Recently, I’ve written about how formulaic most MMORPGs have become. Now, I’ve run across something that seems to be almost perfect for a Monday posting.I’ll wait a moment for the people playing Vanguard to stop screaming “Yeah…and there’s LAG, too!”.

I became involved in a pretty good discussion of the fact that the MMORPG genre’ seems to be trending toward making you scream at your monitor repeatedly over at Keen and Graev’s blog. (I know I’m doing something right, because I’ve been respectfully disagreed with.)

Everyone needs to remember that the video game industry reached the ten billion dollars yearly revenue plateau a couple of years ago, and in case you hadn’t noticed, entertainment industries that large are known for retreading the same crap over and over and over, culminating in things like the Brady Bunch Movie. I fully expect to one day see the beta announcement for an MMORPG based on a movie that was made about an MMORPG.

Why? Because it’ll sell, that’s why.

And that’s not a bad thing to me. There will be a ton of people that will be drawn into the MMORPG world by such things. And the bigger it gets, the more probably the likelihood that we’ll continue to see an increase in smaller development companies that try new approaches to MMO’s. Why? Because they won’t have the funding to compete with the “big boys”, and will therefore have to innovate to garner attention, players…and revenue.

So to me, the larger and more formulaic MMOs become, the more likely it is that we’ll see the Discworld MMORPG.

I know…it won’t happen…the Discworld MUD is the most I can hope for.

Shut up. I can dream.