For me it was the opposite - I was quite happy to pay, but didn't have enough control of, or visibility into, what was going on on the server.<p>I set up a minefold instance for my daughter and her friends to play on, having previously spent time setting up and maintaining a custom server for her and her friends. Unfortunately, disputes between kids tend to escalate into all out war unless you can monitor and keep a lid on things, so Minefold wasn't the answer either.
If you liked Minefold, I'm working on a service called Pickaxe (<a href="http://get.pickaxe.io" rel="nofollow">http://get.pickaxe.io</a>) that's in a similar vein. It's not up and running yet, BUT you can still register to be eligible to beta-test it (for free) when it's available.<p><a href="http://get.pickaxe.io" rel="nofollow">http://get.pickaxe.io</a>
Hey Chris and Dave, This is Dan. I'd love for you to come on Techendo (<a href="http://techendo.co/" rel="nofollow">http://techendo.co/</a>) and have me interview you about your experiences running minefold. I think you've seen a lot and have a lot to share with other entrepreneurs who are trying their own thing now.
Better luck next time guys. Unfortunately they don't always work out. Nice exit note.<p>Game development and game related development is pretty tough market to crack unfortunately.
Aww, I liked Minefold a lot. I think it was a tad too expensive, though: for my own uses, it was a good order of magnitude cheaper to rent a "normal" server. Still sad to see it go.
Gawd, freemium is one thing, but it takes some balls to tell a for-profit company, "yeah, your product is great, you just need to make the whole thing free." I understand being accustomed to things being free on teh intarwebs, since I am as well, but do people not take the half-second necessary to realize that it has to be paid for <i>somehow</i>, or it doesn't happen at all? What fraction of the population is really this dumb?