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Old 05-04-2013, 05:37 PM   #125
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

One of my games - Earth Eternal - is on that list, so you're preaching to the choir a bit there! That game started as part of Iron Realms before I spun it off into Sparkplay Media and raised a bunch of money to build it. We sold it, and it's been shut down since (I think, it was running in Japan after being localized to Japanese for awhile).

However, being in a browser or out of a browser is irrelevant except for user-acquisition. Earth Eternal ran in a browser and as a download, for instance. Runescape could be bundled up and run as a standalone if they wished. Earth Eternal was, on a broad functional level, identical to WoW. Sharded game experience built to scale, 3d quasi-seamless world with instanced areas, etc etc.

I don't feel one way or another about graphics really. I've built 3d games, I've built text games. It's about product-market fit. I don't believe there is any product-market fit for what is fundamentally a traditional real-time text MUD experience with 2d graphics on top. If someone proves me wrong with a commercially successful product (or even a very strong and popular hobbyist one), then congratulations: You've just gained yourself a well-funded competitor, because we will immediately start building multiple games like that. I don't believe it's going to happen though, so I'm not going to spend the money to figure out how to do it right. If someone else takes the risk and succeeds, awesome!

The thing about most of the games on that list you referenced is that they don't require that you just "give up a little bit of ability to produce content cheaply." Iron Realms spent over half a million of our own money building Earth Eternal, and then we spent another nearly $8 million of other people's money. And we the conclusion I came to was that I should have raised more money, because it wasn't enough to build a competitive product in that space. That's a long way of saying that you have no chance as an individual of competing with the biggest games on that list because the up-front investment is too large, unless you unexpectedly strike gold, which is what happened to both Runescape and Minecraft. However, you couldn't release Runescape today and hope to compete (the market 13 years ago was very different), and neither of those games are primarily text in any way. Minecraft barely even has text.

There is one genre of text-based game that has done well and still does pretty well in some cases particularly on mobile: Mafia Wars-style games. They're basically just text with lesser or greater amounts of graphics plopped on top of them, where the 'game world' is completely abstract. What they distinctly are NOT, however, is anything that I'd recognize as a MUD or MMO, regardless of whether some people might legitimately stretch the definition to include them. And, the genre has moved on to the point now that it's probably not enough to just have text. You need a compelling mini-game to support it (like CSR Racing on mobile - $12 million revenue in its first 6 weeks, but it cost them a couple million, at least, to build it).

I don't think we're really talking about MF-style games though.

Which games on there are you really referring to as examples? I know how most of the successful ones on there were built, and none of them are really anything like what I think we're talking about (which I think is what I'd consider a hybrid model where most of the game action is real-time text, with selected 2d graphics overlaid on the experience).
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