The market needs another revolutionary fantasy MMO like WoW or EQ, not more of this crap. You really have to have a huge budget to produce a quality MMO these days, there's not much room for indie developers because of the sheer scale involved in the genre. People don't seem to realize this.

Rhaegar, I would argue that there IS room in the MMO genre for indie developers. If games like Runes of Magic, World of Warcraft, Runescape and Maple Story have shown anything, it's that graphics aren't a huge factor in a game's success. An MMO lives or dies on how fun its gameplay is. The running costs of an MMO are relatively low per user. Assuming you're monetising those users well, an MMO with under a thousand subscriptions can remain cash-flow-positive.

The problem with indie games is that they have to be grown organically. They don't have the branding or the cash to advertise a game and hype it up for launch. As a result, most indie MMOs (of which there are quite a few) don't gain much ground compared to the big players in the market. Of course they do tend to suffer from the same lack of innovation as high-budget games. It's possible that an indie game could come along with innovative gameplay elements, get enough support and break into the market-at-large. Possible, but not likely as most of the talented new game designers entering the market get hired by established studios.

Brendan, don't include WoW in that lot. RuneScape and Runes of Magic are pretty good examples but WoW is not. World of Warcraft was extremely hyped up (especially by fans of the Warcraft series as a whole or even just WC3).

WoW, unlike most games, lived up to it's hype and even though it had crap graphics it was never made by an "indie" developer. Blizzard have had many successful games, not just WoW.

As for a new MMO, no, I do not think the gaming industry needs a new fantasy-based MMO. I've tried WAR, I do not mind it but I don't play it because quite frankly, I get my fantasy-fix from World of Warcraft.

Games like EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies (no matter how crap it may be) and soon-to-be, Star Wars: The Old Republic are, IMO, decent ideas for games. EVE Online is pretty popular, SWG well... let's not go there and as for TOR, well it looks good so far, we'll have to wait and see.

All those games listed are pretty space-oriented. Which is what I like, not because I like fantasy over space, that's very much the opposite but because it's new and it hasn't been done much before in an MMO environment.

Developers need to stop restricting themselves to fantasy games.