Re: Starting a Play-By-Snail-Mail Game

From: gl8f@astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)

Date: Tue, 31 Jul 1990 21:06:10 +0000

This isn't on the same topic as before, I just wanted to stick in a
few cents about my favorite pet ideas...

In article <657@aio.jesnet.jsc.nasa.gov> hack@lock.espan.nasa.gov (Edmund Hack) writes:

> Only a few
>games are commercially available for less than $4.00 a turn and they
>tend to have a limited number of actions/orders each turn, or a have
>options to enter turns by computer disk or email.  Look at a few of the
>costs: Postage 0.25, envelopes 0.02, stuffing envelope 0.10 (1 a minute
>at $6.00/hr labor cost), paper 0.05 for 5 sheets : 42 cents just for
>mailing the turn out.

I think this estimate is right on the money. The cheapest commercial
games are things like Monster Island, which manage to support a low
turn fee by having very little data input, which can lead to very
little apparent freedom to do what you want with your monster.

However, if you are in this as a hobby and not to make money (because
you're not going to make money anyway), a free play-by-email game
offers a lot of advantages. For the same investment of programming
that you'd make anyway for your money-losing commercial game, you can
have lots of fun and have lots more people play. Compu$erve has quite
a few subscribers who could play, in addition to your traditional
Internet types.

--
"In fact you should not be involved in IRC." -- Phil Howard

References

I was wondering...
wolf@mel.cipl.uiowa
Wed, 25 Jul 1990 22:24:44 +0000
Re: I was wondering...
hack@aio.jesnet.jsc.nasa.gov (Edmund Hack)
Tue, 31 Jul 1990 17:11:09 +0000