TBH, when it comes to browser/mobile style "MMO:s" that extra M isn't all that difficult, those games tend to only have indirect interactions between players which makes scaling out a heck of a lot easier than it is for MMOs with realtime interaction between players.
The question then is: is this still an MMO? What makes a game deserve the additional 'M'? is it the persistent world? Having thousands of players in a chat room in the lobby?
There where multiplayer games that used these things before "MMO" became the marketing fad of the decade....
The big difference "MMO"s brought in was that for the first time, they tried to really tackle those difficult realtime interactions that multiplayer games before them avoided because of technical and financial constraints.
I know that players are really following fads and keywords, so creating an online game and calling it "MMO" when its just an MO with a persistent world has become more of a necessary marketing stunt in the last few years, as many players seem to think of online multiplayer as "single player game with a sloppy multiplayer mode tacked on as an afterthought"... the fact that this often is the case with even some AAA titles doesn't help to sway that opinion.
Still, the mere fact that the hard part in MMOs is achieving that realtime interactions, with leaving it out making a game a magnitude of orders easier to develop point into the direction that jacmoe's words have some weight behind them. Why even have a distinction between MO and MMO, if they can be almost the same?
I think jacmoe and you are talking about the same thing. Just that you insist on calling it an MMO while jacmoe is calling an MO. I tend to side with jacmoe here.
