Subject: Re: [DGD] DGD Commercial Licensing?
From: Noah Gibbs
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:05:51 -0700 (PDT)

As far as DGD's cost being steep for something that began life as a
text MUD server, bear in mind that Perl started life as a thin
scripting layer on top of a regexp library, and that (non-freeware)
tools of that quality tend to go for thousands of dollars or more, too.
 How DGD "began life" is one thing.  What it does now is another.

--- Jas wrote:
> Game programmers who agree to work solely on royalty commissions
> usually 
> get the short end of the stick,

  This is true.  Even if Skotos agrees to work with you, your chance of
making significant money is very small.  You'd need to compete at least
on a level with their current flagship products like Castle Marrach and
Grendel's Revenge to see significant money, and that'll be very, very
difficult for one guy, or even a small team, to do.

  You'll discover that when it comes to charging for MUDs, there's not
really a long end of the stick.  Skotos, last I checked, was just about
breaking even in the business.  It's not like they're getting rich by
screwing over small developers -- there's just not currently a lot of
money in the business, so the key seems to be minimal development cost
(i.e. MUDs that suck, few new features, using a standard codebase
illegally, getting people to donate building/development time) so that
you don't have any expenses.  Skotos is *really* not doing it that way,
which is one reason I'm so impressed with them.

  Skotos is offering you a big chunk of well-written code and the hope
of making some money off your MUD, and they're not charging you for it.
 That may sound like a bad deal to you, but if so then you haven't
considered what the usual deals look like.

> I do appreciate your comments, even if the tone of my message would 
> indicate otherwise.  I'm just having "a week of Mondays" already,
> IRL.

  Yup.  Don't worry, this list gets a fair number of grumpy messages. 
I won't say I'm innocent of sending 'em myself occasionally :-)