Multiverse has announced that they’ve managed to snag the rights to the Firefly license. Oooooh, shiny, even if it’s more niche than us fanboys want to admit. However, here’s the interesting part of the article, to me:

Bringing those environments and character types to life as an online game will be a challenge: Multiverse is not a game developer, but rather a platform provider whose product is still in beta. Instead of making the game itself, the company will hire a development team that will craft the virtual galaxy using Multiverse tools.

Is it just me, or does ‘will hire’ imply that they haven’t yet? I expect a gold rush of Firefly pitches from small studios based on this very casual inference of what was probably a throwaway statement.

Because the underlying technology is already in place, “I feel confident that we’ll see something the public can play sometime in 2008,” he adds.

That sounds…. crunchalicious. Tech is not the only thing that takes 3 years to build in these things – you also need a nearly immeasurable amount of content. After all, you haven’t really created the true essence of the Captain Reynolds experience unless you’ve given them a lot of backwater worlds for them to hide around in.

Original comments thread is here.