It is true that in a game like those IRE runs someone has to be buying credits for the credit-economy to work. This means that there would not be credits available for people to buy for gold if there simply were no people buying credits at all. In this, you are totally right.
It is also true that it is clear, for anybody who visits their websites that the game has an in-game type of currency called credits which are things that can be bought with real-life money.
It is also true that it is clear that IRE games are a commercial enterprice, and that anybody who is able to legally use a credit card (this should be only people 18 yr old or older in the US, where the games are hosted), can readily find this by skimming through the web-pages of their websites (all of them mention the credits and the fact that you can buy them, and the fact that they can be used whithin the game).
If we accept the above, we might considering accepting that a person who would be able to use money for advancement in these games (ie. 18 yr old or older, with a credit card account), regardless of whether they were planing or not to spend money in the games, would understand that the games would cease to be a commercial entreprice, or cease to exist if nobody bought credits. This is obvios, I hope.
Now, with this background, we could accept that someone playing these games, with some very basic understanding of economy (reading CNN or other news resource every now and then should be enough is my guess) would realize that there has to exist a continuous influx of credits into the game via people buying credits (regardless of how wealthy these people are), and as such, this translates into a constant availability of credits to be exchanged for other types of game currency or service, be it gold, items, body-guarding, etc ... If this was not true, then the commercial MUD would cease to be profitable, and as such, it would soon cease to exist.
I believe that IRE advertises their games to be free and that it is posible to have continuous advancement without having to spend money because of two things. First, their game economy, driven both by in-game-goods as well as ooc-obtained credits has reached a balance on which there is always a certain amount of credits available for the public. This is probably something you cannot set as a game designer, it is something that you just observe happening, and you probably can later adjust credit prices or credit market tax or whatever you wish, to fit your game needs for money influx. Since we are talking about a somewhat stable system, it is sensible to believe that unless they mess up very badly, the market should not drastically change, and this means they can safely say that a player can join the game, play for free, enjoy everything for free (except for buying credits *duh*), making it a free game for them. They have all the options identical to all other players, except that they have to obtain credits through the player-driven market.
Now, I argue that if a game like any of the IRE games increased the cost of credits, or opened some kind of infinite advancement option through credits that made credit usage more important and credits more scarce -> more expensive, so that the rl-hr-playing time now equals less number of credits obtained, it might come to a point where the game is really what you do describe, something that forces you to buy credits and that makes the experience without buying credits a miserable one, etc. On the other hand, if IRE has found a balance point, where the rl-time-playing cost of a credit is something players are willing to accept, then the experience might be just that of playing a free game, on which I have to sweat hard if I want to advance fast, but on which I can do things at a slower pace, and still enjoy the game.
Now, I know many people here, sometimes myself included, doubt things said by Matt, for different reasons, but many times before he has said that many of the players on IRE MUDs have not bought credits, which means, many of these people are playing IRE MUDs for free.
So, what I am trying to say is that you bring an important point at saying that someone has to buy the credits at some point, and while it is true, the success of games like these which have a large player base does not solely depend on the rich-CEO-son type of player who has access to an infinite source of dolars via on of his many credit cards but more on a larger part of the population spending small amounts with certain regularity (probably similar to what a person would donate to a game who requests such donations from players to keep their running costs), and this would mean that the large majority of the people who actually buys credits do so in small amounts and not at the "1 max skill a day" rate many people pretend to picture. This is probably the case, and if I am too deviated from the real picture I would love to be corrected, but then, in such a system, a balance could be reached where you can actually still enjoy the game without the need of paying for it.
Regardless of all of the above, the game would in any case be a free one; in some extremes a player might be forced to spend an insane amount of time for a small benefit and would probably not be liked by players not willing to spend money; in the other extreme, where there is no real advantage on buying credits because there are so many efficient ways of producing this currency with bots/playing time/etc the commercial venture would just probably fail and the game would cease to exist. I believe IRE games must be in the middle of the two, and if it is true that players can enjoy/play without spending money, I would guess they have it balanced so that these people find it worth-while to put in more playing time in exchange for the credits they will need to advance.
I hope to have made sense with this.
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