[KaVir]

My comments were made within the context of your earlier statement "It's so trivial to start a hobbyist MUD" (emphasis mine). As I pointed out before, it's certainly trivial to start a stock mud, but a game isn't suddenly going to become more difficult to create just because the players start sending you cash.

If you were to only compare muds which had been started from scratch (rather than based on a stock engine), I'd be surprised if there was a huge difference between the number of hobbyist and commercial muds.

And before someone takes offence at that comment, please remember that we're explicitly talking about starting a mud - it's trivial to download, compile and start up a stock mud, and that is without doubt one of the main reasons why there are so many fly-by-night muds.

Sure, agreed (assuming we're talking about muds that are operated as a full business, rather than just selling a few trinkets to cover their hosting costs). But before you can start charging your players, you first need a running game for them to play - and the development phase is the hurdle where I've seen most muds fail.

I've seen numerous mud projects that had (what I felt was) great potential, but hardly any of them survived long enough to produce anything playable. Were they failed commercial muds, though, or failed hobbyist muds? Who knows - they never got that far. And the same could also be said of the muds that start from stock; most fail, but they never reached the point where going commercial was even an option.

That's why I think it's difficult to compare the number of failed hobbyist against the number of failed commercial muds - because many of the former might well have become commercial had they not failed. A common question you'll hear among hobbyist mudders is "If your game becomes successful, will you go commercial?"