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Here's my viewpoint on sci-fi MUDs:
There is a market for them, but I'm unsure how large that market is. Notice when you search for futuristic MUDs on Topmudsites, nearly all of them are using borrowed/stolen (depending on your point of view) IP - Star Wars. Star Wars is sci-fi but it's really more of a combination of sci-fi and fantasy, which is why I suspect there is interest in it.
Eve-Online shows there is a market for sci-fi MUDs but as it is the biggest sci-fi MUD (it's graphical, obviously) around, and there are many fantasy MUDs many times its size (including WoW, which is 50-60x its size), one has to assume that the intersection of sci-fi and text is not going to be that large.
Federation/Fed II is definitely the most venerable of the sci-fi MUDs I'm aware of, and probably the most successful (they adopted our business model as well), but I just logged on right now, for instance, and they only have about 30 players online.
Will we ever do a sci-fi MUD? I wouldn't put it outside the realm of possibility, but it's not something we're falling over ourselves to do either. We've got two MUDs in development currently and that pretty much fills our plate for now anyway.
As far as contemporary-setting MUDs go, I'd say there is no evidence at all that there's any audience for this kind of setting in text. Typically, unless we thought we could build a MUD up to very close to or over 100 simultaneous players quickly, we wouldn't be interested, and I see very little hope of doing that with a contemporary-setting text MUD.
I do appreciate your confidence in us though, lovechief, and who knows, maybe someday we will do a sci-fi text MUD.
--matt
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