It was really interesting to see the BigWorld tech up close at the Austin Game Conference and be able to browse their source code and talk to one of their senior developers. I was very impressed (and I'm only slightly biased by its close philosophical resemblance to the tech I built for Warhammer). It was also great to hear that BigWorld have a number of customers. The impression I had of MMO middleware was that there were a number of good solutions, but that the market was small and that the majority of the big players were using proprietary solutions. That impression has been strengthened having talked to people from Sony and Turbine at Austin, from working on Warhammer and Dragon Empires and from looking in to commercialising MASSIVE-3 while at Nottingham University. So what is the future for MMO middleware? A thriving industry in which distributed systems experts sell unfamiliar technology to a grateful games industry or a long winter where middleware developers try to prove their tech by selling it at knockdown prices to aspiring indie developers?

[Terra Nova]