The oldest public minecraft-server will hit its 11th birthday next month. Not sure how much more persistence you can demand? Some of the other games also have persistence in various ways available. But that's the point, persistence is not a hard demand of MMO, it's just a strong trait for RPG. For MMOs in other genres it makes not much sense to let the player wait in some virtual graphical lobby, when a textual lobby is good enough. For an MMO, a game must support a huge number of players in the game itself, not in the pauses between the games. The definition today has become more flexible than 20 years ago.
> but do you really see Facebook creating video games for it's blue site and instagram audience?
I think their point is more that they will offer the graphical virtual space for the players to wait and meet between the games and work, while others will create the games and apps which people than can enter from this space. My understanding is, they offer technology and the connecting point, not the content. The same way they already do it today with plain old 2D crud-interfaces.
> but do you really see Facebook creating video games for it's blue site and instagram audience?
I think their point is more that they will offer the graphical virtual space for the players to wait and meet between the games and work, while others will create the games and apps which people than can enter from this space. My understanding is, they offer technology and the connecting point, not the content. The same way they already do it today with plain old 2D crud-interfaces.