Phantasmal Site > DGD > Skotos > Commercial Use

Licensing DGD Commercially

Licensing DGD from Dworkin, at this point, costs about $100,000.00 US per year. No, that's not a misprint. Yes, it's well out of hobbyist range. You can get a cheaper price if you're a nonprofit organization, or under some similar conditions, but it's still not particularly cheap. Before you send horrendous angry mail to Dworkin about how greedy he is, please read further. He originally licensed at a much lower cost, and it didn't work at all. He has already tried the approach you're going to suggest. No, I'm not thrilled with the current situation either.

You can potentially get a much lower price through Skotos, depending on whether you compete with them, whether you're willing to contribute code back to them, and how they choose to work with you. The basic license agreement that they have involves (involved?) paying $75,000, or $25,000 per year — still well below the cost to directly license DGD through Felix. Their license-discounting scheme is at best semi-public, but some licensing agreements that they've had in the past are known.

In any case, Skotos has been willing to deal in the past, so if you think you're not far off being able to pay the license fee, or mostly noncompeting, or otherwise an "almost" case, talking to Christopher Allen could be a wise move.

Other Licensing Conditions

Skotos may consider licensing to you cheaper if you don't compete with their business. Their business is games, and more specifically MUDs, so your MUD probably does compete with their business. They're unlikely to give you a seriously cheap DGD license for a commercial MUD. However, they might choose to work with you directly, which is an entirely different agreement.

Skotos has, in the past, been willing to give very cheap use of DGD to those who work with their libraries and contribute code back. They also have an in-house plan for developing games which will run on Skotos servers, using DGD commercially. The idea is that the DGD license is supplied free, because Skotos is the one using it. The developer (you) will be paid a royalty based on the number of subscribers your game draws to Skotos' site, as measured by the amount of time and the number of people that your game has at any given time. If your game is sufficiently popular, you get royalties. Those are split between the implementor(s) and head builder(s) in a prearranged way. If you're using licensed intellectual property like Chaosium's Lovecraft Country in your game, the royalties are proportionally lower.

Your chances of becoming rich off their royalty payments is very, very low. However, it's a way to develop a commercial MUD, running on commercial servers, for nothing out-of-pocket to you. They are offering a free-but-unlikely chance to get rich at no charge, so you can think of it as a free lottery ticket they've just given you. Unfortunately, unlike a lottery ticket, you'll need to write a MUD and run it for awhile before they see if your numbers match :-)

Note that any changes you make to the underlying Skotos lib, or that builds in a non-game-specific way on top of it, will need to be submitted back to Skotos for possible inclusion in the base library. You may believe that that's unfair, and that if they're not going to give you any guaranteed payments, they should get nothing from you except whatever business you drum up. The Skotos response is basically that 1) licensing DGD costs them a lot of money, 2) running the servers costs them a lot of money, and 3) your game doesn't make them a lot of money. If it did, you'd be getting lots of royalties.

Technical Capabilities

The commercial version of DGD has a couple of nonstandard capabilities, but they're basically outmatched by the network patch, so it's nothing extraordinary. In general, free DGD has the same feature set as commercial DGD.

Why So Expensive?

Before 1996 (yes, DGD is old), commercial licensing for DGD cost $100 per month. To quote Dworkin:

Before 1996, a commercial license for DGD was $100 a month.  I
received hundreds of emails from interested people.  Upon learning the
terms for a commercial license, they would generally say, "gee,
that's $1200 per year.  Can we maybe work out some royalty deal?"
Others would say that the terms were fine, tell me that they'd already
started developing a new mudlib, and then they'd fade away.  Nobody,
out of all these hundreds, ever paid me a cent.  Meanwhile, I had my
own bills to pay.

I have come to see the response to the $100 a month license as
symptomatic for the text MUD "industry".  Almost everyone
who contacted me severely underestimated the difficulty of creating
your own MUD, didn't know how to run a business, and was unwilling to
invest $1200 for the first year to get their MUD running.

Then I got involved with ichat.  They were in the $100,000+ per year
licensing league.  Using DGD and 2 LPC programmers, they created ROOMS
and in 6 months they had 80% of the chat market.

Even if I were able at this point to live on DGD income through the
$100 per month market (which I doubt), I believe that, considering the
lack of professionalism of many people in that group, I would be
spending a lot of my time dealing with contract violations and
non-payment of fees, instead of programming.  I consider DGD to be a
professional, high-quality product.  I would much rather deal with
those in the $100,000/year league.
  

From: Noah Gibbs
Subject: Re: [DGD] DGD Commercial Licensing?
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 :-)