[MUD-Dev] Advertising Thread

[Matt Mihaly]

<EdNote: Some rewording and trimming happened>

On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> Rayzam wrote: 

>> I've lost the plot on the point[s] you've been trying to make in
>> this thread, as they seem to jump around. Is it MUDs don't
>> advertise, MUD advertising doesn't work, MUDs are a tiny niche,
 
> All of these points.

You don't play text MUDs.  As far as I can tell you neither have
experience running a MUD, or experience advertising for them.
 
Text MUD advertising clearly works, and I'm in a position to
know. In fact, text MUD advertising is fantastic. Even our banner
ads still get over 1.2% clickthrough rates. Most advertisers would
kill for that kind of clickthrough rate. Our text ads do even
better.

>> MUDs aren't of interest to game designers,
 
> MUDs are 1% of what a game designer could be interested in.  Even
> MMOGs do not currently command the dominant discourse of game
> design, let alone text MUDs that nobody knows about due to their
> advertizing.  Ergo, it is foolish to complain about MUD reviewers'
> lack of knowledge, that they shoulda known X Y Z P D Q about the
> history of MUDs.  People don't know because MUDs don't command
> very many people's attention.

Did you actually say that its foolish to expect a reviewer to know
something about the products he or she is reviewing?

> Quality does not win!  Marketing wins.  If more text MUDders
> understood that, they might get more people to play their games.

If quality doesn't win, why are do you insist that MUDs (graphical
or text) need better quality writing?
 
> Why do you say "of course" they do research?  Just because you
> personally do research?  What if some guy feels like "hey, I know
> enough about games and databases and networking technology."  Sure
> there will be an ugly postmortem in Game Developer 4 years later,
> doesn't mean they won't be a rousing commercial success.

Why would research be important? You've already said that quality
doesn't matter. As long as this guy you're talking about hires a
good marketing firm, he's a guaranteed success, right?
 
> What % of people do you think try a 3D graphical MMORPG, then hear
> about text MUDs from some random online buddy, try out a text MUD,
> and say "Wow this is so much cooler than the 3D MMORPG I was
> playing!"

I couldn't give you stats (of course, you can't give me any stats
either), but I do have quite a bit of anecdotal evidence. There's
quite a few people out there for whom story and depth is a lot more
interesting than eye-candy and monster-bashing. They're in the
minority of course, but then, if I was interested in capturing a
mass market, I sure wouldn't be making games. I'd be making
toothpaste.

--matt



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