From the guys who brought you World of Warcraft comes... another MMORPG company?

Reuters reports that on Monday members of the original team that developed WoW, now called Red 5 Studios, have raised $18.5 million in venture captial to begin producing their own online games.

From the story:

Mark Kern, Red 5's chief executive and former team leader on "World of Warcraft," said his California-based game studio will create original games for online game operators and distributors -- much as Pixar Animation Studios did in the movie world with its animated films such as "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo."

I'm anticipating, knowing these guys are pretty smart cookies, that they will not limit their development projects to the PC and branch out into consoles like the XBox 360, PS3 and Wii. Of course, that's my conjecture. Nothing in the story mentions what they'll be developing and for whom. All it says is that these guys are now hired guns for publishers and have enough bank to make a go of it.

[From Reuters]