Quote Originally Posted by Light View Post
If by surviving you mean less players every year, then yes. Those F2P games have large playerbases because they are.. get ready for it.. F2P. Young adults generally don't have 30$+ a month to spend, and if they do, spending it on a 30 year old text game isn't all that appealing. However once someone is addicted to a game they will generally spend what cash they have on it if the cash shop is designed in an intelligent way.

I'm not sure muds have any more or less appeal then they did 15 years ago, the target audience is very much the same as it was then, the market is simply saturated with graphical games that teenagers and young adults can play for free if they chose.

Most of the F2P market is not a one time fee, GW2 and D3 are exceptions, not the norm. There is a fair share of games that start as subscription based then go f2p when the memberbase begins to decline. They do this to extend the lifespan of the game and maximize the income they can yield until it becomes unprofitable to continue keeping it online. I wonder if there is another company we'd all be familiar with that might be able to learn something from that? Also, all of those games have large investment costs into development of said games, muds do not.

I'm not going to derail Jeril's thread any further, it sucks he got banned in what is essentially a lottery as almost everyone who plays does script (non-afk) and it's simply a matter of being checked at the wrong time. Your doorbell rings, you gotta take a shit, you fall asleep in your computer chair, whatever. Banning paying customers who are not creating mischief or causing harm in a game with a playerbase this small is dumb, and I have yet to hear any argument made that would convince me otherwise. Do I think people should be able to afk-script MA 8 accounts 24/7? No. There is a level of common sense the staff should be using when doing these checks which quite plainly, they are not. Maybe the level of professionalism goes down when you pay your employee's the rough equivilent of a mcdonalds lunch every month. /shrug
Surviving mean that it is making money still. The target audience has shrank heavily compared to what it was back then. WoW has the largest player base and wait for it... It isn't F2P. Also, the game doesn't cost $30 a month, however, that still isn't a lot of money, even when I was a 16 year old working my first job.

Most of the F2P market started as B2P and had a sub, and then went F2P. Some are still B2P, most offer an upgrade package, and whats more, almost all of them offer a subscription service. As far as I can tell, ALL MUDs have been on a steady downward spiral since around 2003 or 2004.... Which coincides with the huge rise in graphical MMO popularity.

As you said, MUDs don't have huge investment costs, so it doesn't need a huge playerbase, and as other threads concerning playerbase have shown, the playerbase has stayed roughly the same for the last couple years.