I came into all this from the Free Open-Source Software side, so I have always been looking for high quality free open-source games.
I helped create
DeVCoin (sorry, I cannot find its original thread) whose purpose was to help fund free open-source projects.
In some ways my entire
Galactic Milieu project was partly a whole multiverse of things one could buy for and sell for DeVCoins; indeed to this day the
Latest Rates include-file intended for inclusion / import into shell-scrpts and apps to provide them with the latest values of the game's assets is denominated by default in DeVCoins.
(Though of course the point of the file is that you can use it to convert prices / values to be denominated in any of those assets; DeVCoin was historically the cheapest of them and thus defaulting to showing values denominated in DeVCoin provided the finest granularity of values, allowing the greatest precision in converting to any of the others.)
My thought was that if free open source games had more funding they might be able to be of "higher quality".
If you look at the history of for example
Battle for Wesnoth, you will see that it was actual gameplay that ultimately led it to enough success to eventually build "glitzier production values" such as high quality artwork.
Originally Battle for Wesnoth had been a whole lot more primitive in its user-interface.
Gameplay, not eye-candy nor hype, caused its success.
That is intended to be the case with the whole
Galactic Milieu project.
Indeed the ultimate high-end user-interface envisioned is basically a holodeck emulator kind of idea, such as an artificial intelligence capable of creating in real time a movie of eventually any arbitrary novel but some of the steps to get there progress through first being able to display in real time a movie bringing to animated life what a text mode interface such as
CoffeeMUD says is happening.
First though something needs to be happening.
The hope is that whether users choose to save bandwidth and maybe at the same time increase scriptability (why ban bots? bots are legitimate NPCs surely...) by choosing a text mode interface or make use of the latest full-immersion 3-D virtual reality interface, there first needs to be something happening, that through whatever interfaces they choose to use players can have some effect upon.
-MarkM-