[MUD-Dev] code base inquiry

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Ben Greear wrote:

> Agreed, as soon as you accept a single shilling, you are beholden unto
> the unwashed masses!! :)

Actually, no, you aren't. Games like UO/EQ/AC are, because they are going
for the largest number of players. On the other side of things are free
games who don't care about the players at all. They have no customer
service, no care for what the players want, etc. To me, that's a bad
thing, not a good thing. In the middle, you have games that care about
customers/players, but who may be willing to sacrifice players/customers
in order to gain other benefits, such as artistic satisfaction for the
creatores. Being commercial does not mean giving that up. A non-mud
parallel that I can think of are nice restaurants. Example: There's a hip,
great restaurant here in San Francisco called the Flying Saucer. As an
infamous (and true) story goes, one night the chef threw out a big food
reviewer, because the food reviewer irritated him in some manner (I don't
know how, but I'm quite sure the reviewer wasn't doing anything to disrupt
business, such as throwing food around, etc). The reviewer wrote a great
review anyway. So here is a guy running a business who still feels free to
act in a way that is potentially hurtful to his business, because he feels
like it. It's his business. Likewise, I'm willing to do that sometimes
with my commercial game, because, well, I can. My business, my world, no
public shareholders to answer to.

--matt




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