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Re:Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people" by thalur on Thursday June 04, 2009 @07:19AM (#641222)
Could a viable company be created with the goal of producing and selling an MMO engine, rather than an actual MMO? You would be removing the expense and risk of creating the gameplay side of things (models, textures, quests etc), and could focus on getting the engine right. There would probably be some issues in selling the engine though: there would be a certain chicken-and-egg factor in selling an unproven engine to a new MMO-building company.
Re:Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people" by osi on Thursday June 04, 2009 @09:27PM (#642539)
they exist. i work for one. the engine was built as we developed worlds on contracts for clients. once we got it to a certain point, we started licensing it out.

we term it a platform, as its something to build with an upon. all of the projects we've seen require extension and addition to the basic model we've defined to customize it for the project at hand. but we've baked in things that make doing so trivially easy.

http://www.electrotank.com/corporate.electro

Re:Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people" by csbrooks on Thursday June 04, 2009 @12:23PM (#641692)
There are such companies and products.

The fact that the article fails to mention them probably indicates that they aren't worth mentioning, though.