Even merely OK'ish MMO still seem to be doing rather well financially
I'm not so certain. Since Everquest, many MMOs have been aborted because investors felt they wouldn't be profitable (for example Microsoft's Mythica and some other roman MMO by DAoC's Mythic I don't remember the name). And several others released MMOs put their investors in deficit: The Matrix Online, Vanguard, Ryzom, Tabula Rasa, Shadowbane, etc.
Unlike single player games, there is a direct competition for market shares, a player of one MMO is not very likely to play another MMO at the same time. The only hope for any new MMO is a) get players who never played MMOs before b) "steal" players from other MMOs.
And those 2 numbers are extremely difficult to predict for a financial analyst or investor.
All those reasons (past failures and "monogamy" of MMO gamers) lead investors to be extremely reluctant to actually support the development of new MMOs and when they do they tend to take as little risk as possible.
Those two ingredients put together = lack of creativity and fresh blood in the market. In the end that's bad for gamers like me who like diversity (for the same reason I'm hating how Fallout 3 is becoming an Oblivion clone, not because I wouldn't like an Oblivion with guns but because that means one less game in the already rare isometric/TB category).
so I am not sure why this situation should stop creativity.
It's because WoW is very successful that creativity is stopped. For the above reasons the only AAA MMOs investors are willing to put money on are WoW clones (EA financiang Mythic on Warhamer Online ?)
It's perfectly logical from a financial point of view. And -I believe- perfectly harmful for gamers. Yet the responsible aren't investors : they're just logical people reacting to the market. It's us gamers, it's the 10.9 millions playing nothing but WoW for years and refusing to try new things.
And the argument gamers will give to not feel guilty (because no one likes being responsible for anything) is the big "just give us something of good quality and we'll play it, it's not our fault we don't play something else".
Well that's a vicious circle, quality is costly, and someone willing to pay for that won' take risks = he'll pay for a WoW clone (see Warhammer Online again). And even then, players were kind of forgiving with WoW when it first came out, no auction house, no high level content, poor PvP mechanisms. And now they accuse AoC of the same flaws. They were forgiving then and not anymore.
"Market standards have been raised" indeed. But so have the costs to meet those "market standards". So creativity and imagination are the first and only victims of cutting "unnecessary" costs to meet the mandatory "market standards".
As long as us gamers will be expecting those market standards to be met before we try/buy anything new, we won't be seeing much genuine "newness" in the coming years.
I wonder what's the MMO being developed at Bioware going to be like (especially with the self proclaimed "we want to be the WoW killer" EA as investor). Some kind of single player / multiplayer hybrid
a la Guild Wars with a huge focus on story telling? That's not very new or creative to me, Guild Wars main story line and AoC's legacy quests come close already.