Well, you did ask the question: "Is there any mud with a growing player base?" The answer that Fizban gave is "yes". :wink: Had you asked the question, "are MUDs as a whole gaining players?" the answer would have been different…

Over all, yes. Text based muds are losing popularity. The playerbases are consolidating into a few large ones that have either been around forever, or are pay-to-play/pay-for-perks based and can offer more than the average hobbyist game. The decline has been slow enough though that a lot of the "oldbies" just refuse to see it happening. But it is happening, and eventually when the decline levels out it'll be more or less like D&D. You'd be surprised how few people these days have even heard of D&D, much less internet text based games based on it.

I think that more people have heard of D&D than play text MUDs… now, that doesn't mean they actually play D&D, but there are more things than text MUDs based off of it. Still, I think a lot of people have heard of it; if anything, the eulogies for Gary Gygax were a testament to that.

No to the question in the subject line from the original poster.

I don't think I've 'ever' met someone who hadn't known what D&D was. Did they know the rules? No, but they'd heard of it. On the other hand 95%+ of the people I know have never heard of a mud.

In some ways, the mud community is very similar to the music industry in the essence that it still embraces an old business model in a rapidly changing environment. I will agree that muds have generally lost popularity, but text based gaming on a whole is booming across the internet and there are a great many ways that you can leverage into those markets and gain new players, but to do so requires some new thinking on the part of mud owners. There is a huge opportunity for those who can adapt to grow into new markets.

I am pretty fortunate be be a parent, i have access to a number of school age kids who enjoy games just as much as i do, together we play a number of graphical muds, mmo's and i have been able to get input from them and their friends on the things that would get them to play muds or the things that could be changed to make playing muds a more enjoyable experience.

There is so much more i can crap on about here on this topic as i have been thinking on this very topic for a while now and also ways to grow players.

To the OP is lpc dead, i doubt it, they have their own little comunity doing their own thing.

Saying that text-based gaming is a booming market today is a rather bold claim. Do you have any data to back that up? Perhaps you have concrete ideas to share regarding how MUDs can tap into this huge pool of potential players…

Agreed, it was a rather poor choice of words, rather what i meant was that the text based and casual game market is substantially large. DFC Intelligence provide the most comprehensive data on the game industry, covering every aspect that you can imagine in their reports, tho most of the information i have been given has come from my statistics tutor who is currently undertaking a study into the casual gaming market, we have had a number of very interesting and informative discussions on the subject since he saw me browsing mud connect during tutorial.



I do have plenty of ideas on how to tap into new markets and grow to grow your product. Do they work? well i cannot say yet as i do not have a polished game that im ready t promote, tho when i do have a game thats ready, i do know exactly where and how i am going to market it.

Ok so what is my current approach:

1. Identify your market: If the only person that your game is aimed at is the current mud community, then your bound to fail. The mud community is substantially small and shrinking, with a small number of well established muds consolidating their positions and market share, the people who play these games have done so for ever and are very unlikely to change or try new things, these same well established muds are also able to recruit people newish to mudding or those that have been introduced to muds and have played a failed game due to their well established nature, professional staff and polished game play and active communities.. It is my personal opinion that the greatest potential market is the 10 to 18 year olds, i wont go into the reasons that brought me to that opinion, suffice to say that its also the market that most traditional muds do not want.

2. Know your market: If you don't know what your target audience wants then your also going to fail. The old way of doing things in the mud community was "I have this great idea for a mud and i think it will be cool" is really not going to cut it anymore. That might be ok if your focus is on making a mud as a hobby, Kavir for the most part has made the game he wanted to make and had been successful because its substantially unique, just another medieval fantasy clone will for the most part fail no matter how cool you think it sounds. If you want to actually have people play it, you need to be designing your game around what your market is looking for. Know that the users want, know what your competitors are doing, if they have a strategy that works then use it to your benefit also. Just because you might not like Iron Realms does not mean that you cannot use the same strategies as they do, in fact you can learn a lot from what they do and the mistakes they make, especially where it comes to growing your business / game.

3. Tapping into new markets: This is going to depend on who your target audience is, i have a strategy that i have started to develop for when i have my game to a point where its ready to be played. But its very specific to the type of game i am making and those to which i am going to market the game towards. Putting a listing on the mud specific boards is not enough, there are a lot of other places where you can get your game listed that are not mud specific. Also all tho you may be running a free game, your still going to need an advertising budget. The essence here is on quality targeted advertising aimed at your targeted audience. All of this does not have to be global, why not start local.

4. Game launch: Do not launch your game before its ready and have a plan for its launch. leverage every possibility you can, from news sites to game sites to places where your target audience hang out. I have a list of 160 sites that i will use when i launch my game to players. All of them have been specificly chosen as places where my target audience visit. Tho the internet is not going to be the only medium that i use. As my target audience is 10 to 18 years old, i will be targeting all the schools in the greater region where i live, schools all have news letters which for a small fee you can place an advert. So my plan is to run a competition with a number of prises on offer, i have not finalized the details as yet, but will have done so come close to launch time.

None of this has been proven to work, but it some of the plan that i have been following in regards to developing a cohesive plan for a game its design and for breaking into new markets. How it works is yet to be seen, but there surely a lot to be gained from thinking on the matter a little more deeply then putting a message on mud connect and hoping someone drops in to take a look.

Also i have a bench mark for success and for me that would be 35+ people logged in at one time during the first week of launch. That is ultimately what i am aiming for.

35+ in a week is a steep number. But I hope you succeed, It'll be a boon if you can pull more people into the community and get them looking around at different things.

Just got back from a 10Km cycle and while i was at it came up with yet more ideas that can be used to bring players in from outside the mud world.

I was thinking of cheese, don't ask my why cheese but the thought of cheese got me thinking about farmers co-ops and how they operate. A bunch of small farmers come together under one banner to market their products to a bigger audience to compete against the industry giants. So why not use the same principle with muds i thought.

Not all muds are competing for the same market sectors, so why see all muds as your competitors when you could in fact come together under one brand name and jointly market your products to a bigger audience.

Most of the better muds have a small budget to spend on advertising, individually you can have small market penetration and often your advertising in the same places and not going anywhere fast. Bring 5 or so muds together to advertise under a common brand and you soon have the ability to reach a wider audience. Set up a your own online games co-op and use your combine budgets to advertise the portal site across a wide range of places, get the page views happening and sell off advertising space and then you have a small revenue stream to put back into the advertising. Jointly develop a proprietary client that can only be used to access the games of the co-op that is vastly better then the web client everyone has to use, call it your enhanced content browser charge $5 a month to use it.

Take the Mud Quest website as an example, they are in a good position to do something like i have outlined above, if each of the 20 or so quality games that are listed there put up $100 each, you would have a tidy sum to invest in advertising the group as a whole.

Just some food for thought. All in all there is a market for everything and everyone, just because the mud community as we know it is dwindling, does not mean that it is dead, there is a market for our products, its out there, the trouble is we are not reaching it, nor in my opinion are we even thinking of what it wants from us.

While I was in school, we were allowed to play online games whenever we wanted (graduated 2003).
I played many browser text base games, because I had allot of free time and it was easy to play
being able to play with any computer with an internet access.

I'm thinking that the players that will end up joining the mudding world will come from middle and high schoolers, with the few college
people who want to learn programming (or dating someone who muds :P). Now the main question would be how to advertise to them to
bring in more players? Maybe using websites they associate with?

Facebook? Myspace? There's also the option of showing them how to connect and using a mud by using utube. Obviously you could have written out directions, but people looking on utube could possibly bring in players, as well as being able to show instead of just write out how to connect.

I know when I was looking for online games to play, I always searched using the term 'mmorp'. Maybe change mud websites layouts and content in order to up the rankings in yahoo and google? There should be many free ways to get more people into mudding. Not to mention, muds work great as chatrooms as well, and there could be potential of bringing in people by starting them off with talkers if they arnt into mudding yet.

I was still toaded when this thread started…I guess
its reanimation today is good enough excuse to respond
to it now!




No, it is not. It's still used, and there's even work on
both existing and new drivers in progress, as well as libs.

For more information, visit http://lpmuds.net



Not true. There are a fair number of libs I have fixed up
and packaged for convenient installation. Most of them
even come with a Windows executable included, so you can
unzip-compile-run on Unix, or unzip-run on Windows. For more
information and downloads, see: http://lpmuds.net/downloads.html

There are a few misconceptions and outdated conceptions
about LPC in this thread…I'll simply limit myself to
remarking "don't knock it til you try it" :)

As for the ancient "mudding is dying" trope, srsly, cmon. I
think people have been wringing their hands about "mudding is
dying" since 1993. As far as I know, movies haven't killed
books, TV hasn't killed radio, etc etc. The hobby will adapt
and survive, as it always has, as entertainment tends to do.

One of my favorite lines in The Godfather Part II is when
someone tries to dissuade Michael from harming Hyman Roth
on the grounds that he's an old man and dying anyway.

Michael dismisses the argument, saying, "Hyman Roth has been
dying from the same heart attack for the last twenty years."

Don't worry about mudding. And don't grieve LPC yet, either.

-Crat
http://dead-souls.net

Lol, toaded. Now, that's old school.

How about Direct Marketing. In the school district that i live in there are 30,000+ kids ages between 12 and 17. Hand out 100 or so mini cd's with a client on it pre-configured to connect to your game, have a really nice looking pdf with a walk through on it as well, or better yet some web pages that auto load into a browser, offer an incentive to come and give it a try, $50 cash prize anyone? and in no time you should have a few dozen if not more local kids having a go at your game. 3 or 4 imms do the same in different locations and you have yourself an pbase the can then grow with word of mouth.

I cannot say that i have tried this yet, but i intend to as soon as i have a game worth trying it with i intend on doing something similar to what i have outlined above.

No, lpc is definitely not dead.
As of 2 weeks ago, I didn't know what a MUD was. The first one I played was made in lpc and, I have to admit, it still has the best look and feel out of the several that I've looked at since.
That MUD had a rather large following, despite the fact that it's been going on for over a decade.
I read somewhere on the games' site that you could help to create the game and have been reading up on lpc ever since. I know a little HTML, and I'm currently learning Adobe Flex, but don't know beans about programming.
Considering that I'm completely unfamiliar with any programming language, I figure that I'm not disadvantaged at having to learn an otherwise completely-new language.

@ The Fury:Your strategies look to be sound. You certainly have to have an objective mind when dealing with marketing. The public is a funny thing; it's very unpredictable and, as such, you have to be prepared with backup contingency plans. No one method is enough to target every audience, or even every member of a specific audience. There will always be variances and unknowns.
I hope your game becomes a success.

Note that you're talking to someone who is banned.

I did notice that, but it's possible that he/she still reads this from time to time.
But thanks for the pointer, anyways.