I just want to bring to your attention that there is the second part of Richard Garriotts interview online over at GamesIndustry.biz. This time he speaks about development boundaries mainly related to the difference between the Eastern and Western market and another focus is the risks you are faced with when developing Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

The development time for a big MMO is multiple years, and the teams are very large, so you are investing tens of millions of dollars prior to launch. ... If you fail to not only ship the game but fail to have a hit, the repercussions are substantial.

Don't miss the first part which you can find over here.

Lord British himself gave GameIndustry.biz an interview regarding his current, Tabula Rasa, MMOs in terms of subscribing players and their future. Garriott of course speaks about projected life-time sales of Ultima Online and how this demand projection had been missed (in a positive way of course).

[GI]: So every new MMO game that comes out merely adds players, doesn't necessarily take away previous generations of players?
[Garriott]: I completely believe that is true.

It's a two parted interview, right now there's the first part online and the second part will be due sometime in next week.

You might know of Richard Garriott from his superb Ultima game series in the 1980s and 1990s and from the good old days of Origin Systems, his own publishing company. In 1992 he sold Origin Systems to Electronic Arts and coproduced some more Ultima's with them, but towards the end of the century it didn't went well with Lord British, he turned his back towards the game industry and left the company he once created. In the year 2000 he came back when founding Destination Games and later teamed up with the game publisher NCsoft to develop MMORPGs.
NCsoft today announced the start of the closed beta testing of Tabula Rasa, Garriot's actual PC game project. In Tabula Rasa you will take part in an epic, intergalactic science-fiction story on alien worlds with fast-paced action and role-playing aspects combined. The player enters the game as a rebel soldier faced with a huge war between his comrades and a xenophobic alien race.