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Negatives of a commercial environment from a professional developer's point of view:
1. You're forced to pay more attention to what your players want instead of just working on what you want. This is a negative for the developer only of course as it benefits the players.
2. The larger you get the more man-hours have to be devoted to the not-so-fun business of running a business: Dealing with the lawyers, the accountants, the banks, preventing credit card fraud, advertising, press releases, etc. For me personally the amount of time this kind of thing takes is a downer and I now look forward to the rare times I actually get to personally develop a new feature or area rather than just managing other people's development.
Benefits from a developer's point of view:
1. You get to work full-time on your hobby. It is, frankly, a dream job. I have friends at some of the top games companies who are quite jealous of the lifestyle running a commercial mud gives. Compared to the mainstream games industry we have nearly total creative freedom and a near total lack of crunch time. (One friend is working on a high-profile video game and has been in 6.5 days/week crunch mode for a few months now. Sleeping at the office sometimes, etc.)
2. You get taken seriously (if you're successful) by the wider games industry and games press. This is nice if you're looking to move into a more mainstream part of the industry some day. Whether it's fair or not, nobody outside actual text mud players cares about hobbyist muds anymore. The days when journalists wrote obsessively about LambdaMoo are long gone.
3. More resources to work with. It's nice not to have to worry about where the $1000 to host your mud is coming from this month.
I won't go into positive and negatives from a player's point of view. I'm assuming most of you reading this are not commercial developers but you're all players, so you can figure out what you think are the positives or negatives from a player's point of view yourself.
In summary, I have no problem with free muds. There are many quality ones, like Armaggedon and Aardwolf (why do so many popular muds start with an A?). They are, however, absolutely dwarfed by the hundreds upon hundreds of free muds that are little more than straight-up stock stuff run by teenagers on an ego trip. It's simply a function of it being very very easy to start a hobbyist mud. Just download, start it up, and you're running a mud. Commercial muds have a much higher barrier to entry from a developer's perspective, so the average one is far better than the average free mud. Note that I'm not saying the average commercial mud is far better than the average -good- free mud.
--matt
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