[MUD-Dev] Will players pay for public services?

[ceo]

Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

> How to make a MUD profitable?

> Options:

>   2. Subscription. Players increasingly play more than one game,
>   subscription is a barrier to revists. This can be overcome, but
>   I also believe subscription leads to designs choices which are
>   optimal for retaining customers, but detrimental to gameplay.

I think this area is a lot less black and white than many think it
is, mainly because of naivety or inexperience with pricing models.

$10/month seems to be a de facto automatic baseline for MMOGs - even
amongst those who just picked the number "because everyone else does
it" (even though that's no longer the case, the number has
stuck). $X/month also seems to be a common target amongst people I
run into who are hoping to start a small commercial MUD.

But I've seen online games (non RPG, non MMO) with a $5/year pricing
model - with several hundred thousand subscribers. Obviously, this
is a gross simplification, and glosses over the cost of each
customer, but a lot of people don't seem to stop and think about the
possibility that reducing per-customer revenue by a factor of 20
could increase customer numbers by a much greater ratio.

Maybe not. But...the variation in pricing models for subs-based
games still seems to me surprisingly low?

Adam M
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