[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Where are all the amateur MMORPG devs?

[Morris Cox]

On 1/30/08, Mike Rozak <Mike at mxac.com.au> wrote:
> Several amateur MMORPG development kits are now on the market (Multiverse, Realmcrafter, Torque), with more to come. Some amateur authors are using the toolkits, but despite the fact that there are around 100x as many MMORPG players as MUD players, there only seem to be 10x as many amateur MMORPG authors as amateur MUD authors. Why is this? Where are all the amateur MMORPG devs?

My take is that most people want to just consume content, not generate
it. They just want to play. In addition, making a MMORPG or MMOG is
way more difficult than making a MUD. By nature, doing graphics and
animation is much more difficult than doing text and MMOGs have much
higher requirements in all areas. My attempts to do a MUD were much
more successful than my attempts at a MMOG. A person could make pretty
good progress on a MUD by themself. Forget that with a MMOG.

> Number of worlds as a metric:
>
> MudConnector lists 1500 text MUDs. Sure, a lot of them are dead, so let's assume the real number is 200 (just to be on the completely-safe side).

I used to have a MUD and a MAUD on there, but that was over a decade ago.

> There are approximatelly 20 million MMORPG players (100x the number of MUD players). Why aren't there 200x100 = 20,000 amateur MMORPGs out there? Why aren't there 40,000 amateur authors contributing to these worlds?
>
> Yeah, sure, MMORPGs are more difficult to create, etc. So why aren't there just 2000 worlds (not 20,000)? Or even 200?

Maybe you could look at it as being something like inversely
proportional squared (or whatever). As the difficulty goes up, the
number of MMOGs drops by the square (or cube, or whatever).

> The tools are available, albeit not very stable/mature: There's Multiverse, RealmCrafter, and Torque. Metaplace is coming. My own toolkit (kind of MMORPG-like) is coming.

Not very stable/mature explains a lot of it. Also not being easy to
use or with decent documentation.

> Forum posts as a metric:
>
> Watching the forums, it feels like hundreds of amateur authors (maybe a thousand) are out there. Not 40,000. MudConnect and TopMudSites get 10 (?) developer/author posts a day. Multiverse and MMORPGMaker are around 20-ish each. Even the NWN1 and NWN2 forums, while more active that MudConnector and TopMudSites, are not super busy (50 dev posts a day?).

Maybe some difficulty in finding these sites? I knew of MudConnect and
maybe TopMudSites. Multiverse and MMORPGMaker were new to me.

> Given 100x the players (MMORPG to MUD), I'd expect 100x the amateur authors, and 100x the forum posts... that's around 1000 posts a day. My rough count is more like 100 posts per day on all the MMORPG-ish development forums.
>
> Why haven't amateur authors flocked to these tools?

I looked at the game engines listed on gamedev.net and I was quickly
buried in the "noise " of there being so many choices for a game
engine that I had to focus on the ones that I had heard about. Option
overload. Then I focused more on the free ones since I don't really
have spare money. Once I had picked a few, I had to try them out to
see how usable and friendly they were. Some of the
documentation/tutorials were confusing, out of date, left important
stuff out, or were wrong. I also realized that I needed others to help
me and it's not like  I know all the right people with all the right
skills who are all willing to help me at no cost. :D
-- 
Morris Cox
morriscox at gmail.com