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Old 08-05-2009, 10:29 AM   #10
Jazuela
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: New England
Posts: 849
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Re: Barriers to commercial MUDs

Simu got into the business, as was mentioned in a previous post, during the golden age of muds. This was when GEnie was charging by the hour to log onto their service, -and- an extra fee per hour to play the games they provided to customers. There were some GEnie members paying hundreds of dollars -monthly- just for the privilege of being on GEnie and playing a text game. There were even stories of bankruptcy by players who couldn't stop playing, and couldn't afford to pay the rent because they'd skip out on work, get fired, have no income, and continue to play and be charged by the hour.

Then Simu took their games to the other online service providers, such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. THOSE services were monthly fee providers too, plus they -also- charged per hour for game play at one point or another (some of them went free play, monthly fee for login, but at some point, all of them had an hourly fee to play).

Then..AOL went free to play, monthly fee to log in. That's when Simu acquired the bulk of its customers. Thousands of customers, to the point where they were over 10,000 accounts. The problem was, they didn't limit the number of accounts anyone could have. If you had 10 e-mail addresses, you could have 10 accounts. And on AOL, it was easy to do that, especially with those "Free Trial Offer!" CDs they tossed in mailboxes every month to US residents from coast to coast.

The gimmick worked great for Simu though, who managed to addict a core group of people with multi accounts, who learned how to min-max and sell characters, sell equipment, sell all kinds of things, for actual money over e-bay and player fansites. Then Simu "went internet" and divorced itself from the online servers, most of which had gone out of business.

A whole lot of customers who -were- playing for free or at an hourly fee, were now hooked, had no idea other muds existed because they had never stepped into the Internet, and only knew about Simu from their online services. So they went along with Simu to the internet and started paying a monthly fee, gladly. They justified it, that a month's fee for playing was cheaper than a weekly night out at the movies, or that it was definitely cheaper than most other hobbies.

That's WHY Simutronics is successful. Because they started during a time when people were paying a FORTUNE..and then it became a provided service of AOL, which skyrocketed the playerbase. And then they took that freebie away, tossed it on the internet, and told everyone they had to pay for it. By then, the players who had been playing a couple of years already, were die-hard fans who would refuse to accept the fact that free games -might- actually offer better than what they're paying for.

The playerbase of SImu games has dwindled since that huge boom, but remains steady enough to maintain their offices. Also, the promise of the graphics game Hero's Journey, which *I* remember being told would be out in 2002 when I used to play Gemstone, is still being promised. And like obedient sheep, the players still think it'll come to them some day and they'll get to be the first to play it. So they hang on to their multi accounts, continue paying per month, some of them continue -making- money by selling game-items for cash, and Gemstone really is nothing more than a RP-optional trading card game.

Now, if you want to go that route, if integrity is just a word with no meaning for you, you could set up a trading card game, hook a few people into it, don't charge them anything at first, wait until people are in love with your game..release some amazing items, and then BOOM - start charging for the privilege and leak out to your favorite player that you'll pretend not to notice if he sells his uber sword of doom to Lord Bigbang's player over e-bay.

And then you can be just like Simutronics, and succeed in a commercial venue.
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