...and says, "Hey all you game developers! You guys are awful at writing middleware! Bow before our subscription model licensing! Muahahahah! Muahahahahahahahhah!"
Ok, I didn't expect this, but it sure is neat to see an organization like Sun Microsystems paying attention this market.
Read on, draw conclusions, laugh, rant, or worship their wisdom. Sun's MMOG Aspirations"Today, if you talk to a lot of MMOG companies, they're constantly reinventing the wheel, every time they build a new game. Chat is never the same, toolsets for asset management are never the same from game to game. For their own particular title or own product. It's an incredibly expensive proposition for a small developer to get into this space against larger companies that have the resources." - Sun's chief gaming officer, Chris Melissinos He's sorta right. But the question is, will any game studio have the money or the incredible amount of trust it will require to base their game on code they don't own or control? I'd say, not a chance. (Ok, I guess Turbine will buy it.) He eludes to helping out the smaller game studios. Tip to Sun... small game studios can't afford your software, much less the Sun hardware and Solaris OS that it will no doubt need to run on. AND, they will likely either not be able to afford or become physically sick when contemplating outsourcing their chat servers to a Sun operations center. The market doesn't want or need cookie cutter games based on outsourced frameworks. Unreal Engine is as close as any game studio will get to putting that much trust (and cash) in someone else's hands. Even the success of a product like the Unreal Engine is suspect until proven otherwise. In this case the Unreal Engine earned its keep (and deservedly so) with many success stories to back up its product. I can see some of the well funded shops using a system such as Sun proposes, but smart game studios and publishers will prefer their own innovation and their own codebase over speed-to-market and hands-off-operations. Or at least so says I. What say you?
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