"There are no MMO engines for sale that can make robust games. They just aren’t any good yet"
That's somewhat surprising to me. There's so many MMOs out there that have failed for one reason or another that you'd think someone would be trying to salvage their sunk costs by selling the engine.
Despite the competitiveness of the MMO market, there are still a lot of companies trying to break in, so you'd think that there'd be a decent sized market for a product which would shave years off of the development time.
I wonder if part of the problem comes from most MMO companies clinging to life for as long as they can, and then not having the money to rework their technology into something suitable for a third party. Certainly, there have been quality(from a technical standpoint, anyways) games that got released, got a few rounds of post launch patching, and then died from lack of users. I'd bet that with a bit of polish, that sort of proven technology would be a moneymaker.
Oh, there are a few such companies. Can't think of the names right now, but I did some research into this over the winter. A big problem is that the asset creation is very expensive, and balancing the economic factors is much easier said than done. If you are interested in this, Richard Bartle, inventor of MUD, is the leading thinker in the field.
The best technical system that I know of is the stackless python one developed for Eve Online, which I believe is profitable but has only about $300k players. Mind you, with that number it's insanely complex already. I had to stop playing, because to do so well requires the same level of commitment as a full time job.
I can imagine that asset creation might easily be as large an expense as building the technology.
However, one of the big killers of MMOs is problems with the launch. With some of these large high profile failures, they've already gone through this and worked out at least some of the bugs, so one would assume that this would make them more attractive to buyers.
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.
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.
Why not use an open source one? I saw a Google tech talk by Keith Fulton, one of the main architects of PlaneShift. He said that although the engine is GPLed, the characters, rules, scenery, etc. are all separate from the main project and can be scripted. So if someone wanted to, they could improve the GPL engine while creating proprietary art and storyline that could then be marketed.
Unfortunately, you can't use GPL or even LGPL licensed code on consoles, and try getting (L)GPL code past your publisher's/investors' lawyers. I had to go through an arduous approval process to be allowed to use zLib in a game.
That's somewhat surprising to me. There's so many MMOs out there that have failed for one reason or another that you'd think someone would be trying to salvage their sunk costs by selling the engine.
Despite the competitiveness of the MMO market, there are still a lot of companies trying to break in, so you'd think that there'd be a decent sized market for a product which would shave years off of the development time.
I wonder if part of the problem comes from most MMO companies clinging to life for as long as they can, and then not having the money to rework their technology into something suitable for a third party. Certainly, there have been quality(from a technical standpoint, anyways) games that got released, got a few rounds of post launch patching, and then died from lack of users. I'd bet that with a bit of polish, that sort of proven technology would be a moneymaker.