[Help] Mu Online as an income source

[piparins]

Hello everyone!

I wanted to make a truthful open discussion about MU Online “today” in general. Is there anyone with existing/past recent project experience who can share their success/failures about creating/managing a MU Online project?

Is MU Online still as popular as it used to be? Is it worth to create a project if you want to make profit out of it considering the high cost of hosting/server files/protection etc. or you rather make it for fun, because there is no way to make money out of MU online?

Existing/past project owners can share their experience, for example highest loss or highest income per calendar month made. Or any other story managing a project, your highest players per 24h, highest registered accounts, I would love to hear every opinion.

I would like to hear some opinions guys, because MU Online was one of my top favourite games back in the day and I am curious how it has changed through the past years.

Appreciate you sharing your opinions/thoughts,
stay safe everyone.

 

[Dea7h]

Unless you have a lot of players, you will be on a loss for sure. Paying for hosting/anti-cheat/server files/web site = more than you can get from donations I would say... But yeah let's hear from someone who actually has some real world experience...

 

[chichoDqdko]

I totally agree with @Dea7h that unless you have more than 150 players active players, from which only 10-20% are donators (that depends on the server configuration, may vary) you will be losing time and money.

My personal experience:

1. Server: 99.60T beta 34 / Season 1 @DarkMaster * Files were not released back then
2. Testing's: Jan 2014 - Dec2014 (if not mistaken)
3. Lifetime: Dec 2014 - May 2016 (if not mistaken)
4. Registered: maybe 600+ accounts, never paid attention to them because it does not matter how many accounts have been registered
5. Capped online: 146 and kept them for three weeks then after having problems we got dropped to 80 and stayed like that for few months. Then dropped in half to 35-40 and stayed by the end like that.
6. Owners: started with 2 and then just 1. Works separated I had to deal with the website, hosting and server, the other admin had to deal with all gameserver configurations and in game things.
7. Server shut: May 2016 with 35-40 active players
8. Reason: I was not able to handle all things myself. Did not have much time and desire left to keep it online and decided to close that book.
9. Spending's in total: period roughly about £ 1170 , which includes a year and a half hosting, antihack, main.exe addons and marketing
10. Earnings: Roughly around 250-300 euro and that was only from the period when we had over 130 players online (3 weeks). Keep in mind that donations are good at server restart and fall down after, so this range of profit is not considerable as a realistic for the whole time. I would divide it in half, and you see why I said you need to have players and good server conception which is also well done implemented without bugs. With having SMS (40% for you) and PayPal (90% for you) and that was the only option to get money from players, there was no official Webshop nor selling's under the table. By the way some of the current servers prefer this method, to sell gear behind the scene to players and this turned to be more profitable if that is your target, then this approach is an option.

Since I don't have a personal experience with running a new season server I can not say anything for them. From 97 to season 2 there is a huge problem with the security and having a bad antihack leads to disastrous consequences, especially if you want to build a solid not pay to win hard-medium oriented server. For a fun server it does not really matter whether you have or not a solid Antihack since the concept is fun and hacking is part of this concept to my understanding.

One thing I believe is a fact with older seasons: They gets pissed with players no matter how interesting it is in a month after the restart. The players just drop after time, and then maybe it is a time for another reset. So its all about the server conception and configuration, if you mess it, you wont survive even a month keeping players online. The players drop in groups because this game turned to be more social than I though at the beginning and if one of the guild leave it's very likely all will leave after time.

Second thing: If you do not have perfect start especially with a new server name, this server won't last long. You have to expect something like this 200 on the start and 100 in a month time, this is the ideal scenario. So with that being said it is easy to have many players at the start but hard to keep them longer than two weeks. Increasing them progressively after a month is something I haven't seen at all.

I have spent more than 2 years working on this, lost some money too, but learned a lot. Met many new friends, added new hobbies to my hobby list which is beneficial.

My general feeling is that if you think for having a profit upfront especially from MuOnline server you are most certainly lost. You got to be running by a passion, money have never been a good adviser.

 

[piparins]

Thank you very much for your honest opinion, I see that you did put some time on writing there.

I will introduce you with my experience, it is quite similar, but different. I also started with DarkMaster 97d+99i server files back in 2013.

I had a solid hosting, managed to get a really good web-site with lots of features included. I started slow, with around 20+ online, but then it blew up and went up to 100+ online, 100+ players takes a lot of strength and a lot of players also brings a lot of hackers and then some problems started: GS crash, website crash, and me being only 16 years old and still studying I couldn’t handle it and sold the server after around 8 months of life. After I sold it I followed how is it going and the new admin closed it after around 4 more months, so it was 1 year in total. Money-wise it wasn’t that bad. I remember I was able to pay for the new website, hosting, and had a profit of at least 150-300e on top of hosting and other server costs every month and it feels unreal if we are looking back now. Of course this amount of money is nothing for 2020.

I believe that if you want a successful server, the money you make, you have to put back in a server, better protection, better features, advertising is also very important.

I am planning on making a huge project with IGCN files, paid website, hosting + anti ddos and here comes another question. Does anyone have an opinion about IGCN server files? How stable are they, how supportive is their support? Any other experiences?

 

[chichoDqdko]

I don't know what you expect but those who make money from MuOnline (if any) will never share their profit, approaches and experience. This is how the world works, you have to find the answers yourself.

In terms of IGCN, as far as I know they are stable, maybe the most stable out there. Of course not perfect, nothing is. Support is good for the money you pay upfront should not be otherwise.

 

[hA7SH9dks]

youmust invest a lot of time and must have a BIG LUck to do money with mu online
BUT FIRST you must have a CAPITAL to buy PAID server Files i think and to PAY ADS because sure WITHOUT ADS nothing happens ..