[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