The MMO has been declared dead roughly annually since 2012, usually by someone comparing current subscriber estimates to World of Warcraft's 2010 peak. It is a bad comparison. That peak was an anomaly produced by a genre with no competition in a market with far fewer games, and using it as a baseline makes everything since look like collapse.

What actually happened is that the genre stopped trying to be the only game anybody played, and the survivors are in better shape than the narrative suggests.

Six games doing distinct things

Final Fantasy XIV is the story MMO, with a two-hundred-hour narrative that people organise their play around and the most welcoming community in online gaming. World of Warcraft is the group-content MMO, where Mythic+ dungeons and raid tiers remain mechanically unmatched. Guild Wars 2 abolished the subscription and the gear treadmill and built a game you can leave for two years without penalty.

Old School RuneScape is governed by binding player referendum, which is genuinely unique in commercial software. EVE Online runs a single shared universe where player politics produce events that get covered by mainstream news. The Elder Scrolls Online is, functionally, a very large single-player RPG with other people in it.

Those are six different products for six different audiences. In 2010 they would all have been trying to be the same product.

The subscription is not the problem

It is worth noting which of these charge monthly. FFXIV and WoW do, and both are healthy. Guild Wars 2 does not, and it is healthy. ESO makes its subscription optional and then makes inventory management painful enough that you take it anyway, which is the least honest arrangement of the three.

What actually predicts an MMO's health is not the payment model, it is whether the studio has a clear idea of who the game is for. The genre's failures over the last decade — and there have been many, several of them expensive — were mostly games that tried to be broadly appealing and ended up specific to nobody.

Where a new player should start

Final Fantasy XIV, and it is not close. The free trial covers two full expansions with no time limit, which is the most generous onboarding in the genre and has become a running internet joke for good reason. If you want group content above all, World of Warcraft. If you resent subscriptions, Guild Wars 2. If you want to read a lot and occasionally start a war, EVE.