MMOs in the early 2000s were an incredibly cheap form of entertainment though. For like $10/month, you got something that you and friends could goof around on for a few hours a night all month, and it was a primary ‘meeting space’ for those friends. I still remember when my online friends shifted away from ICQ, and just moved to WoW as their primary spot to contact each other… like I’d go in to WoW to sort out RL dates with my gf at the time, cause that’s where she’d be in her time off.

Part of the point I’m trying to make is that it’s not necessarily that people have less free time now, or that the cost is a huge burden, but that their attention/disposable income is split between a lot more ‘stufff’ online when they’re off. Social media, in general, wasn’t as big back in the 2000s, and MMOs filled part of that connectivity niche – you’d log in to WoW to catch up with real-life friends. Now you just glance at their facebook page or whatever periodically and pretend like you’ve kept in touch. And before, you’d get by with just the $10/month single MMO subscription and a $5 Netflix subscription shared between all your friends, now you get people that have like 5-6 different ‘streaming’ subscriptions, vpn subscriptions, cloud gaming pc subscriptions, etc etc etc. Heck, just think about the old landline setup vs current cell phones – in the past, the whole family had like a $30/month landline connection with a generic $10-20 handset or two in the house; now each person in the family needs a $50+ cell plan, or you can get a family plan for a slight discount, but you still gotta buy everyone mobile phones every few years, etc.