[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:

> On 11:17 PM 6/10/99 +0100, I personally witnessed Greg Munt jumping up to say:
> >Endnote: from reading Raph's posts about UO - specifically 'what we planned
> >on doing' vs 'what we actually did' - UO seems to be a lot closer to the
> >'state of the art' than most free muds. Yet a lot (apparently) of the
> >original plans either remain unimplemented, or have been disabled. Now, we
> >all know that UO has no problem clearing its costs - so how are these fears
> >of Mihaly's justified?
> 
> I would hazard the guess that Origin, by virtue of having more
> income-generating products, can afford to take more risks. If UO loses
> money for a little while, they can suck it up and take the time to fix it.
> A smaller company which has fewer and smaller sources of income is more
> likely to go under. 
> 
> I don't know anything about Achaea, really, so the next is all supposition.
> However, since I haven't seen big ads for it all over the place, chances
> are they don't have the level of financial backing UO has. If Achaea did
> something really really wrong and chased all its players away, there is a
> very real possibility it might never recover, and this part of the MUD
> community could be lost forever. Even worse, Matt might be so dejected and
> discouraged that he'd never write another MUD, and that would really suck
> donkey balls. ;)

This is definitely the case. I raised all the money for Achaea myself,
mainly from internet acquantinces that I've never met. I had no clue what
I was doing when I started out (had never coded anything besides some
apple II BASIC in high school), and still feel like I am just playing
business half the time, despite some previous work and personal experience
in the financial world. Unlike your standard internet business, we cannot
afford to be in the red. We've had to make sure we're in the black since
day 1, and, due to some generous people who had faith in me, that was
possible. I envy Raph being able to employ professional economists to help
him with his economic system. On the other hand, despite all the
headaches, I love running a business that is also a MUD. Sometimes when
I'm out hiking on Mt. Tam, I think to myself how happy I am to be there
rather than sitting in a brokerage house.

--matt




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