You hear this term a lot, I use it myself plenty, but what is Endgame exactly?

It comes from standard RPG gameplay, where the player "levels up" to progress. But an online world needs persistence, you can't trap players into leveling up forever. It has to plateau, it needs an End. At which point players begin a sort of new game, where some of the rules change and new activities are repeated or take a much longer length of time to complete.

Anyone who doesn't play these games could look at that description and shake their heads. We don't repeat the leveling grind into infinity, because the repetition without end would frustrate players-- So we give them an End, but then redirect them into other activities that repeat anyway. Or make them progress very slowly.

That about sum it up?

I think it's perfectly possible to have activities that aren't a grind, the plain and simple of it is: gameplay and content.

It's easier to repeat gameplay and stretch content than to provide more of it.

Clearly it's impossible to create infinite quality content, but I also think there's this situation in MMORPG development when they stop making a game for the players and start cashing in. Further development slows, they accept the monthly fees but the content trickles out, reducing cost and turning the whole thing into one big cash cow.

I'm generally not this sort of cynic when it comes to game developers, the ones I know are passionate about their games, but I can't explain the trend for MMORPGs any other way.

I think this market is wide open for the first game that keeps up a better pace with quality content and a greater variety of gameplay.