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Many businesses survive years and years of no profit. Some investors are willing to take a long-term view and sacrifice short-term results for potential long-term benefit.
Well, I'll tell you what. I run commercial MUDs. Four of them. And ours would stay open regardless of the profit. What would go would be the paid staff. There's no way we'd shut down our MUDs, as we're all quite emotionally attached to them and, if worst came to worst, would just convert them to hobbyist MUDs.
Taking their toll on what or whom exactly, and what data are you basing this on?
Well, this is completely incorrect in my opinion, with all due respect.
First of all, there's an enormous sense of community in even World of Warcraft. It's just a different sense of community. It's guilds rather than everybody in the entire game knowing everyone else, like in small text MUDs. For instance, there's a whole community that's recently arisen as a result of the in-game (friendly) conflict between the PvP Online guilds and the Penny Arcade guilds.
As far as roleplay goes....people don't want it. Seriously. Go log into the most popular commercial MUDs/MMOs in the West: World of Warcraft and Runescape. The roleplay in WoW is pretty pathetic by text MUD standards, and there is none at all in Runescape as far as I can tell from playing it. I have yet to encounter a single person making any serious attempt at roleplay, for instance. The situation in Asia (where MUDs/MMOS are far more popular than in the West) is similar.
Roleplaying is an extremely geeky (no offence, I'm a geek and I'm proud of it) past-time, and it's also an extremely hardcore past time insofar as it requires people to really give their imaginations a workout. That's not popular these days, unfortunately.
We had our best month ever in August, though I can't speak for anyone else.
--matt
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