[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Personal virtual worlds

[Mike Rozak]

Tess wrote:
> I think that when most of our friends are game developers, sometimes
> we forget that we're weird. :)

Actually, most of the people I know can barely use word. They can tell you 
how to not get bitten by a woma (#1 venemous land-snake in Australia), but 
don't stick them in front of a word processor.  :-)


> The horrible truth is that most people are consumers.

Yes, but 100K - 1 million write blogs. (Or so I guestimate.) That's 0.1% - 
1% of the 1 billion people in the 1st world.

1000 (?) people have used NWN to create a PVW. 1700 have created text MUDs. 
20,000 (?) own land in SL, which is kind of a PVW. How many have custom 
rooms in habbo hotel (or one of the others), or whatnot? NWN and MUDs are on 
the players' servers, while SL and habbo-equivalents are hosted by the 
company that provides the client.

Is this a large demand?

For a large corporation, no. For a small company, it might be... but I 
understand your point, since it's a failure point that concerns me. I'm not 
entirely sure how large the market is for people who want to build worlds 
(of a given complexity), and who want to visit those worlds.

> Builders are a rare and wonderful breed.  I'm all for giving them good
> tools.  But I don't see a future where "millions of people" make their
> own worlds.  There's not enough payoff for the amount of work
> involved.

I suspect that if you just had a dollhouse, building would be trivial, and 
you'd get millions, but I'm not interested in that.

My toolkit requires coding. Being small, I'd hope for something between 100 
and 1000 PVWs created from it. The total market for a "thou must code" PVW 
might be as high as 10K in 5 years... or it might be as low as 10. I don't 
know. :-)

To hark back to the much over-referenced "long tail":

- 5(?) VWs have spend $20M+.
- 10(?) VWs have spent $10M.
- 20(?) VWs have spent $5M.
- 40(?) VWs have spent $2.5M
- ...
- A good MUD or NWN world is 5-10 man-years, which is about $250-$500K, and 
there are 100-200(?) of them.
- A mediocre MUD or NWN world is 1 man year, $50K, and there are 200-400 of 
them.
- A PVW, like I'm thinking of, would be in the 6 man-month to 1 man-year 
range.
- A SL property takes 2-4 man weeks(?), and there are 20K of them.
- Habbo-style VWs have 100K(?) - 1M(?) people with dollhouses.

Or am I way off?