[the_logos]

I've had two different venture capital firms offer me seed investments of half a million or so to try making text games on cell phones and at one point a public company was trying to buy Iron Realms in order to launch mobile text games in China.

I turned down the investments both times (though, granted, partly because I was in the midst of raising a lot more than that for Sparkplay) and we couldn't come to acceptable terms regarding a sale because I fundamentally do not believe that there's a large market for text MUDs on cell phones either in China or in the West.

I think that trying to link texting with an untapped desire to play text games on a cell phone is the same kind of mistake that linking kids reading Harry Potter in huge numbers to a desire to play traditional text MUDs is.

Just because they're doing one thing in text doesn't mean that they want to do the other. For instance, just because people enjoy looking at pretty graphics while playing graphical MMOs doesn't mean that these same people are going to spend a lot of time looking at post-modern visual art. Yes, they're both in the visual medium, but that's where the similarities end. Similarly, one might posit that the fact that people spend so much time talking on the phone indicates a desire to play MUDs-by-phone but I think that example mainly serves to demonstrate the flaw in linking interest in activities that take place over a particular medium.

After all, people have been texting each other via IM programs for years, and I don't think that's led to any great influx of MUD players from IM fans.

--matt