This multiverse thing uses one of the worste business models ever. They are basically relying on hobbyists and amateur start-ups to develop some of the most complex games imagineable. Whoever approved 4 million in funding for Multiverse needs to have their business sense seriously examined. A LOT of caution is warranted with Multiverse. This whole thing could have taken place in 1990 as this happened in MMOs before, around 1990 when the text codebases like DIKU started coming out. Did it allow many people to make text based MMOs? Sure. There are about 1,500 text based MMO's running on a primarily text interface. 98% of them have about 5 players and are nearly identical to each other. To run worlds of the size that the average hobbyist will attract, you don't need anything more than the Neverwinter Nights toolset really. I can't say I see how academics, for instance, will particularly benefit from Multiverse. If you just want a cheap way to create a virtual world to study, text has been available for a decade and a half. Yes you won't get many users, but then, you're not going to get many users with a nearly budget-less graphical MMO which are the only things that will be developed using Multiverse, and you'll have far less content and far less depth due to the cost of producing the models/textures/animations. Far less ability to actually produce something interesting. The odds of any hobbyist developer ever producing a MMOG using multiverse that would make it to market and get published are slim to none. The odds of a professional developer using multiverse to develop a MMOG are 100% zero.