I could be wrong and being a bit naive, but what prevents them from creating an original game now?
The team have proven credentials at this point surely?
Not to mention at least some of their players must actually like what they do vs wow, unless I'm mistaken about that part and it's still mostly nostalgia
Having the prebuilt client and art assets you hack and change on saves you million of up front cost.
The foldingideas videos about decentraland talks about this. "Dead" mmorpgs work on a small skeleton crew despite the original game having taken 100s of people years to make. Looking it up the turtle wow server was like 5-10k concurrent players? A lot for sure but bordering on that category.
It takes a lot of work to manage that but nothing compared to making an original IP from scratch.
Don't disagree, just thinking it's a shame as it's non-trivial to create a good team that creates something new, even if it is on top of something old
Also, I'm not sure they have to start by creating an MMO
Part of the settlement might prevent them from launching a similar game for X years. Wouldn't be unheard of.
I’ll never understand modding in this day and age, I got it back in the quake and half-life 1 days when teenagers didn’t have access to commercial game engines but modding total seems crazy to invest time into building on infrastructure you don’t own, you can’t successfully monetize and will likely be taken from you if you do.
Instead of just building something you own.
> you can’t successfully monetize
this wasn't the goal of modding.
There is no shortage of game dev talent or adjacent creatives. It’s doubtful they will go on to find roles in the industry given the current climate and they presumably don’t have the capital to gamble on multiple years of game dev for potentially no return.
It's not a small thing to create a team who's proven to ship a successful offering, trust me I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it and hitting that bar is hard
Honestly as someone building a game right now, I'd love to meet some people who are trying things and are open to meeting
If you just make “wow but with different graphics” how long until Blizzard sues you?
Wow but with different graphics is pretty much every MMO that has come out since 2004.