Is the Popularity of First Person Shooters a Phase?

Currently, First Person Shooters like Call of Duty, Homefront, Battlefield, and Medal of Honour dominate the sales charts and gamer's free time. Many gamers however (myself included) are frustrated with this genre's current trajectory, criticizing its lack of innovation, uninspired settings, and predictable, rushed experiences. There's no doubt FPSs are one of the most (if not the most) popular and profitable genres in all of gaming, but will this trend eventually fizzle and give way to the next best thing? Is the current popularity of First Person Shooters just a phase? I heed warning before venturing further; the answer may be a little discouraging. Allow me to elaborate...

Failure of the MMOFPS

 

Granted, I've never played an MMOFPS, so I'm not nearly as experienced as I should be on this matter, but I find the consistent failure of the MMOFPS genre very interesting when MMORPGs can achieve such massive success. Why can't the FPS, the most popular and profitable genre in gaming, be translated into the massively multiplayer space? Why can't games like PlanetSide or Tabula Rasa attract and maintain sustainable audiences like Blizzard's World of Warcraft? Some say it's the nature of the FPS genre that makes creating a compelling MMO experience impossible. However, I think MMOFPSs have simply been approached from ineffective perspectives and need to be re-worked and re-thought for mass audiences. It's fascinating that MMOFPSs have failed, time and time again, to be a reliable and viable platform to develop games. I think this genre is full of untapped potential and it's only a matter to time before the MMOFPS blasts its way through the genre's seemingly impenetrable dark crevice of the gaming sphere.