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

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

How to make a MUD profitable?

Options:

  1. Sell the software. Requires high prices, high volume and
  consequently high upfront investments.

  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.

  3. Sell items or upgrades or access to subgames/zones to
  individuals and groups. Difficult to do without dragging OOC
  issues into the world, and without having negative effects on the
  game design.

Proposed alternative: let players pay for convinient in-game
infrastructure that is not limited to individuals. Basically: let
them pay for redesigning the world within your predefined limits.

Example:

  o Wizards have to gain mana from certain energy sources fixed in
  space. The furher away you are from a source the slower you gain
  mana.

  o The design allows players to pay real dollars for the
  introduction of time-limited sources of energy in other locations
  of the world which makes regaining mana more efficient as they
  don't have to travel to get their mana up in reasonable time.

Would they band together and pay for such benefits, even if they
have to share the benefits with others? You would of course engrave
their names in the source, let them select what the source should
look like and what not in order to give them credit and some feeling
of ownership.

Any empirical examples beyond donations to free MUDs?

--
Ola - http://folk.uio.no/olag/
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