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 .

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

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

I figured you must be joking, but:



"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.

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

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

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

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



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

- Ryan

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

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

Much closer to the low end than the high end.

--matt

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

-Visko

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'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

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

KaVir:
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

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

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

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?

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.)

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.


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

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.

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

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.
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.


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

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.

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

I have not flamed him. I have disagreed with the practicality of what he is offering. There is a difference.

Exactly. And why do you think that is?

I'm saying that I don't believe such a mud would be able to recover the required expenditure within any sort of realistic timeframe, particularly when a substantial chunk of the income is used paying off royalties.

No, Iron Realms Entertainment owns the engine. It didn't buy a license (from itself!), nor does it pay "substantial royalties" on its income. Furthermore it has taken six years since it opened for Achaea to reach the level of popularity that it has today, and from what I've read the early days were not easy.

I didn't mention you, but IMO some of these posts have been pretty flamatory. Guess I'm use to calmer boards *shrug*

Because it's primarily a hobbyist area. But so what? If muds can buy a liscence for Rapture and make a profit then what's the problem? You keep saying it's unlikely, but aside from the royalties aspect, Iron Realms did exactly that. It spent $10,000 on an engine and has become successful.

I don't know if the royalty aspect will make THAT much of a difference, guess we'll just have to wait and see.

You think 6 years isn't a realistic time frame? Besides, it'd be interesting to find out how long it took Iron Realms to gain a profit (I'm assuming it hasn't only just recently started gaining a profit).

I doubt that has much to do with it. I suspect the most likely reason is that it's such a niche market, there's not a great deal of money to be had. Running a successful mud is not easy, and that is even more the case when your livelihood depends on it.

Which is the primary point I've been talking about. The "signifant royalties" will be a constant hole in the pocket of the mud owner.

Without having to pay significant royalties, it's a realistic time frame.

Well, actually you are wrong about that. I don't have anything against commercial muds, as long as they charge their players per month or per hour or whatever - as long as it lets everyone start from the same platform.

What I DO have a problem with is Muds that sell In-game benefits for RL money, because that DOES defeat the purpose of the game.

And that's what you are doing, regardless of the smokescreens you try to put out.  If the players didn't get actual benefits from it, they obviously would not pay good money for those credits. And judging from the way you brag about your successful business idea at every possible occasion, you are making quite a good profit from it too.

I think you probably run a good Mud, but somewhere along the line your interest in profit took over all other aspects of it. (god knows you've demonstrated it enough times in your posts).

I wonder where the mudding community would be if the creators of DikuMUD didn't realease their code and decided to copyright it and sell it? Probably not where it is today.

-Delerak

Pretty bold statements considering you have no facts on which to base those conclusions. Why don't you spare everyone your speculative stabs in the dark.

What do the royalties have to do with the feasibility of a timeframe for returns on investment? When you finally break even, the numbers on accounting statements (like royalty payments) won't change the fact that you broke even.

Today? You mean inundated with identical stock muds run mostly by children who left their previous muds on tantrums, swearing to make the most l33t mud ever? Yeah, probably not.

- Ryan

KaVir:
I'm quite aware of many good bases to work from for a hobbyist.  As logos noted, none of these have a proven track record of years in a commercial environment supporting several hundred simultaneous users.  Am I missing something?

I imagine that, with royalties, you also get continuing support/development.  This may be much, much cheaper in the short term than hiring a coder (in the fully paid sense).

I don't believe that either of us has enough information to make that statement.  I believe that there are content development tools written in Rapture, and for all I or you know they're included.

I respect a lot of your opinions, but now you're claiming "it'll never work" to someone (logos, not me) who HAS made it work, past tense, and shows every sign of continuing to make it work.

Stilton

KaVir, responding to malaclypse:
Iron Realms now owns Rapture.  To get started,  Achaea LLC LICENSED Hourglass and then Vortex, and paid royaltie.

logos has in fact done what malaclypse proposes to do, and you claim above that he hasn't: start a company with a licensed engine and make it a success.

Stilton

Stilton that depends on your definition of success. Making lots of money? Sure. A success in my eyes? No, just a game that is making sales off poor saps who buy into it. I can deduce that at least 70% of the people who play Achaea (I am hypothesizing here) are not older and mature gamers, most likely they are younger, teenage kids who use their parents money or their allowance to buy their "credits". No it's not a fact, but it's just my guess, and that is why it is having 'success'.

-Delerak

The argument that has been posted to this board time and time again is that money is just another OOC commodity that can affect a mud. The other major one is time. Is it fair that in a diku the guy with nothing to do all day can beat the pants off a professional who can only log in the evenings? Not particularly.

And so it could be argued that by allowing more than one commodity to be used, it is actually more fair than your standard diku. Now the guy in his parents basement can play all day (giving back to the game community, thereby earning credits), and the professional can buy a few credits to save himself some time. They can both achieve.

Of course, if you're simply railing against capitalism, you wouldn't want it to be fair for the professional anyways. If thats the case (and the more you post the more it seems that way), then lets just agree to disagree.

I'd like to see you try to qualify that statement.

Obviously they get benefits from their purchases. But, as Matt pointed out earlier in this thread, the point of the game is not to acquire the things the company sells, the point of the game is the interaction between the players.

- Ryan

Wow, so, as far as I can tell, you've never spent any significant time in our games and yet you're already acquainted with the various purposes that players play the game for. Are you psychic?

If your idea of good mudding fun is item and skill acquisition then yes, you can buy success in our games. Can't say I know many players playing our games for whom that is true though and, in fact, our games would be awfully boring if you're playing for the purpose of getting skills or equipment.

You may have a difficult time processing this but all muds are not the same and all mud players aren't looking for the same thing.


Of course they get benefits from buying credits. What's your point though? They buy those credits because it increases their enjoyment of the game, just like I might subscribe to a game because it's more fun than just looking at the website. I'm not sure what your problem is with that. Just don't buy them if you don't want them. *shrug*

--matt

Ahh, speculation in the absence of any information is wonderful isn't it?

The average age of our players is 24.

--matt

Yep, they all do. I'm not sure if you want to call it roleplaying or not but it is definitely very immersive and players take the political aspects of the game -very- seriously. They write constitutions, sets of laws, have trials, elections, conspire to throw people out of office, etc. It's great fun if you're really involved in the political side, whether that's at the religious, guild, or city level.

So, if I'm a member of the Shamans guild, which is not getting along with the city it is chartered in (Hashan) and I have a guild meeting to formulate a strategy to stack the Hashan ruling class with either Shamans or people sympathetic to us, but mention that I saw last night's Daily Show and found it funny, am I RPing? That's what I mean when I say I don't know (or care) if it's what people consider "RP". I'm just happy to see players taking the world and their positions in it seriously.

--matt

I'm not a naysayer, I just personally don't like people who make money off of muds, something that was never meant to be a money-making business, yet it is turning into one sadly enough. Maybe I will slip my dungeon master a 20$ and he'll give my dwarven fighter 200 gold. Sounds good.

-Delerak

Never meant to be? Funny how the inventor of muds turned his first mud into a commercial mud 20 years ago. Funny how the biggest muds since then have -always- been commercial. Funny how hobbyist muds as you know them didn't start until about 10 years after muds began.

And "turning into one"? The heyday of commercial text muds was 1995-1997. At least one text mud was making over 1 million/month during that time. No text muds make that much now.

Get your facts straight, yet again.

Of course, what it was "meant" to be is irrelevant. If by "meant to" you mean whatever the first mud did, then I wonder why you're not objecting to all muds that are not MUD I, since they are all doing things that, by your reckoning, were not "meant to be".

--matt

Yes, you have a blind hatred of capitalism.  The worst part about that isn't that you perpetuate ad hominem threads. The worst part of it is that you undermine those who share your political views because rather than give intelligent, coherent arguments, you just throw out opinions and false numbers to back up your claims.

- Ryan

My hatred for capitalism isn't blind. I know exactly why I hate capitalism.

-The poor stay poor.
-The rich stay rich.
-We grow up thinking we are gonna become something great and wonderufl, like rock stars and musical performers, well, you don't.
-The country is run by people with money, money - which is just paper with dead presidents faces on it, such a false sense of worth isn't it? And is the reason the rich stay rich.

No not all of these are facts, but they are true. I don't need facts to prove this, I know it's true, step outside of any of the richest city in America and take a look around at all the beggars, pollution, and morbid society that continues day in and day out with their capitalist lives. No matter if you are a construction worker, actually making the building for that CEO, or not, you are just a drone going about your capitalist life with no purpose but to acquire one thing: money, which is simply paper printed in a fancy way. That's why I don't like capitalism Malaclypse, it isn't a blind belief.

-Delerak

I don't think Roy Trubshaw in the late 70s was thinking:
"Oh I have an idea, I will create a game that is complete text and it will sell and sell and sell and I will be a millionaire."
No I think he got inspiration for something and started working on it as a project. Here is some "facts" for you non-believing Achaea capitalists.

Roy's reasons for writing MUD were twofold: to make a multi-player adventure game; to write an interpreter for a database definition language. The language he developed was rather crude, and I had to hack it to get it to do a lot of the things I wanted to do. This was partly because Roy didn't know the kind of things that would be needed from a game-design perspective, and partly because the multi-user aspect came to dominate the project. However, the core of the database definition language (MUD definition language - MUDDL) was all Roy's. I didn't add it, I added TO it.


Do you see money anywhere? No. Go read on it here.



And tell me where money is mentioned logos.