[MUD-Dev] The scalability of paying for in-game things

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Brian Green wrote:

> A clarification before I begin.  I happen to really like Achaea's
> system.  I think it's elegant and quite smart from a business point of
> view.  My experience on Meridian 59 showed me that people were willing
> to pay a more money to play some games (Merdian used to cost up to
> $30/month for the constant player).  My arguments here are more devil's
> advocate than a vehement disagreement.
> 
> As a player, however, I'd probably be one of those bastards that played
> the game and added to the community but not the bottom line.  I'm still
> quite cheap in some ways.

We love you. We get a lot of adult players who say "I'll never pay for a
mud." and who start playing Achaea and find themselves opening their
wallets eventually.

> I see two main arguments against scalability of pay-per-item/service
> games.  The first is that Achaea makes quite a bit of money from
> labor-intensive auctions.  It's pretty much established fact that you
> can organize a large activity easier in a smaller community than in a
> larger one.  I would suggest that the tasks of organizing such auctions
> on a larger game would be much more difficult to orchestrate.  I also
> suspect that your intimacy with your playerbase allows you to better
> gauge your customers; it has been said that such closeness is MUCH
> harder on large-scale games.

Auctions of items only make up about 1/3 of our revenue. The other 2/3
mainly comes from selling skills, which is completely automated. I'm also
going to automate selling items.


> The second argument is what you have said yourself; your game is niche. 
> Niches rarely scale very well at all.  You may attract a certain type of
> person, but can you say that you could attract 100 or even 10 times as
> many such people and still be as profitable?

Yes, it's niche, but that's a factor of the content, not whether or not we
sell skills/items in-game. I really have no idea if we could attract 100
or even 10 times as many people and still be profitable (well, if we could
attrack 10x our current user base, with the same demographics, I'd never
have to work again, as we'd be rolling in money.)

--matt




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