Who canned whom?

[imported_Kranar]

Did AOL can Simutronics, or did Simutronics can AOL?

I'm starting to think, as far as number of players go, GS would be far better off with AOL on their side.

[Scott]

GS wasn't getting $12.95 a month per customer from AOL though. GS is making a hell of a lot more by itself then it did with AOL.

[imported_Kranar]

Do you know how much they were getting? I'm sure it was more than 13 bucks per player, which is why I believe AOL had to can GSIII.

I don't know exactly.

[Skirmisher]

AOL dropped SIMU after they changed their pricing setup because if i recollect SIMU got paid an hourly fee by AOL for every hour an AOL user was playing but AOL was no longer making money per hour on their own subscribers.

It almost overnight turned from a nice money maker to a money pit for AOL.

That along with the need to free up modems that had instantly become flooded with the unlimited pricing schedule did them in I think as GS3 users tend to be on for hours at a time. That also was unnaceptable to a company suffering horrible public relations due to connectivity problems.

Sure, if they had time and energy they both probably could have come up with a mutually beneficial financial arangement, but i think AOL was floundering at that time with this being only one of many thousands of financial deals they had to try to work around as well as the massive modem/connection problems so they probably just cut dealings with many businesses in a similar manner.

If that was not what you were asking then sorry, my error.

[imported_Kranar]

No, that's exactly what I wanted to know, thanks!

[Kisteira]

Here's my slant on it... nothing official:

AOL went unlimited in November of 1996. Simu moved to the web in June of 1997. That's an 8 month time frame. Busy signals were already decreasing by that point.

What was changing, however, was AOL beginning to charge $2 an hour for it's premium games, of which Simutronics games were going to be part.

My theory is that Simu figured if AOL was going to charge $2 a game, that those profits go straight to Simu instead of just a "cut". Either way a fee was going to get paid. Why get a cut when you can have it all? I don't mean to make it sound greedy and seedy. Not at all. Just a business decision.

Simu might have also felt that the price would drive away players who had become accostomed to the "free" game.

This is my take on what happened :)

[Bobmuhthol]

<<Simu moved to the web in June of 1997.>>
Heh, I'm glad you know what you're talking about. Exact date was my birthday: July 3rd, 1997.

[Kisteira]

Here's an article I found, extremely outdated of course.

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,4625,00.html This site claims it was AOLs decision to cut the game...

[Kisteira]

Oh no! I was a few weeks off! <gasp> whatever shall I do? :-P

I found the date here: http://www.fantasyonline.net/interviews/gemstone/gem-index.shtml In an interview with Llearyn.

Exact quote: So in June of 1997 Simutronics moved it's service to the Web, where we've been very comfortable since.

[Revalos]

Heh...and not to wax more nostalgia...but I remember the "Something wonderful" webpage and how many thousands of times I visited it until that magical day.

Anyway, as to the canning process. AOL made some tactical errors when it went unlimited to compete with rapidly failing P* and others. They singlehandedly decided to make unlimited internet access a right instead of a priveledge. We reap the benefits right now. They could have simply gone into an Airlines style price war still tacking on an hourly fee...even if it dropped to something like 40 cents an hour and would have made oodles on GS3.

[Neildo]

AOL canned Simutronics because once AOL went unlimited with their pricing plan with a cheap, flat rate, they began to lose money due to bandwidth and the like from Simutronics users being logged in an ungodly amount of hours while no longer paying by the hour. AOL making $20 a month vs $100's of dollars a month is a huge difference, heh. Not to mention, on top of that, them paying Simutronics a few cents an hour per customer playing Simutronics products.

Or, in otherwords, what Skirmishers said. I just wanted to basically reinforce what he said. :P

Here's a post by David Whatley from another message board that Roberta will notice, heh. Anyhow it talks about all that. It's in regards to the whole "free vs pay to play MUDs" discussion that all the free MUDers bitch about.. mainly due to them not knowing a whole lot about the history of MUDs, heh.

- N

- PS, sorry if this is an old thread as I have no idea since the dumb boards doesn't show the date, just the month with a "th" without a number.

-----------------------------

You may be interested in the geneis of a pay-for-play "MUD" like GemStone III...

Long ago, in a galaxy far-far away there was a time before the Internet (as we know it today). In those days to be online meant logging onto someone's Bulletin Board System (BBS). People typically ran these in their homes and had a single phone line hooked up to it (if you had more than one, you got lots of envy).

I created my first free contribution in those days, a BBS named FRPBBS for the Commodore 64. This was a BBS that was geared towards running message-based roleplaying events. Lots of people used it. A sequel, GEMBBS was almost, but never completed.

Increasing in popularity was the idea of online services. They were becoming more commercial, but were still horribly expensive. CompuServe was like $12/hour. But they had games... multiplayer ones at that. Kesmai (may they rest in peace) had MegaWars III and Island of Kesmai, to name a couple. I was fascinated by these!

Providers of online games did not "charge" for their games, back then. Not per-se. Instead they got a royalty from the online revenue generated by them being there. You payed CompuServe $12/hr to be online, and if at any time you were in Island of Kesmai, they'd pay Kesmai a small piece of that hourly charge.

I wrote GemStone as my first commercial online game. GEnie, an up-and-coming online service at the time, bought into the concept. Unfortuantely the code for GemStone, orginally written on an Amiga, would not port to GEnie's mainframes and proprietary operating system. I had to start over, and hence was born GemStone II.

GEnie cost something like $6/hr to be online in the evening. Since GEnie used spare resources of GEIS's business computing division, the daytime rates were astronomical ($35/hr). Eventually the rates dropped to $3/hr and even prime-time (day) rates dropped over time.

During this time, GemStone made money through royalties. The internet still didn't exist as we know it today, so there was no real concept of free MUDs except those that existed on BBSs. If people complained about the cost it was the cost of GEnie, not GemStone II that was at issue. They may have been mad that GSII crashed a lot, or that it was addictive (and thus their bills were high), but it wasn't *us* charging them. We just got a royalty check every month.

GemStone III, the rewrite of GSII, was a smash success. It drove to the top of GEnie's charts being their #1 cash maker. Eventually as AOL became a serious competitor, we managed to get a contract to put GSIII and a new game DragonRealms on their online service.

This is when things got big. AOL was such an amazing marketing powerhouse. If they put one of those little icons on their front-page to promote use, it was a like a fire hose of users. So much that we had to beg them to take it down once because the onslaught was crashing our systems.

But still, it was the online service, not us charging. We got a royalty from AOL. Same with GEnie; same with Prodigy. Our games keep people online... like a hit TV show keeps people watching... and it made them a lot of money. We saw a little of it in royalties... less than we deserved, IMHO, but it payed the bills.

Then things changed. GEnie, AOL and eventually everyone went flat-rate. Suddenly the economics changed dramatically. The very thing that made a game like GemStone III great for business (the fact it keep people online for lots of hours) was now a horrible thing! The best user to a flat-rate company like AOL was users who paid every month and never showed up... or did so minimally. A game that sucked bandwidth and server costs, like GSIII, was suddenly a 'bad thing'.

As things progressed, our relationship with AOL ended and we were on our own. Our company, and our employees who's livelihoods depending on this enterprise, were in jeopardy. We had to create our own billing and customer service systems. And transfer our customers from AOL and the other services to our web-based game. And do it fast.

Long story short, we did it. But of course in the process we then became the people billing for our games. We stuck with flat-rate because that is what people came to expect. Hourly just didn't work anymore, even though it makes a certain fiscal sense. That's okay tho, because we knew that we could keep giving the players enough value to justify them coming back. And, fortunately both server and bandwidth costs were coming down so it wasn't financially ruinous to provide a flat-rate service with products like this.

The real kicker has always been... why would someone pay for the "MUD" experience when you can find so much of it for free? There are many good, fun, engaging and well supported MUDs out there that cost you nothing other than the access to the internet you already have.

The answer was that we had to provide a clearly superior product in one or more respects. It had to be definitively worth what we charge. You can't fake this… people won't pay for what they don't want. The proof of quality is in the numbers.

For us, the good news is that we already had years and years of experience in continually improving and refining our products. We did this originally to give people a reason to play more and more hours. And now these skills came into play in order to convince people to pay month after month in the face of free competition for their MUD attention.

GemStone III, DragonRealms and our other products are serious business for us. We work hard, every day, to make them as good as we can. Not everyone is going to be happy… but it's not for a lack of effort and commitment.

The long road to where we are today is not something one could have planned for, but it has certainly been quite an experience. We have some big things we're working on now. We are investing quite heavily in them, and I think we’re going to add a whole new dimension to MUDing that people haven’t seen before.

- David

[Bestatte]

Interesting choice of inclusions in his post, Neil. And interesting exclusions too.

He makes it sound (in public relations it's called "spin") as though NO other online games existed until he brought Gemstone to the internet. I'm sure he realizes that GS wasn't the first online (internet, not just online service like GEnie) game, and in fact the Internet existed for several years before GS finally arrived on the Web.

The first online text-based game was called MUD, written by Roy Trubshaw in 1978, and then released the code to his fellow Essex University student, Richard Bartle.

The acronym for Multi-User-Dungen or Multi-User-Dungeon (depending on which history you read) was the actual copyrighted name of the first text-based online multi-player game. The acronym is now known to refer to the entire family of these types of games, but they all descend from the original.

It was available on the internet (which wasn't called the internet yet) in Great Britain. It was introduced to the masses (at the time, that -was- the masses) in 1980. MUD was -the- first multi-player internet game, and MANY other games came after that before David Whatley wrote Gemstone II for GEnie.

MUD is also still available, under the name "British Legends," and therefore is also the longest-running text-based internet game in the world - in addition to being the original text-based internet game.

You can play the original MUD from www.british_legends.com

[Neildo]

I don't see where he makes it out to sound like Gemstone III was the first MUD.. even with the post standing alone. He was mainly referring to GS3 though since people were talking about pay to play games. I'm sure you read the whole thread his post was in which is why he didn't go into the whole history since the previous posts already said what you said. You know, Ka'vir and his infinite history wisdom. :P

Go ahead and look up the thread by searching for David's posts since he only made a couple. I just found it funny you did the normal "mud history harping" as well. ;)

- N

[imported_Kranar]

<< You know, Ka'vir and his infinite history wisdom. >>

I really hate KaVir.

Please link me to the thread where this post was found. I'd appreciate it.

[Bestatte]

Erm, I didn't get that info from KaVir. I got it from this website:

http://livinginternet.com/?d/di_major.htm

I found his website in a Google search.

KaVir's expertise is more driven toward intellectual property copyright law. My interest is more history-oriented.

Edited to correct: the website linked above is a comprehensive encyclopedia of internet-related articles ranging from who built the first network, to who coined the phrase "surfing the internet," and everything in between. The articles are mostly written by the people who actually invented/developed the things written about, or who had major contributions toward those projects.


[Edited on 7-13-2003 by Bestatte]

[Neildo]

Wow, weird. I went looking for the thread again to link it for you, Kranar, but now I can't find it. It was over at topmudsites and David's posting name is NSXDavid if you wanna try and search for it.

Another cool timeline that many people use over there is:

http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/mudtimeline.html

- N