[CCIP]

You have a 10-million market but what you don't have is a budget, and that is important. Modding is something that is easy to digest as a hobby - it's already done on a sort-of-finished platform and it is a kind of weird mixture of development and play. Development from scratch would be problematic. There are start-up costs and I honestly don't think most of us would be willing to work on a development project of that scale and complexity for free - and if you pay them, you can't pay with tomorrow's profits... Borrowing money on tomorrow's profits is also exceptionally risky. In theory it's easy, but the risk of getting burned is really high and I wouldn't blame anyone for being rather intimidated by it.

I don't doubt there is a lot of talent here who would be willing to work on something like that. But until someone comes along with some cold hard cash and solid business sense, it won't happen.

I hang around a lot of creative types and see this type of thing everywhere. There is more talent than you can shake a stick at, but sadly much of the time that talent cannot go anywhere because any major undertaking needs both an initial investment and a healthy dose of business sense. Ironically, the creative types - which modders are too - are almost never the types of characters who have either the funds or the business sense to do something like this.

Honestly, I think all it would take for something like this to happen is even one person in the community who can put up a major investment, take up the business side of such a project, and be ethical enough not to screw developers over. However such a person is yet to come along, and I personally don't think it'll ever actually happen...