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.
