The thing that always gets me with these new MMORPG efforts is that they always create the wheel from scratch. There's been hundreds of failed MMORPGs in the past. You would think that some of those companies would want to recoup some of their losses by selling or leasing their engines that they spent many years developing to start up companies.
I mean yeah I get the fact that a ton of it will be throw away, but parts of the networking, server, and client code should be re-usable for any MMORPG. Instead of re-inventing the particle system, shaders, etc, use what some other company spent many millions making, and spend your time on creating new art, game rules, and content.
Not all failed MMORPGs are obviously good candidates for this kind of thing, but there are some out there where it wasn't the technology under the hood that caused them to fail, but rather it was the direction of the content, game rules/mechanics, and marketing that caused the game to not succeed.
If I owned a company that spent 50-100 million on a MMORPG that ultimately failed, I would take that fucker and turn it in to a MMORPG game engine that I would lease out to everybody and their dog in order to recoup as much money from it as possible. In fact, I would go one step further, and make it free to use for learning and small projects in order to indoctrinate young developers in college who might then take those skills of working with my engine to a future company that would buy my license for their big triple A game.
I just don't get the whole, hey we wasted 100 million dollars, and failed. Oh well. Fuck it. See ya later guys. You're fired.
