making money with custom maps !?

Sounds good! I'm always open to more stuff, Only reason I had been thinking Torque was because of all the license options and price, so when I made it to a release I could get a license and port over to other platforms if I got to that point. I haven't really had too big of look at the Torque engine, only used their demos and fiddled with the map editor, as the rest of the stuff is locked away unless you buy it, and I sure didn't want to buy something I wont even really touch for awhile...

I worked with unity. And my team had really quick results with it.

Same thing as with many folks around here - I'll either apply for a job in the GI (had some interesting offers already, but I'll finish studying first - heck, I'm only 23, and that's what most of us are, low to mid 20s), or go right into my own freelance company and get licenses for everything that's needed, so I can claim that the work I'm doing on my "Mod" isn't work I'm doing only for fun's sake.

I've already put aside some money for that purpose, even if that means I'm not living a very pleasant student's life right now.

Video Games volume of sales has reached that of Hollywood in 2006, and beaten it in 2007 and 2008, and I'm very determined to participate in that business since frankly, I feel like I've got the talent to do that and I damn sure spend my daily pensum of work (on some days up to 16 hours) on getting better at turning my ideas into actually playable video games. Adds up to a realistic chance to be successful. From my experience, there's really more than a handful of people capable of creating better stuff than the big companies (a fact that reflects itself not only, but also in the growing number of mods turning into standalone-games).

On the long run, a joint venture of really absolutely qualified and highly talented devs, all coming from the custom scene, forming an independent studio and creating all the content from the first sketch to the last brushstroke should be able to produce a game that sells. I've spent three years now working in many teams with a lot of people who work for big studios, making various modifications, so I did in fact get some insight into the processes that are behind the development of a video game. The only external thing that'll be necessary for this concept to work is the publisher, since making a game and publishing it are two entirely different pairs of shoes.

And yes, warby, this would in fact be the money generating machine. But what makes this different from a couch potatoe's wet daydream is the fact that it'd require at least one year of hard, mostly unpaid work and discipline. And although the hard-work-factor wouldn't change over the years, the benefit will be that those people working in that studio can really claim to do what they want to for a living.

Frankly, I'm also fond of traveling and I want to see the world and meet people while I'm young. But I'd rather spend another two years working hard and without anything to show for if that means I'll not be forced to spend my life working a 08/15 job until I'm allowed to retire and die with 67 years...