining the classic team’s efforts?
You want Turtle WoW becoming a thing? This is how you get Turtle WoW becoming a thing! You make everything a blend of classic and suddenly it feels like a beige sameness. The spell is broken and people then want something new to try and reach that classic high. “New Classic” is an oxymoron, yes, but people are complicated and can hold conflicting beliefs.
Sure, for a while there, I thought maybe Holly Longdale had unlocked the fountain of eternal youth with classic. But when classic content becomes pervasive, it is no longer classic. There can be no nostalgia when the old version is served up to you constantly… or, rather, nostalgia is defeated when things have changed so much… Dan Olson has a whole side riff on how much different it is to play WoW Classic on modern computers in his Why it’s Rude to Suck at WoW video… that you go there thinking you’ll feel the way you did, and it doesn’t happen.
Or it no longer happens.
For the first year or so of WoW Classic, it felt enough like the old days and Blizz hadn’t gotten concerned and started modernizing the old experience that I could squint my eyes and get a modest hit of “the good old days” from the game. But like all nostalgia, it is a very perishable product. I didn’t go play Anniversary Classic because it was too soon. The first time only worked because it had been so long since that original content had been playable outside of an emulator that is was great and there were crowds of people and we were all just so happy to be there.
Until we weren’t.
Now our group is off playing something else. We did WoW Classic and it was good, but even the most powerful nostalgia cannot fix what was broken in the first place. So it was an incredible high in vanilla, followed by a low in Outland… which I didn’t really like back in the day and was also the point when Blizz decided they really needed to monetize this classic stuff more… had a rebound in Northrend, and then died in the cataclysm, just like it did the first time around.
I guess full points for recreating the original experience, but also I am no longer a subscriber.
And EQ has it even worse. They’ve been putting out the special server thing for so long now that it is no longer special. There seems to be no setting of the dials that they have easy access to that will excite their installed base, and keeping them engaged is a critical part of their own business plan, a plan that wasn’t going so well at the last report, to the extent that EG7’s largest shareholder, Eros Capital Partners, has a list of demands including a new board of directors, more stock buybacks to bolster the share price, and maybe even bringing the whole place private again so they can loot the company without the watchful eye of regulators getting involved.
What do you do when the nostalgia well runs dry?
Yes, this is where we get to Classic Plus and like dreams.
The problem is that the EverQuest team simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to work on a new content creation path for the company’s foundational title. And if things continue to decline for EQ, they are likely going to have to make do with an even smaller team.
Meanwhile, the World of Warcraft team could almost certainly find the staff to do something along those lines. Season of Discovery proved they could change up at least some of the vanilla experience. But my outsider opinion, having watched them for so many years, is that there is no internal champion capable of driving such a project. They always had the public company problem when Bobby Kotick was running the show, but they now have that in spades with Phil and Satya so obviously willing to slash and burn the second their bonuses might be in jeopardy.
This is where Old School RuneScape is the outlier. Jagex has had a horrible time trying to develop another title. It feels like RuneScape is all the magic they had in them. But when they too went to the nostalgia well, they somehow found it within themselves to create a new path forward, different from RuneScape’s, to follow.
This again, however, points out the hollow nature of nostalgia as a business plan. People want to “feel” like they did back in the day, but in the attempt they often find that simply going back to a game in their current state of mind will not fulfill that need.
In the end, even Old School RuneScape failed the nostalgia test in the end. In going back to that, the players who embraced the old style of play quickly settled in and it became normal. It was Coca-Cola Classic just becoming Coke for that group. To keep them engaged, there had to be more, a hook, something fresh to keep those players happy.
Nostalgia is a gimmick. A tease. A hook to grab attention. But Nostalgia alone is not sustainable, in part because we have all moved on from those times. We are different people in a changed world and the context that made something great at one moment leaves it feeling hollow now.
For my final example, just to seal the deal on that idea, I am going to fall back to the Atari 2600. As I wrote years back, I wanted that more than anything in the world back in 1977. And I played the hell out of that console once I had it. But it doesn’t interest me today despite whatever investment group that holds the Atari name tries to tempt me with. That is a console that has been beaten to death when it comes to nostalgia. The history of the 2600 these days is 6 years of success, and 22 years of trying to remind me how cool it was back in 1977.
There has been no point in time since the mid-90s when I could not have bought a software version or a reworked, cost reduced, hardware copy of the original, to the point that I wonder who is left to even purchase such a thing.
Then again, I suppose they wouldn’t keep remaking if nobody was buying them. But they always seem to show up around the holidays, when nostalgia is often at its peak and many adults are internally struggling with the fact that none of it is as much fun as when they were a kid. And then they see a stack of the latest round of 2600 remakes sitting on a pallet at Costco, and they cave to the temptation in their state of weakness.
I mean, I know better and it almost works on me every year… almost.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 