Quote: Original post by raydog
I think the point is that the startup (time and money) is not profitable. In the long run,
like 5-10 years, it might be profitable.

No, 5-10 years to be a millionaire, if you're good at what you do. Of course, if you start at year 0 with 0 experience and 0 coding and 0 design and 0 content-writing ability, then millionaire status is all but impossible.

If you're good, and you know what you're doing, you should be profitable in 6-9 months. The established MUD small businesses appear able to launch a new game every 6 months and have it profitable before they launch the next... c.f. Skotos for instance. (although MUD's are only 1/3 to 1/2 of their business).

EDIT: ...then you do that for 5-10 years, building up larger and larger user bases and more and more games each year, and ...

[Edited by - redmilamber on August 6, 2004 5:18:36 PM]

Yeah, if you have a well-established per monthly subscription service available, it doesn't take much
math to figure out in how many days and how many subscribers it will take to make a million. Just
add up the numbers. The hard part is getting those subscribers.

Muds are a really tough sell in this day and age. I'm a veteran of the MUD community, having worked on numerous Diku and LP MUDs as a volunteer coder/level designer. From where I stand, it might be more profitable to either hunt for MMO money assuming you can show you're capable of accomplishing this feat or build a 2D MUD using tools you can find on the web in the open source community.

It's not too difficult to adopt the "room" based descriptions of a MUD to a 2D coordinate system and use a tiling engine to represent the game graphically. I can't see MUDs breaking out from the niche market that they are in today and this is because Ultima Online forever changed the way we view them. I know others were first but UO and EQ finally made the MMO mainstream within the game industry. MUDS from that point on were niche market games. Both can be profitable but I have to believ ethat MUDs are not a get-rich-quick mechanism simply because there are waaaay too many replacements a user can go to instead of paying for your game. Competing in this market is likely expensive relative to the revenue.

Kressilac