removed playful mocking in agreement of cas comment

In the San Francisco Bay Area, which is kinda sorta the gaming/engineer capital of the world, an entry-level junior game engineer could expect around $60,000 / yr, plus benefits and stock options. Ignoring those benefits, that boils down to (assuming a 40-hour work week and 4 weeks off a year) about $31.25 / hour. 50 pounds a month is, when generous, $100 a month. $100 / 160 hours (4 40 hour weeks) is 63 cents / hour. Minimum wage in San Francisco is $9.50 / hour.

I was working when I was 16 at $7 / hr, washing dishes for a restaurant. I knew how to program a graphing calculator in 5th grade or something like that, and at that age I might have been mildly interested in $100 / month (my allowance was $50 / month).

So. You're looking for kids who barely know how to program, or what?

Now some actual advice... don't bother offering such a tiny amount of money, and learn to program yourself. As a game engineer myself, this sentence of yours: "I have ideas, I can invest time on it, but I need someone else to do the development for me" both made me laugh out loud, tell the game engineer, sitting next to me (as a hilarious joke), and completely and totally turned me off to any thought of ever working on your project ever. Something that's frustrating for me as a professional game engineer is being the monkey who implements other peoples' ideas - ideas you often don't agree with or understand and sometimes from people you don't think are qualified to make game design decisions. But - I do it because I get paid and I learn important things from everyone else.

So, if you take the money out of the equation too... What incentive do people have?

Instead, learn how to code yourself, and then make it yourself.

There are groups who churn out MMOs in just a few months. Mostly small website style ones, far from a typical MMO, but they do it. It's the full triple-A MMO that expects 10s of millions of users which takes decades to build, and indie versions of those MMOs which take years.

So I think if you scaled back your plans enough, aren't planning to make the next WoW, and even added elements to make it easier to build (like force small teams like in PSO), then sure you can build an MMO. Won't be easy, will take you several years, but it's certainly not impossible.

But I'd be weary of offering money on such a small and new project. Offering such a tiny amount will not attract anyone decent, and probably not anyone truly interested in seeing the project succeed. Might not be bad people, but will be mostly interested in making £1,000 doing some cheap Java work; that's all. On such an early project that is not what you need.

To clarify here is what I would suggest: scale back your plans to something reasonable, get an alpha demo built, then look for others to help out, then build to completion.

I wouldn't worry so much about trying to find players whilst it's built; people just don't like playing incomplete/buggy games. So you can start doing looking for users when it's approaching completion.

Finally like others have said, having ideas means nothing. Even good ideas are worthless if they are badly implemented.

You made an account just to revive this old thread? O_o