There’s always debate among both devs and players over which popular intellectual property’s specific characteristics and fan base make it most suitable for an MMO. I had a random thought earlier, however, that provides an objective way to measure its popularity among MMO fans. The hobbyist text MUD community (still thriving) tends to feel quite free about using popular IP without a license. Whether this is fan fiction or a copyright violation is a question for the courts to answer, though generally, owners of popular IP have taken a hands-off approach to text MUDs. The most notable exception is author Raymond E. Feist (whose work we licensed partly because he had prevented hobbyist MUDs from using his IP), though the Tolkien Estate has threatened action at least once, against a MUD that was selling mugs and t-shirts via Cafepress.com in order to pay its server bills.
When combined with the fact that starting a hobbyist text MUD has a very low barrier to entry, is it possible that one can judge the relative popularity of a property by looking both at how many text MUDs (there are thousands after all, though most have few players) are using that IP? Maybe, maybe not, but I’m sure something useful can be gleaned in the way of likely popularity. There are at least a couple assumptions I’m making here, and I’ll explain why they’re probably at least partially flawed:
- I assume that text MUD players and developers are not much different from graphical MMO players and developers. This assumption holds up pretty well to me, as I’ve noticed no substantial difference between an MMO audience and a text MUD audience in terms of the demographic makeup, attitudes, or anything else.
- I assume that the barrier to creating a text MUD is equal regardless of IP involved. This one is a bit flawed because certain popular and long-running IPs (Star Wars, in particular), have entire Star Wars MUD codebases that can be downloaded and altered from there.
Still, with the caveat of varying barriers to entry and the fact that this is just an unformed, stream-of-consciousness post, here are the results of some major IPs from Mudconnector:
Star Wars: 57. Yep, there are fifty-seven text virtual worlds using Star Wars right now, at minimum. (the listings on Mudconnector aren’t complete, though they’re reasonably close.)
Tolkien: 36
Harry Potter: 18
Dragonball: 51
Stargate: 6
Battlestar: 4
Dragonlance: 21
Pokemon: 6
Anime (which will include Pokemon): 57
Miami Vice: 0 (doh! Sorry Tubbs!)
Eddings (as in David): 6
Wheel of Time: 32
Star Trek: 28
Actually, I don’t think those are too bad. A lot of those numbers fit my gut for how popular a particular franchise is.
6 comments
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July 28th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Scott
There’s only one caveat to this: time. Battlestar Galactica’s only experienced a popularity spike for the past 3 years, Stargate for only a bit longer (5 years?) and Miami Vice may get more popular in a week. Is that enough time for a MUD to get coded and established? Some of those TrekMUDs have been around almost as long as their admins have been alive.
July 29th, 2006 at 1:15 am
Joseph Monk
Some of those muds are probably not “unique” worlds. My first mud was a “Star wars” one… it had about 5 Star wars area’s and a Jedi class… that was about it. To make a mud like that, working of a stock code base… a month or two if the admin knows what he’s doing.
July 29th, 2006 at 6:09 am
Andrew Crystall
*looks a the Miami Vice comment and grins*
The PSP game was done here, didn’t work on it though.
I can understand why people have to take action against fans of their own, sometimes, because of the stupidly messed up nature of IP laws meaning there is no real way to allow them without risking your IP.
July 29th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Matt
Scott wrote:
There’s only one caveat to this: time. Battlestar Galactica’s only experienced a popularity spike for the past 3 years, Stargate for only a bit longer (5 years?) and Miami Vice may get more popular in a week. Is that enough time for a MUD to get coded and established? Some of those TrekMUDs have been around almost as long as their admins have been alive.
Given the spotty quality of most (but not all) hobbyist MUDs, three years is plenty of time, and I didn’t take into account how developed or how many players each MUD has. Being popular longer does give hobbyist devs an increased timeframe to put up a MUD based on that IP, but there are diminishing returns, since very small hobbyist MUDs often have short half-lives.
Keep in mind, too, that the numbers listed above don’t take into account number of players per MUD, etc. The Battlestar MUDs are likely all quite small in terms of playerbase.
July 29th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Mike Rozak
I don’t disagree with your assumption. However, you didn’t mention a few non-IP categories such as:
- Christian-based muds - 2
- Furry muds - 24
- Historical - 10
- Gothic - 11
- Modern day - 31
- Post apocolyptic - 11
- Roleplaying enforced - 373
- Sexually oriented - 21
July 29th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Mike Rozak
Forgot to mention: The “roleplaying enforced muds = 373″ poses a bit of a MMORPG extrapolation problem. I can think of a few reasons why the number might be so high though.