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The good free muds do. But they don't have to in order to continue to exist. There's nothing stopping a hobbyist from running a mud as his or her personal fiefdom and acting like an erratic Roman God. Indeed, growing large can be a problem for free muds due to bandwidth costs. I know Aardwolf had to start accepting money a few months out of the year in order to pay for those bandwidth costs, for instance.
I think when some people here hear "free mud" they think "He must be talking about my mud specifically rather than a general pattern among most free muds." I try to add the "I'm talking about free muds in general, which include about 1000 that you've never heard of because they have about 2 players and are done very poorly."
The benefits of pay muds to the developers are obvious and worth promoting particularly as commercial games are the only ones capable of attracting any kind of attention from media or the wider games market. That's just the way it is, right or wrong. I have both a personal and a financial interest in seeing that people are exposed to text muds who otherwise wouldn't be. We can all market to new potential mud players virally through our playerbases but free muds aren't really in a position to reach out directly to a wider market.
I don't care why you're pushing Aardwolf, as you obviously love it, but perhaps the benefit to you is simply that you get pleasure from being loudly pro-Aardwolf. *shrug*
--matt
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