[ramesh31]

Pretty awesome that making an MMO has gone from something requiring a budget of millions to being something an indie dev can put together with Unity and a few cloud services now. It's impossible to overstate just how far the tooling for game dev has come in the last 10 years. What the OP is describing would have been a silly pipedream in 2010.

[criley2]

For the record people were making "MMO's" as hobby or academic projects many decades ago. The earliest MMOs were text based multi-user dungeons and folks were programming them by themselves and running them on university hardware in the 80s. The biggest difference is obviously the lack of graphics, but you might be quite shocked at the sophistication of the gameplay mechanics and multiplayer in the MUDs of the 80s and 90s.