[MUD-Dev] Small scale commercial text MUDs

[Matt Mihaly]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, [iso-8859-1] Emil Eifr=E9m wrote:

> Slightly OT (at least off-thread) and just out of curiousity, you
> mention a CTO... how much staff can you reasonably support with
> Achaea's current playerbase / revenue stream? I'm steadily working
> towards convincing myself to dare an endeavor into the land of
> commericalizing my text-based mud and trying to earn a living by
> doing what I love the most, and Achaea seems to be a successful
> example. I realize that for my small-scale approach it will be
> important to keep the staff requirements low, which means focusing
> on creating a game that encourages players to admin themselves in
> order to minimize staff. How many people does Alchaea LLC currently
> employ? Do they have "competetive salaries," ie are you able to
> employ people other than old-friends-that-loves-mudding-anyway?

I'm Achaea's only full-time employee right now. In a month and a half
our part-time CTO will become our full-time CTO with compensation that
is reasonable. (So whether a company with two full-time employees
needs someone with the title of CTO is debatable but that's the role
he fills so that's what we call him. Incidentally, he started off as a
player, began doing volunteer coding, and when we hire him full-time
he'll get ownership making him the second-largest owner). We could
afford to hire a third person full-time, but we don't really need it,
and in any case, as I'm the major owner, I prefer to have profits that
we can distribute to myself and the other owners.=20

And yes, they are competitive salaries for the games industry. As with
most games industry salaries, it's likely that my CTO, at least, could
easily go out and get a better salary, but the ownership he'll have
boosts his salary fairly significantly due to the profit payouts he'll
get. Unlike dot.coms these days, our options are actually worth
something!

--matt

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