[MUD-Dev] business models

[Christopher Allen]

Matt Mihaly wrote:

> 800-1200 online and they have 60,000 subscribers? I have a difficult
> time believing that. If anyone can confirm that, my hat goes off to
> Simutronics, cause that is really excellent. Practically printing
> money since apparently most of their subscribers never even log on,
> or log on for exceptionally short periods of time.

I believe that the 60K subscribers was based an estimate on a
published number of customers in Inc Magazine a year and a half ago,
multiplied by the percentage growth they claimed at that time.

We did some considerable research on Simutronics, and believed that
they had about 40K customers in September of 1999. Approximately 1/4
of these customers were paying Premium, or $29.95, 3/4 were basic
$9.95 customers. We able to back these numbers financially into what
they have disclosed in various publicly available resources such as
D&B.

We also had a spider running that logged the number of users online
over the course of a month. I don't have the figures in front of me,
but I seem to recall that Gemstone ran around 1200-1800 users, and
Dragon Realms 900-1500 users. Thus a total of all users would be
~2100-3300 users. This was roughly 10% of their customers at the
time. Some special events had peaks in each game over 2000 customers,
so general idea of 15% seems fine, though I did hear that they had
real performance problems during some of those events.

I personally believe in spite of their claims of growth that
Simutronics has actually stagnated, or has even slightly fallen. If
newer numbers of users online are now 800-1200 per game, then that
would prove it to me. My guess is that they have between 30K to 40K
customers. However, as they have strong incentives to become a premium
subscriber, their percentage of premium subscribers may have grown,
giving them more revenues.

-- Christopher Allen

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/647-2760  f510/647-2761 ..

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