[the_logos]

Mill Valley, CA -- September 27, 2003 -- Iron Realms Entertainment announced today that it had finalized a license for its Rapture Technology Suite with Persistent Realms, a new Santa Cruz based developer of online games.

"We are excited to be using the Rapture Technology Suite," said Ryan Schwab, Persistent Realms's President. "It has already accelerated our development process significantly, to such an extent that we are confident in saying we can deliver a fully featured game by the third quarter of 2004."

Matt Mihaly, Iron Realms' CEO said, "We believe Rapture is one of the fastest and most stable text mud engines available, making it ideal for commercial use. There is also no other licensable text mud engine that has proven it can support games with the commercial track record of Achaea, Aetolia, and Imperian."

For more information visit www.ironrealms.com/other.htm.

[visko]

You people are all around Mill Valley?! Damnit. I was living in Palo Alto and working in Menlo Park/Sausalito/the city all of last year. I would have dropped by if I'd known.

-Visko

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (visko @ Sep. 27 2003,21:34) You people are all around Mill Valley?!  Damnit.  I was living in Palo Alto and working in Menlo Park/Sausalito/the city all of last year.  I would have dropped by if I'd known. -Visko

Well, I'm in Mill Valley at least. Other people are in Colorado Springs, Seattle, Toronto, and London. You've just gotta love the internet!

Sausalito and Menlo Park is a strange combination of places! What were you doing that had interests in both places?

--matt

[Amnon]

Hopefully they'll find someone willing to actually buy it... From what I read, the amount of money involved contains 5 figures.

I dunno, maybe Bill Gates is a MUDder and will wanna buy the license :P

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by From what I read, the amount of money involved contains 5 figures.

I figured you must be joking, but:

http://www.ironrealms.com/other.htm

"Rapture is available for license but the cost is in five figures."

[Azhon]

Originally Posted by (KaVir @ Sep. 28 2003,20:05) Originally Posted by From what I read, the amount of money involved contains 5 figures. I figured you must be joking, but: http://www.ironrealms.com/other.htm "Rapture is available for license but the cost is in five figures."

Considering he bought it originally from avalon for 10K, that isn't such an unreasonable figure for a licence.

http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev...1/msg01596.php

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (Amnon @ Sep. 28 2003,06:56) Hopefully they'll find someone willing to actually buy it... From what I read, the amount of money involved contains 5 figures. I dunno, maybe Bill Gates is a MUDder and will wanna buy the license

If you read the press release you'll see that one group has already bought it for that price. That was what the release was announcing.
--matt

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (Azhon @ Sep. 28 2003,07:58) Considering he bought it originally from avalon for 10K, that isn't such an unreasonable figure for a licence.

Actually, I originally bought Hourglass for 10k. It was a thorough piece of **** and ran on Acorn RISC machines before being ported to linux. We then switched to Vortex (on its 5th version at that point) wihch had originally been backwards compatible with Hourglass but had gone way beyond Hourglass. It was written by someone with no connection to Avalon besides being a player. We eventually bought Vortex outright from the author to save on royalty payments in the long run and then decided that we needed to start from scratch anyhow as Vortex was hopelessly slow. Our new engine, Rapture, was developed internally and is quite good. Vortex we just killed as it is inferior in every way to Rapture.

--matt

[the_logos]

5-->

Originally Posted by (KaVir @ Sep. 28 2003,07[img http://www.topmudsites.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wow.gif[/img]5)]figured you must be joking, but: http://www.ironrealms.com/other.htm "Rapture is available for license but the cost is in five figures."

Eh, if you can't come up with 10k, you're extremely unlikely to succeed on a level that makes it worthwhile for us to license to you (ie pays us significant royalties).

Heck, we recently had an American soldier srving in Iraq spend wire us US$10,000 to buy credits in Achaea. (Although I think he split the cost with another soldier over there.)

--matt

[Amnon]

By the way, does 5 figures mean 10K, or $99,999?

[malaclypse]

I would just like to add that you can get more information as it becomes available on our website:

www.persistentrealms.com

Not much there yet, but we're just getting started.

- Ryan

[Hephos]

No offense to iron realms, but anyone paying five figures for a text based engine is NUTS.

[malaclypse]

Originally Posted by (Hephos @ Sep. 28 2003,14:10) No offense to iron realms, but anyone paying five figures for a text based engine is NUTS.

Not if you consider the alternative of spending lots of time and effort programming an engine from scratch, and then also consider the lost revenues incurred as a result of that additional development time.

- Ryan

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (Hephos @ Sep. 28 2003,17:10) No offense to iron realms, but anyone paying five figures for a text based engine is NUTS.

Shrug. I paid 10k for a text mud engine and it's led to quite a successful company. I'm not going to talk about what our revenue is but consider that we currently have five full-timers earning competitive developer (60k+) salaries. Best 10 grand I ever spent.

--matt

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (Amnon @ Sep. 28 2003,15:35) By the way, does 5 figures mean 10K, or $99,999?

Much closer to the low end than the high end.

--matt

[visko]

I lived in Palo Alto and was doing a little construction over in Menlo. Sausalito was a software development project - Zigzag.

-Visko

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by Eh, if you can't come up with 10k, you're extremely unlikely to succeed on a level that makes it worthwhile for us to license to you (ie pays us significant royalties).

You're telling me that as well as paying a $10k license fee, people also have to pay you "significant royalties"?

I'm sorry, but anyone who falls for that is obviously lacking in business sense. There is simply not the market to recover that sort of expenditure within any sort of realistic timeframe.

[Hephos]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ Sep. 28 2003,18:16) Originally Posted by (Hephos @ Sep. 28 2003,17:10) No offense to iron realms, but anyone paying five figures for a text based engine is NUTS. Shrug. I paid 10k for a text mud engine and it's led to quite a successful company. I'm not going to talk about what our revenue is but consider that we currently have five full-timers earning competitive developer (60k+) salaries. Best 10 grand I ever spent. --matt

Yeah i guess our point of view is a bit different. We have a great coding crew but no strong financial backup. To us creating a codebase from scratch is easier than coming up with 10k Though, if our coders wanted a standard salary 10k sounds really cheap.

[malaclypse]

Originally Posted by (KaVir @ Sep. 28 2003,23:24) I'm sorry, but anyone who falls for that is obviously lacking in business sense.  There is simply not the market to recover that sort of expenditure within any sort of realistic timeframe.

I'm not sure why you are speaking with such feigned authority and objectivism when there are many examples to the contrary. You are also choosing to ignore the brand name recognition that Rapture has among players who are already used to (and happy with) the Achaean business model.

- Ryan

[malaclypse]

Originally Posted by (Hephos @ Sep. 29 2003,00:42) Yeah i guess our point of view is a bit different. We have a great coding crew but no strong financial backup. To us creating a codebase from scratch is easier than coming up with 10k Though, if our coders wanted a standard salary 10k sounds really cheap.

Which brings up another good point that was considered when Persistent Realms was making the decision on whether or not to purchase Rapture: With this software, our entire team can keep their dayjobs, each one worth far more than the pricetag of the engine.

- Ryan

[Stilton]

KaVir:

Originally Posted by I'm sorry, but anyone who falls for that is obviously lacking in business sense.

How many hours have you put into GodWars II so far?

What would that figure lead you to believe it would cost a company to develop an engine themselves?  What would the lead time be?  How long would they have to wait before the engine and related tools were even ready to support content development?

Stilton

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (KaVir @ Sep. 29 2003,02:24) You're telling me that as well as paying a $10k license fee, people also have to pay you "significant royalties"? I'm sorry, but anyone who falls for that is obviously lacking in business sense.  There is simply not the market to recover that sort of expenditure within any sort of realistic timeframe.

I have financial models that demonstrate otherwise. I also have three games that demonstrate otherwise. In fact, Imperian did more in -net profit- than that its first month.

If we end up doing a Feist text game, we'll invest closer to 100k than 10k in it and it'll be well worth it.

You've no idea what you're talking about.
--matt

[vedic]

Out of curiosity, how does your donation system work? I understand about the credits, but it sounds like you'd have to make a lot of things in the game available for cash in order to get people to send in that much money.

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (vedic @ Sep. 29 2003,16:04) Out of curiosity, how does your donation system work? I understand about the credits, but it sounds like you'd have to make a lot of things in the game available for cash in order to get people to send in that much money.

Well, just to clear this up: it's not donations. You are buying a service from us. I just hate it when muds that sell services claim they "take donations" as if to pretend they're not trying to make money via sales.

Now that that's out of the way, our system works like this. There's a generic currency called 'credits' (as you know) that you can purchase from our websites. Once you buy them, they get deposited on whatever character you choose. They are fully tradeable so you're free to do with them as you wish. You can convert them into lessons to raise your skills, you can buy artifacts (swords, magical items, etc) with them, you can buy houses, pets, custom modifications, economic skills like tailoring or masonry, and so on.

The other ways to get credits include: Mentoring people who buy credits (you get 15% of their first 4 purchases), leading a city or guild (you get 5% of all guildmember or city member purchases), going up in levels (gets you NeoCredits, which can only be used to convert into lessons. Can't buy artifacts with NeoCredits), getting awards in our monthly art and writing contests, winning the occasional contest, or just getting them from other players. There's an active market in gold for credits (and vice versa) so even if you have no rl money you can acquire gold in-game and trade it for credits, as some people have more rl money than rl time, and some people have more rl time than rl money.

So then what you can buy are generally: tools (better swords than the average forged one, for instance), customizations, skills, housing, and pets. There may be some other minor things but these are the major ones. The key to this business model is ensuring that you aren't trying to sell people the object of the game.

For instance, in a DIKU-style game many players bash monsters to get 'phat lewt' to bash bigger monsters to get bigger lewt, etc. If you ran a game like that and sold people the items you'd probably not have a lot of players because you're selling them the purpose of the game. Our games aren't item-oriented though (few monsters give any sort of loot beyond gold). Instead, people buy combat artifacts, for instance, largely to help with PvP (and some PvE). As such, we can't be selling them a sword that is, say, twice as good as the average forged sword. Instead, we sell them swords that are between about 5 and 15% better.

Think of selling items in a virtual world like golf. I'm not a golfer myself (deathly boring if you ask me) but obviously there are a lot of people who are really into golf. Some percentage of those people are into golf enough that they'll spend significant amounts of money on it. They might spend $3000 (or more. I assume you can spend almost unlimited amounts on golf clubs.) on a set of metal sticks. Now, without the context of the game of golf, would anybody pay $3000 for a set of thin metal sticks? No. Those otherwise useless metal sticks take on a huge amount of value within the right context (golf in this case).

It's similar with a virtual world. Outside of the virtual world, the services you're buying (you're not buying an item since from the real-world perspective there are no magical swords. Just database entries) seem insane at first glance to many people. "You spent $200 on a sword in a game??" But at the same time, I might say to someone who just spent $2000 on a set of golf clubs, "You spent $2000 on some metal sticks in a game?"

A skeptic might reply, "Yes, but the metal sticks are, at least, real, and the sword isn't." This is true. The sword isn't a sword, but it does give me extra functionality in a context (the game) that I find attractive and valuable. I might also point out to the skeptic that I bought Dreamweaver recently for a few hundred dollars and bought it via download from Adobe. No box, no physical product. Is that "real?" Who cares, I say. It lets me do what I want in a context (web design) that I find attractive and valuable.

--matt

[vedic]

Well, the question of whether it's a donation or whether it's an actual sale, depends less on hypocrisy and more on your point of view and a certain amount of legality. If it's a sale, what happens if the player gets deleted for causing problems? Can they then sue you to recover their property, even if it is virtual? Do you refund their money that has been spent through the credits system? How do you handle situations like that?

So instead of killing monsters and gaining loot, your players are killing each other in a PK environment? They get loot from that, I assume, but not from NPCs.

It sounds like you've taken a practice point concept and converted it to be based on the dollar. Don't you get complaints about the game being "for sale" and what not, and jealousy from the poorer players towards the more affluent players? How do you deal with those types of complaints and keep your players happy?

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by Well, the question of whether it's a donation or whether it's an actual sale, depends less on hypocrisy and more on your point of view and a certain amount of legality. If it's a sale, what happens if the player gets deleted for causing problems? Can they then sue you to recover their property, even if it is virtual? Do you refund their money that has been spent through the credits system? How do you handle situations like that?

Well, we don't sell property to players. We sell the service of allowing them access to certain database entries. Further, they agree in our EULA that we are the judge, jury, and executioner. If you break our rules, we're within our rights to punish you as we see fit, and we're also the only interpreter of our rules. (That's how basically all muds are run, of course, from the smallest stock mud to Everquest.)

Originally Posted by So instead of killing monsters and gaining loot, your players are killing each other in a PK environment? They get loot from that, I assume, but not from NPCs.

Well, they fight, raid enemy cities, they run their city governments, get involved in guild and religious politics, etc. Politics are a big part of the games.

And no, you don't really get loot from killing players. They'll drop any gold they're holding but intelligent players put their gold in a bank or put it somewhere else safe. Loot isn't a big part of our games.

Originally Posted by It sounds like you've taken a practice point concept and converted it to be based on the dollar. Don't you get complaints about the game being "for sale" and what not, and jealousy from the poorer players towards the more affluent players? How do you deal with those types of complaints and keep your players happy?

Sure, we get those sorts of complaints but then, Everquest and company constantly get complaints that their games are for sale to the people with the most time. The entire DIKU model is predicated on buying success with time. You can actually only "buy" anything you want in Achaea with time. We've got players who have played for free for thousands of hours without ever spending a dime, have maxed out their skills, gotten lots of artifacts, etc. It's just easier to buy the stuff. The stuff you can buy with credits isn't the point of the game anyway. Power is in combat skill (which you can't buy, though you can buy tools that help) and political influence. Political influence you can't buy at all as you just have to convince people you're worthy to lead.

I don't really care if players are jealous of other players. They need to realize that the reason those without any money are allowed to play is because other people are basically covering their tab by buying more-than-average amounts from us. Subscription games don't let you play -at all- without giving them money, after all.

--matt

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by What would that figure lead you to believe it would cost a company to develop an engine themselves? What would the lead time be? How long would they have to wait before the engine and related tools were even ready to support content development?

There are other perfectly good engines which could be used - there's no reason why a company would need to develop their own unless they need it to do something which isn't feasible with the currently available engines. However unless the mud owner plans to run a "stock Rapture" mud, they're still going to need to invest a huge amount of time and effort in order to turn it into a decent mud.

And where will the players for these new Rapture muds come from? The existing games mostly, I would guess, which is going to dilute the income of the other muds. And that, I imagine, is why The_Logos wants each such mud to pay "significant royalties" in addition to the $10000 licensing fee - a good business model for The_Logos, certainly, but not for the person running the mud. The market for commercial text-based muds is not huge.

[Molly]

To sum up what the_logos is using a lot of words to say in one sentence:

In Achaea you can buy success for $,

Some players apparently like that concept.
Personally I don't.

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (Molly O'Hara @ Sep. 30 2003,04:15) To sum up what the_logos is using a lot of words to say in one sentence: In Achaea you can buy success for $, Some players apparently like that concept. Personally I don't.

No more than a $3000 pair of golf clubs buys you success in golf.

I understand that you're a bitter person and fundamentally have something against commercial muds (god knows you've demonstrated it enough times in your posts) but grow up Molly. You're too caught up in your own frustrated rage to actually read what I wrote.

--matt

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by There are other perfectly good engines which could be used - there's no reason why a company would need to develop their own unless they need it to do something which isn't feasible with the currently available engines.

Certainly there are other mud engines available. However, there are not, to my knowledge at least, other available mud engines available that have proved themselves to nearly the same extent in a commerical environment. There's no arguing with the idea that something proven commercially is less risky than something not proven commercially. I mean, you can argue with it (I've seen people argue with more obvious statements on this site, god knows) but it'll just get you laughed at.

Originally Posted by However unless the mud owner plans to run a "stock Rapture" mud, they're still going to need to invest a huge amount of time and effort in order to turn it into a decent mud.

Rapture is an engine, not a codebase. There's no such thing as a "stock Rapture" mud. Or rather, there is, but all you can do is log in and use the 'say' and 'who' commands.

Originally Posted by And where will the players for these new Rapture muds come from?  The existing games mostly, I would guess, which is going to dilute the income of the other muds.

The playerbase of all our games combined has tripled since our second game opened 2 years ago.

Originally Posted by And that, I imagine, is why The_Logos wants each such mud to pay "significant royalties" in addition to the $10000 licensing fee - a good business model for The_Logos, certainly, but not for the person running the mud.

So your logic is that we'd sell Rapture to people in the expectation that they will significantly dilute our existing game revenue and then try to gain some of that back via royalties? Yeah...brilliant. Without expansion of market share or expansion of market (we're achieving both) doing anything that results in significant cannibalization is silly without royalties beyond what would even approach reasonable.

Originally Posted by The market for commercial text-based muds is not huge.

At least THAT'S a sensible statement. Of course, text-based muds also don't need huge amounts of players to be profitable. There's enough room for lots more commercial text muds.

I don't mean this insultingly, but you're looking at this from the hobbyist point of view and while that's well and good it doesn't give you much insight into the business of text muds.  We've grown 40%+ for 5 consecutive years now. ####, we're projecting 60% growth for 2003.

--matt