Well then...
It makes me wonder why anyone want to bother with making MMOs in the first place then. Comes off as a quite the high-risk gamble when looking at the expenses of making one. And considering that most MMOs seem to need maintenance long after release as well, they more or less drain more finances over a long time...
Seems to me like it's a practice of using a single dollar in order to earn a single doullar.
Because if done right, they can be pretty damn lucrative in the long-term. Games like Ultima Online, Everquest, WoW, EVE, etc, have made their developers millions. But the thing is, unlike regular games, where people tend to buy and play multiple games at a time, people really only have room in their life for one MMO, and once they've invested a lot of time and money into that one MMO, it'll take something pretty damn special to get them to move from one MMO to another. So just copying the top dog and adding a few tweaks isn't going to attract players to your game; if people want to play WoW, then they'll just play WoW, not your WoW rip-off. Unfortunately, big-time publishers already prefer to stick to what's popular, and the more money that's involved, the more risk-averse they become, and since making an MMO requires a [censored]-tonne of money....
» Wed Aug 01, 2012 4:48 am 
