Comment by Arwill

Putting together an MMO requires knowledge how to make your software systems scale. Putting together a demo in Unreal is the exact opposite of that. That is why you see so many bad MMO-s, they can make a demo, but they could not make that scale in 100 years.

If going by the above logic that just showing expertise is enough to get funding, then why was an Unreal demo valued as expertise at all?

If they showed expertise by demoing a network server/cluster, or world streaming, or asset import workflow, then i would say that there is some relevant expertise.

But they didn't even import a custom character into Unreal for their demo, how are they going to make a character creator and a clothing system?