[jerf]

I'd also observe that an "M(ultiplayer)ORPG" isn't too hard anymore; not trivial, but something the tooling has gotten a lot better for over the years and something a lot of people could put a prototype together for fairly quickly. In fact we've seen a number of "Show HNs" over the years that amount to this.

But the "Massive" can be a real killer. Even if there are to some extent off-the-shelf tech that can handle fairly "massive" communications, it still takes a lot of skill and effort to use them correctly.

[Jaruzel]

This is where the fakery in most MMOs kicks in - they are not really 'Massive'. Most of them have sharded servers where only a few hundred players are actually in the same world together. Players think there are a lot more as the underlying chat system (originally just IRC in a lot of cases) runs on a separate server for all the players.