OSRS and Tibia are a exception to this

Blame Wow, it stole most of buy RuneScape gold the cake which investors and developers replicate the version and got much achievement. If wow did not have such a big subscriber count we would see more programmers danger, OSRS and Tibia are a exception to this since they're so old and predate wow. Id state Albion is a exception but it is not my cup of java and that I have zero expectations that we'll ever receive a game since mmo players are use to the wow development model. It's successful because it is combat and core gameplay in times of entirely disastrous game design was still the very best in the genre and it's not going away.

And to be honest, I can't see how developers can not risk because of WoW. There was never any risk in that, although yeah afk grinders which OP discusses in this thread can't be developed by them. An MMO with combat would get funded daily, developers need to show a demonstration with combat. Instead of best in the genre for its moment, it is just that it piggybacked on all the hype brought about by being associated to the warcraft collection. That coupled with the simple fact that the majority of its features were compact enough to cater to a wider audience i.e. no punishment upon death, straightforward leveling purely through quests, basically all the groundwork for what we now know as themepark MMOs.

Hype is an incentive to try it. Would play be poor people would not endure for long. Just like in any mmo that was becoming fame and hype of"wowkiller" after that. The genre was stuck in a limbo between rpg and action genres, but not providing on some of it. Sure mmos in 2003 were fine if you're a fan of mindless grind with no challenge to your ability, but at precisely the same time single player games with deep, satisfying and just good gameplay to this day were publishing at the time. No shit MMOs were a niche. WoW simply broke the cycle allowing for more action-like gameplay to emerge.

Perhaps MMOs have been a market but over here whatever you call them in america or where shittons of people played them together. These online cafes didnt catch in many areas out asia and eastern europe because having private PCs for gaming was not actually a thing here back then, but in the regions where they caught on, mmorpgs were booming and single player games were popular because it was far simpler to set up an MMO while folks would pay for playtime through prepaid game cards than getting a bunch of copies of singleplayer games lawfully (so you'd have largely illegal copies of warcraft/starcraft/GTA/half of life as far as single player games go).

Where I live, the existence of pc bangs created it so that nearly everyone I know from back then then played mmos i.e. lineage and ragnarok being two major ones which are almost unknown in the west. At some stage warcraft III got pretty popular as a result of custom maps like dota, td, etc which was pretty much one of the chief reasons why people must know world of warcraft over here. Wow had simple streamlined features but had reasonable thickness when it came into it though I wouldn't discredit everything else which existed alongside and rs2007 gold before wow as"disastrous game design".