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Certainly there are other mud engines available. However, there are not, to my knowledge at least, other available mud engines available that have proved themselves to nearly the same extent in a commerical environment. There's no arguing with the idea that something proven commercially is less risky than something not proven commercially. I mean, you can argue with it (I've seen people argue with more obvious statements on this site, god knows) but it'll just get you laughed at.
Rapture is an engine, not a codebase. There's no such thing as a "stock Rapture" mud. Or rather, there is, but all you can do is log in and use the 'say' and 'who' commands.
The playerbase of all our games combined has tripled since our second game opened 2 years ago.
So your logic is that we'd sell Rapture to people in the expectation that they will significantly dilute our existing game revenue and then try to gain some of that back via royalties? Yeah...brilliant. Without expansion of market share or expansion of market (we're achieving both) doing anything that results in significant cannibalization is silly without royalties beyond what would even approach reasonable.
At least THAT'S a sensible statement. Of course, text-based muds also don't need huge amounts of players to be profitable. There's enough room for lots more commercial text muds.
I don't mean this insultingly, but you're looking at this from the hobbyist point of view and while that's well and good it doesn't give you much insight into the business of text muds. We've grown 40%+ for 5 consecutive years now. ####, we're projecting 60% growth for 2003.
--matt
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