@Sunny said:
@Jaunt
It's not just relevancy (though the ATTEMPT at relevancy is a good start) that is a problem here. It's that as you've made perfectly clear, you're really not willing to discuss things. 'Well that's my opinion' is a shut-down, not a discussion. This is a discussion board. @Thenomain is trying to freaking help you and you're being a gigantic dick in response.
It's ... very difficult to converse with you when you make a point of being so incredibly wrong all of the time. I did discuss with @Thenomain, both here and on my site. It took @Thenomain four or five posts to actually make a point that was more in depth than, "Seriously, what?"
That's not being helpful. He was actually being pretty insulting without posting much substance, which I don't think is beneficial to discussion. We've been through that already. The one point he made that I felt he validated (the placement of one of my sentences being too low in the body of the text) I accepted, and I moved the sentence.
@il-volpe said:
I don't think we need revenue to advertise the hobby. We just need better newbie support, more different kinds of games, and to take advantage of free advertising among table-top and play-by-post RPGers.
I think that those things are important, too. But I don't think that they're going to sustain the genre in the long-term, as we continue to get older. Table-top gaming is likely to move, more and more, onto online platforms like Roll20. The play-by-post community is shrinking even faster than we are.
It's something that I can compare to real life work that I do. I perform/direct frequently for two different theatre companies. One of those companies does "edgy" plays and Rock & Roll musicals -- the average age of their patron is around 30-45. The other company does Opera -- the average age of their patron is probably 50-65. The age at which most patrons stop seeing theatre is between 65-70, for both companies.
Guess what the Opera company's number one goal is? Market penetration to younger audiences, and re-branding what they do to be more appealing to younger audiences. They know that if they don't do this, then the Opera will die. It's basically the same for Opera companies around the world.
It's the same for MU*s. We have to ask ourselves two important questions.
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How can I market to a younger audience? The most obvious answer is to penetrate the video game market, to get press from popular blogs and magazines, to cast a wide enough net that people actually know that we exist.
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How can I appeal to a younger audience? I believe we should be considering things like beautifying our game clients through MUSHclient plugins, or significantly improved web-clients. Create intuitive links between gameplay to helpfiles, engaging and immersive character generation and industry quality tutorials. Most of all, I think we need to find a catchier way to brand ourselves to them. Right now, for Redshift (for instance), I'm considering calling our game "an online tabletop RPG", and I've taken that branding to heart in my design of the game (by creating a tabletop like interface with the GUI and a tabletop-like combat system instead of a standard DIKU-like room-based system).
The solutions are going to be different for every game, but I don't think that we can afford to soft-ball our marketing attempts and expect to see a big change.
You hear the phrase "you have to spend money to make money" a lot in the world. It's relatively true. In our case, though, it's more like "you have to make money to spend money to attract a future generation of players". Unless you're independently wealthy --- I know that I'm not.
@Tyche said:
That's not at all accurate. This restriction appears to be limited to only DikuMuds and some LPmuds. It certainly never affected Aber, Mush, Muck, MOO, or the 50+ other mud servers released (many of them Dikumud clones).
In fact, most of the older mud engines were created specifically for commercial use.
That's actually a rather contested point, and not just in our community. The Artistic License can be rather tricky when it comes to using it to make money, particularly because of how the code in the old engines has come from all different kinds of sources.
I was not able to find a single instance of a pay-to-play (via a one time cost, annual cost, microtransaction-based, merchandising, or any other type of model) MUSH anywhere on the net. Have there been professional attempts at MUSHes before? If so, can you link me to them, because I'd be very interested in learning more about them.
@ThugHeaven said:
I knew the pay to play thing was going to be a focal point. Posting from my phone, so I'll be brief. I think that model is a bad idea for many reasons. Even if we're just talking about rpi's, I don't think the quality of rp justifies paying for it. People are going to expect and want things for paying.....eventually you're going to give it.
I could go on and on, but please don't monetize your new mud.
There were some frightening things that I learned about Atonement (an old RPI of mine) when it ended and I did some calculations. Important to note is that idling is less of a thing on RPIs than on MUSHes, generally. Without some sort of trigger, RPIs will log players out if they idle for more than 15 minutes or so. There were players that, over three years, spent up to and over 50% (ON AVERAGE) of their waking day playing Atonement. The average play-time for its players far exceeded the average amount of time players spend playing games like WOW or Guild Wars 2. Can you think of many other types of game that people play for free for 4-8+ hours a day? Do you think it's unfair to ask players to spend $5 a month for their unlimited (which might reach 300 hours+) play on your game?
I don't. And I think people are largely reasonable enough to agree. We live in the Era of Microtransactions, where people are willing to throw silly amounts of money to buy virtual goods for social-based games, without a second thought. $5 is less than the cost of a Happy Meal. $5 is less than the cost of a pack of smokes. $5 is less than the cost of a movie ticket. $5 is about the cost of a buying a single episode of a television show (that gives you 21-60 minutes of entertainment) off of I-Tunes.
It's actually extremely reasonable when you think about it like that, IMO.
I agree that the quality of RP alone isn't enough to justify a "professional game". I think that you need to spend time on the bells and whistles. You need an engine without legacy problems, that's stable and modern. You need a game that LOOKS good, even if that just means a simple GUI that's going to be attractive (and, preferably, immersive). You need a pay system that's fair for players, but doesn't entitle them to more than what it's designed to. You need administrative policies that protect players from the too frequent corruption of abusive staff.
If your point was just to make enough money to help promote your game, a one-time fee after a first, free month of play might work. Or maybe you charge $5/month, or $2/month, or you have aesthetic only microtransactions, or whatever is going to work best for your game and community. You don't need to rob players blind like IRE and Simultronics do (though they've proven that players will still play anyways, I think most of us can agree that they're exploitative and overly corporate).
If 200 players pay $2/month, that's $400/month that you have to spend on advertising. Not only that, the fact that your game is pay-to-play actually makes you much more likely to be able to get reviewers from big sites and magazines to come check out your game, and hopefully promote it.
I think that that's important. It's not for every game. For instance, if you're using a shared IP (Middle-Earth, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, etc), obviously your options are limited. Thankfully, part of the benefit of using shared IP is that you have extra means to market your product to a younger audience already. It's another viable option.
@WTFE said:
If you need persuasion, go look at the clusterfuck that was Skotos' batch of pay-to-play RPIs.
Skotos' games were not RPIs. They also were terrible, and that's why Skotos failed. Their administration was often corrupt, their games were sub-par, and their marketing tactics were lazy and ineffective. They only had initial success, at all, because of the fact that they were "professional". When they couldn't meet expectations, they lost that good will.
Counter-point: Simultronics and IRE. While I don't like their pay-to-win approach, they've dominated for so long, largely in part due to their very attractive interfaces, reasonably high quality games (for their genres), more professional approach to administration and customer service, and far superior attempts at marketing to younger audiences and penetrating the video-game market.
There are success stories and failures. I don't think going P2P is for everyone. It's definitely more work. I do think it's worth considering. I do think it's necessary for some of us to do it if we're going to keep our genre alive, overall, well into the future.
