Whoa, this looks very cool: a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) with a Flash front-end client! Not only does it look great, but the underlying system for managing hundreds of world assets must be really nifty. My palms sweat with excitement just thinking about how this thing must be engineered.

And who put together this latest player in the MMORPG market? From what I can tell, Ankama Studio is the game development wing of Ankama Web Agency, a French company near the Belgian border specializing in e-commerce and web marketing. According to this interview, the three founders use their web agency profits to fund development of (I assume) something they’ve always wanted to do. Very very cool.

I haven’t played the game, but the business model behind this is very interesting, as is the reason to use Flash in the first place. The reasons should sound familiar; from the raw babelfish translation:

1. development costs, much more reduced than with hard development out of C.
2. costs of distribution. Here, not need for editor, all is done by the Net.
3. portability: with only one development, one touches Windows, Mac and Linux. It is not beautiful, that!
4. One knew flash well.

Uh, yep! Cheaper development, cheaper distribution, cross-platform deployment for free, and heck, if you know Flash well, use it!

Via XD.