[MUD-Dev] A Brief History of Commercial MUDs

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu 
> [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> Brian Hook
> Sent: Monday, March 19, 2001 9:45 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] A Brief History of Commercial MUDs

> Thanks to everyone for the info on commercial MUDs.  The timelines
> are definitely interesting.  The one area that I'm curious about
> (and which I believe someone else said isn't readily available) is a
> reasonable list of the available commercial text MUDs today along
> with an idea of their subscribership.
 
> I mean, is EQ or UO bigger than the whole MUD community combined?
> That's kind of data I'm trying to figure out.

I think it is safe to say that either one is larger than the total
combined *commercial* text mud community. The single largest block of
commercial text muds is the stable of games at Simutronics, which I
think has around 60,000 people (any Simu folks around to offer a
correction? I guess I could ask Elonka, I've seen her around the GDC
conference twice today...) In agreegate, UO and EQ have well over a
half a million subscribers, possibly up at 600,000 by now, and
Asheron's Call definitely pushes it over 600,000; there's surely
overlap and multiple accounts in there, but the latter are a very
small percentage.

As far as the hobbyist mud community--how big IS it anyway? I've heard
wildly varying estimates. I would say that it's likely the graphical
games in aggregate make up over half the total mud community at this
point, and possibly substantially more.

-Raph, who has a functioning Internet connection at GDC!
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