Re: Barriers to commercial MUDs
I was thinking about that exact same thought last night (after I made my last post).
The biggest problems is that Simutronics (and to a lesser extent, IRE) created the bulk of their code/content in the golden days of text MUDs. Simutronics must have poured at least a million into their code/content (because they were making a lot through hourly billing), not to mention years of fine tuning.
All things being equal (which they aren't), you could invest $1M of your own money and take away half of Simutronics' market. I suspect that the return on the $1M investment would be less than you could get by putting the money in the bank (assuming the bank doesn't go under. :-P ).
And, of course, there are all the completely-free hobbyist MUDs, some of them with content to rival Simutronics. You have to compete against them too.
It's not impossible, but it's very challenging.
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