It’s no great secret really, that despite its many shortcomings the MMO business is doing quite well. As far as making a few bucks go they really hit the sweet spot with this one; design a game that never ends, and charge people by the month to play it. It’s ingenious.

The problem though (that is, with ingenious ideas) is that everybody wants a piece of the action. Design a game that makes millions, and millions will begin re-designing your game. Of course, those millions are more often than not Korean, and as Koreans are about as good at emulating the success of World of Warcraft as a sock is a condom, things tend to turn south fairly quickly.

Skip ahead a few years and you’ve got an industry made up almost entirely of these ‘WoW clones’, and e