Pharaxes, while building one from scratch would be exponentially more difficult, moving to Unity would not be nearly as hard for an experienced team. Unity is very powerful and simple to use, for one example, and even a tiny, inexperienced team can manage to make an immersive, open-world shooter style MMO (e.g. Firefall). A free to pay model, similarly, is not 'pay or barely play', but a 'pitch in a bit here and there/make your own way' system. I should note that the free to play model here doesn't exactly work perfectly, either- as far as I can tell, it retroactively removes characters that your subscription doesn't support. A well-structured free to play model stands to bring in even more development money for Virtrium, as paying 'premium rent' on your lair AS NEEDED, or unlocking more character customization options (e.g. races, perhaps?) by-character, as opposed to consistently paying for certain features you may not use. Right now, the engine doesn't support anything like a premium currency or character-customization locking. I'd really like to see the devs make an effort at this sometime!