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

[Brian Green]

Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Brian Green wrote:
>
> 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.

Oh, I'll pay to play a game, I have no problems with that.  I spend a
huge amount of money on single-player PC and console games.  What I
won't do is fork over a few thousand dollars to buy a nifty item in a
MUD. :)
 
> 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.

1/3 of your revenue is a significant amount; not something to write off
easily.  Plus, as I understand it, buying skills is something that
nearly every player has to do to advance.  So, in reality, this is your
game's subscription fee for people who want to advance their
characters.  This is hardly earthshattering, because we've already
established that players will pay a subscription for a game.

And will people spend as much money on automated item sales?  Part of
the attraction of the auctions is the personal touch.  You know how to
read the audience, know when to set the starting price a bit higher if
you have a few credit-flush characters, etc.  If you reduce purchasing
items to an automated process, will you get as much money out of it? 
Also, auctions only happen occasionally.  If buying items degenerates
into "plunk down $200 in credits to get an item", will that alienate
your buyers who worked to buy the special items (and paid 3x as much?).
 
> 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.)

And, that's where the question of scalability arises.  You don't know if
you could attract 10 or 100 times as many people.  Yes, it may be your
content is niche, but there's no guarantee that if you made your content
more mass-market friendly that you'd be able to support your business
model.  I have to side with the others in this list and say that, in
general, mass-market content lovin' people might not pony up as much
cash as you'd hope.

--
"And I now wait / to shake the hand of fate...."  -"Defender", Manowar
     Brian Green, brian at psychochild.org  aka  Psychochild
       |\      _,,,---,,_      *=* Morpheus, my kitten, says "Hi!" *=*
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      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'  "Ritalin Cures Next Picasso" 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)               -The_Onion_, August 4th, 1999



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