As part of my knowledge-absorption regimen, I subscribe to Quora regular email digests. Every so often a good programming related question appears and I feel a given answer is so good I have to upvote it.

This time the question was "how do I create an MMORPG [ with no skills of programming or design ]." This was Daniel Super's answer.

Good, honest answer. It's true, too. The best you can get as an individual is probably a MORPG, and that's going to be taking plenty of time already.

That is the path I took with Sphere (but I wanted to make a Secret of Mana styled game not an MMO, and Blockman has come a long ways and is considered fairly close, if only I can release it to you guys). After 6-7 years programming small games and understanding everything that would go into an MMO I'd still say I'm not qualified enough. Not necessarily of skill, but of time and money. Unless I use a lot of third party libraries to run just about 90% of the game logic, and I just write the last 10% to make the game unique it'll still take years. And thousands of dollars too.

Try, just try finding an MMO made by an individual, and I'm pretty sure there is one. Probably the only one.

I'll confess. I write like 10 lines of Blockman code every two months. Why? Life got in the way. I could only spend my younger years working on hobbies, but then I began to make a living for myself and that sapped all the time out of my day. Look what it did to Metallix. I would literally have to put away thousands of dollars in expenses to live at home for three to six months in order to create a game I care about. But I don't have the time and money to be doing that right now, and there is no security in it. I'll never know if Blockman would become a hit. I might get the satisfaction of a few forum goers here and on RMN, but I doubt a game like this - in this day and age - would take off (enough so I could live happily having spent the time making it).

I still feel like finishing the "demo" of Blockman and calling it quits, though. Perhaps move on and create smaller games, like I did for the Ludum Dare compos I did (I missed the last one BTW).