The barrier to entry was the point, it's what created community. There is really no such thing as a durable community without entry and exit friction. But game

The barrier to entry was the point, it's what created community. There is really no such thing as a durable community without entry and exit friction. But games that rely on community are thus generally less scalable and profitable than games that don't. WoW was an aberration (partially because it had almost no competition at the time it was building its player base). It set profoundly unrealistic standards for the genre, and the gravity of community building in a contested space kind of killed off the rest of the genre because no one else was able to do it at 'WoW-scale', which was held up as the benchmark for what good looks like.