[MUD-Dev] The Future of MMOGs... what's next? (fwd)

[Matt Mihaly]

On 16 Jun 2002, Sasha Hart wrote:

> What about games which are done free? (Thousands of text worlds,
> many utterly fascinating and/or worthwhile; a smattering of free
> graphical ones, e.g. Furcadia). Do you really mean to say that
> nothing new will develop because everyone will be waiting on
> corporate money? Have you forgotten how much damned fun this can
> be, or underestimated the capacity of weird people to pop out of
> the woodwork with improbable free stuff?
 
> What about massive text games? At least on a hardware basis, I
> imagine that Dragon Realms is somewhat cheaper to run than
> Everquest on that basis; perhaps also on a labor basis. Maybe not
> so exciting, I understand... but there are a lot of heads on
> DR. In some respects the design isn't too far from what you
> discussed, though.

I don't know how much the hardware costs to run a single Everquest
shard, but you could put a text MUD with ~800 people online
(Dragonrealms size) simultaneously on a single PC.

> By a similar token, what about Achaea?  Matt Mihaly got me to fork
> over $100 to farm rats and I had never spent money on a MUD in my
> life. What is it, 3 games that Matt runs now? There is something
> to that model, and something to the world - and even if Matt's
> worlds aren't getting more massive that much faster, his empire
> seems to be pretty healthy by all external accounts, if certainly
> on a different scale than Everquest.

Only two right now (only one of which I actively run. I hired Josh
Olson, whom I met through this list, to run Aetolia on a day-to-day
basis.)

Also, while we're never going to have 1000 players online in either
game I'd guess, growth in text MUDs is still definitely possible. 6
months ago we were getting about 160,000 user-minutes per day on
Achaea. In the last 24 hours, we've had 243,000 with another 100k
from Aetolia. Aetolia, of course, has grown from no players last
October to up to 100 online at a time right now. Hardly big stunning
numbers, but on a percentage basis, we've got nothing to complain
about, and expect our games to continue to grow.
 
There's definitely something to it, and it's a shame more small
developers can't stop themselves from drooling over the latest
pretty graphics.

--matt

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