The state of MUD, part 3

I believe that MUDs’ greatest strengths are also their greatest weakness; namely that they are quick and cheap to setup and run. While this means MUDs can offer some of the unique gameplay I mentioned in my last post it has also undoubtedly lead to an explosion in the numbers of mediocre games. New players discovering MUDs through a major listing site such as TMC are presented with huge numbers of games to choose from, however many of these will be half finished or nothing more than stock clones.

In order for MUDs to survive and prosper I believe they need to focus on their strengths, namely their ease of development. There is a market for high quality text games that cater to specialist niches such as hardcore PvP, permadeath, fan fiction or a particular period of history, that more expensive graphical games cannot afford to appeal to. Dynamic games where the world changes in response to character actions, or that feature frequent administration run events are also much easier to achieve in a MUD where the development costs are low.

I would also like to see more specialist listing sites that focus on smaller numbers of high quality games that feature the kind of gameplay that makes MUDs stand out from other virtual worlds. However it is very hard for these sites to reach new players without funding for advertising, and that in turn requires the support of advetisers, who for the most part are commercial MUDs. I believe therefore that were more MUDs to become commercial, whether through donations, subscriptions or pay for perks, it would be better for MUDs as a whole.

So what happens when graphical games finally catch up and are as fast and cheap to develop for as text games? That’s when I believe we will truly see the end of MUDs. Of course there will always be people who play and develop MUDs out of nostalgia, but I believe that once the development cost playing field has been leveled there will be far fewer compelling reasons to choose text over graphics.