I have no idea if he can actually deliver what he promises. Give him credit: he admits, himself, he doesn't know yet if he can deliver what he promises, that we won't know whether or not HeroEngine can do for developers everything he thinks it can do, not until someone actually finishes a game with it.

But he's working on the right problem. Budgets and development cycles for MMOs have been completely out of control, the last couple of years. I was just talking with someone about this the other day, and the point came up that EVE Online is considered wildly successful with less revenue coming in than Age of Conan or Warhammer Online, both of which have been written off as failures. Why is that? Because EVE Online is *profitable.* They didn't spend anywhere near what Funcom or EA/Mythic spent. If Tabula Rasa had cost 1/10th what it cost to develop, it'd still be with us. If Auto Assault had cost 1/2 of what it cost to develop, it'd still be with us.

It may not be Simultronics that solves this problem, although as a fellow St. Louis native, I'm rooting for them. Whenever I hear them talk about the kinds of games they can develop, I'm hearing an awful lot of antique design philosophy about D&D style character classes and stats and levels, DikuMUD style open game worlds with regions gated by the fixed levels of the mobs, few or no instances ... exactly what you'd want if what you wanted was to build something just like World of Warcraft only with a few tiny changes. If a game was just like World of Warcraft but set in a different game world and with some minor improvements like branching quests, and it cost 1/10th of what WoW cost to develop, would it attract 1/10th of WoW's insanely high revenues? Or would it be more like 1/100th, or 1/1000th? I'm not getting any clear indication, from what we know so far, that you can do anything actually innovative with the *game play* in a Hero Engine game. If not, then they're probably doomed.

But I'm delighted that somebody is thinking about this, talking about this, experimenting with this, and investing in this in a big way. Because the MMO industry just flatly can not afford to go on doing what it's been doing the last couple of years; the money just isn't going to be there for it.