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This is genuinely intended constructive criticism: One of the classic mistakes people make when planning a business is to proceed based on exactly what you said. I have heard, from multiple professional investors, jokes before about how many business plans they've read that say, "There are <x> people in this market. If we just capture 1% of it, we'll be rich!"
The intersection of people who read fantasy novels, people who like hardcore roleplaying, and people who want to play graphical MUDs is not very big. That's your potential market, and of course, it's only really possible to capture a relatively small percentage of that small market. That's in return for a minimum $20 million investment in order to create a competitive graphical MUD. Minimum. WoW was about 60 million (at a bottom estimate) including worldwide deployment costs.
And I mean, if you're saying that Underlight is relatively unsuccessful because it wasn't competitive in terms of graphics, staff, etc, then you may as well just give up hope now. $20 million for a hardcore roleplaying product is impossible to justify financially.
--matt
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