You may be interested in the geneis of a pay-for-play "MUD" like GemStone III...
Long ago, in a galaxy far-far away there was a time before the Internet (as we know it today). In those days to be online meant logging onto someone's Bulletin Board System (BBS). People typically ran these in their homes and had a single phone line hooked up to it (if you had more than one, you got lots of envy).
I created my first free contribution in those days, a BBS named FRPBBS for the Commodore 64. This was a BBS that was geared towards running message-based roleplaying events. Lots of people used it. A sequel, GEMBBS was almost, but never completed.
Increasing in popularity was the idea of online services. They were becoming more commercial, but were still horribly expensive. CompuServe was like $12/hour. But they had games... multiplayer ones at that. Kesmai (may they rest in peace) had MegaWars III and Island of Kesmai, to name a couple. I was fascinated by these!
Providers of online games did not "charge" for their games, back then. Not per-se. Instead they got a royalty from the online revenue generated by them being there. You payed CompuServe $12/hr to be online, and if at any time you were in Island of Kesmai, they'd pay Kesmai a small piece of that hourly charge.
I wrote GemStone as my first commercial online game. GEnie, an up-and-coming online service at the time, bought into the concept. Unfortuantely the code for GemStone, orginally written on an Amiga, would not port to GEnie's mainframes and proprietary operating system. I had to start over, and hence was born GemStone II.
GEnie cost something like $6/hr to be online in the evening. Since GEnie used spare resources of GEIS's business computing division, the daytime rates were astronomical ($35/hr). Eventually the rates dropped to $3/hr and even prime-time (day) rates dropped over time.
During this time, GemStone made money through royalties. The internet still didn't exist as we know it today, so there was no real concept of free MUDs except those that existed on BBSs. If people complained about the cost it was the cost of GEnie, not GemStone II that was at issue. They may have been mad that GSII crashed a lot, or that it was addictive (and thus their bills were high), but it wasn't *us* charging them. We just got a royalty check every month.
GemStone III, the rewrite of GSII, was a smash success. It drove to the top of GEnie's charts being their #1 cash maker. Eventually as AOL became a serious competitor, we managed to get a contract to put GSIII and a new game DragonRealms on their online service.
This is when things got big. AOL was such an amazing marketing powerhouse. If they put one of those little icons on their front-page to promote use, it was a like a fire hose of users. So much that we had to beg them to take it down once because the onslaught was crashing our systems.
But still, it was the online service, not us charging. We got a royalty from AOL. Same with GEnie; same with Prodigy. Our games keep people online... like a hit TV show keeps people watching... and it made them a lot of money. We saw a little of it in royalties... less than we deserved, IMHO, but it payed the bills.
Then things changed. GEnie, AOL and eventually everyone went flat-rate. Suddenly the economics changed dramatically. The very thing that made a game like GemStone III great for business (the fact it keep people online for lots of hours) was now a horrible thing! The best user to a flat-rate company like AOL was users who paid every month and never showed up... or did so minimally. A game that sucked bandwidth and server costs, like GSIII, was suddenly a 'bad thing'.
As things progressed, our relationship with AOL ended and we were on our own. Our company, and our employees who's livelihoods depending on this enterprise, were in jeopardy. We had to create our own billing and customer service systems. And transfer our customers from AOL and the other services to our web-based game. And do it fast.
Long story short, we did it. But of course in the process we then became the people billing for our games. We stuck with flat-rate because that is what people came to expect. Hourly just didn't work anymore, even though it makes a certain fiscal sense. That's okay tho, because we knew that we could keep giving the players enough value to justify them coming back. And, fortunately both server and bandwidth costs were coming down so it wasn't financially ruinous to provide a flat-rate service with products like this.
The real kicker has always been... why would someone pay for the "MUD" experience when you can find so much of it for free? There are many good, fun, engaging and well supported MUDs out there that cost you nothing other than the access to the internet you already have.
The answer was that we had to provide a clearly superior product in one or more respects. It had to be definitively worth what we charge. You can't fake this… people won't pay for what they don't want. The proof of quality is in the numbers.
For us, the good news is that we already had years and years of experience in continually improving and refining our products. We did this originally to give people a reason to play more and more hours. And now these skills came into play in order to convince people to pay month after month in the face of free competition for their MUD attention.
GemStone III, DragonRealms and our other products are serious business for us. We work hard, every day, to make them as good as we can. Not everyone is going to be happy… but it's not for a lack of effort and commitment.
The long road to where we are today is not something one could have planned for, but it has certainly been quite an experience. We have some big things we're working on now. We are investing quite heavily in them, and I think we’re going to add a whole new dimension to MUDing that people haven’t seen before.
-- David
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