Virtual Worlds Were Supposed to Let Players Be Themselves, But Monetization Forgets That

When Roy Trubshaw and I created MUD1 at the University of Essex in 1978, I was not trying to build a product category. I was not trying to invent a business model. I was trying to build a world.

More specifically, I was trying to build a world that gave people the freedom to be themselves, unshackled from the constraints of reality. The real world imposed too many limits on people for reasons that had nothing to do with who they actually were. I wanted to create a better, fairer world, one that judged people by their strength of character rather than by the accidents of birth, appearance, social status, or real-world circumstance.

We knew we were making something special. What we did not know was that no one else had already done it. There could have been dozens of virtual worlds out there for all we knew. We did not have the means to find out. We were doing it because we wanted to do it.

That distinction matters, because much of what went wrong later in the history of online worlds came from forgetting why these places were worth building in the first place.

Virtual worlds are not merely games with more players. They are not content platforms, monetization funnels, or retention systems. At their best, they are works of art. They express something that the designer cannot express any other way. If a designer could say what they wanted to say through a novel, a film, a board game, or a conventional multiplayer game, there would be no need to make a virtual world.

A virtual world needs craft, of course. It needs systems, economies, social tools, moderation, technology, content, onboarding, and all the operational machinery of live service. But the craft has to be subservient to the art. If it is not, the world may function, but it will have no soul.

Virtual Worlds Were Built on a Social Contract

MUD1 did not stumble into community by accident. We knew what we were doing. One of the things early virtual worlds understood, which much of the industry has since forgotten, is scale.

When a server has players numbering in the low hundreds, everyone knows everyone else. Everyone is impactful. Reputation matters. Actions echo. Players feel that they belong somewhere because the world is small enough for their presence to mean something.

When servers have players numbering in the thousands, no one is special. The player becomes one more body in a crowd. Guilds are not a complete solution, because guilds define community by exclusion. They create smaller circles, yes, but they also shut out non-members. They do not make the world itself intimate again.

This is not simply a nostalgia point. It is a business point, a design point, and a cultural point. If players feel replaceable, the world becomes replaceable. If players feel impactful, they invest themselves.

The Subscription Era Had a Clearer Bargain

The early commercial model for virtual worlds understood the player-developer relationship better than many modern models do.

It is often said that players paid monthly simply to exist in those spaces, but that is not quite how it began. They paid for usage. The more they played, the more they paid. It was like fuel for a car: the farther you travelled, the more petrol, gasoline, or electricity you consumed.

This per-hour charging was a good model. It brought in enough money that developers could spend time improving their games. Other MUDs were free, and worth every penny. The implicit contract was simple: you paid because you would get a better game than you would if you played a free one.

That contract was easier to understand than many modern monetization systems. The player paid for access to the experience. The developer used that money to make the experience better. Both sides knew what the exchange was.

Subscriptions became the norm partly because they were easier for small professional outfits to manage, but the larger shift came from the economics of Internet access itself. Once flat-rate Internet access became the expectation, per-hour charging for online worlds had to go, and subscriptions became established as the norm.

We still have subscriptions today, but they are called battle passes.

That may sound like a joke, but it is not only a joke. A battle pass is a recurring payment model wrapped in a progression structure. The problem is not recurring payment in itself. The problem is what the payment is allowed to touch, and what kind of relationship it creates between the player and the world.

Player Types Explain Why Monetization Breaks Worlds

My player types model — Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, Killers — was originally a design tool, not a business tool. I published it because I wanted to help a new academic journal, the Journal of MUD Research, and I thought the model would be superseded within six months. I was not trying to say, “These are the four player types.” I was trying to say, “There is more than one player type; here are four.”

At the time, many people were designing MUDs they themselves wanted to play, but not necessarily worlds that other people wanted to play. The model helped designers see that different players valued different things.

In hindsight, it can also explain why MMO monetization broke. The problem is not simply that developers built revenue models serving one or two player types while starving the rest. The problem is that they built revenue models that actively offended some of them.

Pay-to-win, for example, may be of little significance to Socializers. If what matters most to a player is social presence, conversation, belonging, or identity, then someone else buying power may not directly undermine what they came for. But Achievers loathe pay-to-win because it undermines the very meaning of achievement.

Achievement means nothing if it can be bought. If a player can buy progression, power, XP acceleration, inventory advantages, or anything else that affects gameplay, the meaning of earned progression changes. Characters are no longer advancing purely on merit. They are advancing because real-world money has been allowed to interfere with the rules of the world.

This is why free-to-play is generally regarded as acceptable when it is used for cosmetic purposes only. Cosmetic purchases can still be excessive, manipulative, or tasteless, but they do not necessarily invalidate achievement. Gameplay-affecting purchases do.

Free-To-Play Was Never Really About Access

Free-to-play is often framed as democratizing access. I do not think that is why it happened.

If democratization were the point, developers could simply give players anything they wanted for free. Fill in a web form, press the button, and there it is: you have what you want, no charge. Democracy in action.

Free-to-play came about because players like free. When there were fewer graphical virtual worlds around, players had to pay a subscription because all of them asked for one. Once one broke ranks and found that going free-to-play could dramatically increase income, the subscription model collapsed for most of the market.

The shift was not primarily about mass audience as an ideal. It was about income versus operating costs. If a developer takes in more money from free-to-play than from subscriptions, it goes free-to-play.

Players who do not pay cost money to service, but the amount per player is usually negligible. Having non-paying players around can make a virtual world look busy. It also gives paying players someone to look down on, consciously or otherwise. A large audience is useful, but not because developers necessarily want more players as an end in itself. At the moment, a large audience delivers more money.

The danger is that the world begins to reorganize itself around extraction.

When Monetization Breaks the Fiction

When a game introduces pay-to-win mechanics or aggressive monetization loops, the argument is often that most players do not mind. This is misleading. The ones who do mind stop playing.

If you ran a restaurant and started adding double the salt to everything, the diners who came back would be the ones who liked double salt. They would not be representative of diners in general. They would be the survivors of your change.

The same thing happens in virtual worlds. If monetization undermines the fiction, the players who care most about the fiction leave first. The remaining audience may appear tolerant, but that does not mean the change was harmless. It means the culture has already been altered.

When monetization starts undermining the fiction, the virtual economy becomes an adjunct to the real-world economy. The culture becomes dominated by what can be bought. The virtual world loses its separateness.

That separateness is not a minor aesthetic concern. It is the point. Players can no longer be who they truly are if the world simply imports the social pressures and financial affordances of reality. They can only be what the real world allows them to be. The person with more disposable income gains access to more status, more power, more convenience, or more expression. The world stops being an escape from reality’s unfairness and becomes another interface for it.

This is why virtual economies are not merely spreadsheets. They are cultural systems. When you decide what can be bought, you decide what kind of people your world respects.

A World Built to Last Needs More Than a Business Model

If I were advising a studio today that said it wanted to build an MMO around 50,000 deeply engaged players, my first response would be: why?

Not because I think they should not do it. Small and deeply engaged can work. The answer matters because if they do not know why they are designing this world, they will fill the gap with business logic, feature checklists, investor expectations, and monetization habits inherited from other genres.

Small-but-dedicated worlds are scalable in one sense. You can add more servers, and each one can be small. But content creation is still expensive. Until developers can buy vast packs of assets for very little money, we are still some way off from making this easy. It was far easier back in the text days.

A lasting virtual world also needs enough capital. If I were advising a studio that genuinely wanted to build a virtual world designed to last financially, culturally, and experientially, the single most important thing it would need to get right is raising the capital it actually needs, as opposed to the capital it believes it needs. The latter will usually be much, much lower.

The lesson of MUD1 is not that we should go back to text worlds, per-hour billing, or servers with a few hundred people simply because they came first. The lesson is that a virtual world’s business model, social structure, and design philosophy cannot be separated from one another.

If the world is built to let people be themselves, the economy has to protect that possibility. If the world is built to let players achieve, achievement must not be for sale. If the world is built to be separate from reality, it must not allow reality’s inequalities to dominate its culture.

And if the world is meant to last, it needs a soul before it needs a store.

Richard A. Bartle, Game Design Professor at the University of Essex