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Old 03-19-2014, 10:17 AM   #10
plamzi
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Join Date: Nov 2009
Home MUD: bedlam.mudportal.com:9000
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Re: How do you bring back a fading MUD?

Marketing is the biggest challenge for all indie games, not just MUDs. But running a MUD in this day also involves facing a number of unique challenges that other indie games don't have. To name a few of the big ones:

* Text-based I/O. To modern players, a MUD looks like a chatroom in a "real" game, and is disqualified instantly in a world where even graphical games are disqualified for not being as pretty as other graphical games. Text-based I/O also means you need basic reading and writing skills in a particular language, whereas a graphical UI could enable a game to cross language boundaries much more easily.

* Very low entry barrier for devs, negligible maintenance costs. Pretty much anyone can put up a MUD in less than a day and start hacking away. And if you have 0-3 players, you can still keep your game/hobby going on indefinitely because the cost of keeping a game going is so low. This results in audience fragmentation and a great number of lower-quality offerings that probably reflect negatively on the overall ability of MUDs to attract and retain new players.

* Unwillingness to change. It seems that at this point almost everyone who thought MUDs should experiment with new technologies has left the building. Even something as obvious as the fact that telnet is no longer a default application is lost on most MUD devs and admins. The audiences have moved on, but most of us haven't.

To me, it seems that there are two healthy directions that a MUD can take. The first direction is going to echo some of the earlier posters. It involves becoming "even nicher", offering a unique RPI experience, or a staggeringly complex text-based world that no graphical game can ever hope to match. After spending countless of hours achieving this and slowly converting veterans of other MUDs, you *may* get to a relatively stable playerbase. At least, you'll have a better fighting chance.

But not every new MUD can go RPI or roll out a world that can compete with games that have been in development for decades now. The other direction is to start trying to reach new players where new players now live. On sites like Facebook and Kongregate. On mobile devices and tablets. On new platforms that offer a key advantage to early adopters. With this approach, you would have to constantly re-think the way people play your game.

To put it simply, Option A means greater emphasis on the server and catering exclusively to MUD vets, while Option B means greater emphasis on the client(s) and trying to broaden your target audience.
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