Introduction

BlackNova Traders (BNT) is the creation of one Ron Harwood who was a fan of the Trade Wars 2002 Bulletin Board System (BBS) game.  Like many other TW 2002 fans, Harwood was dismayed with the first ever commercial Browser Based Game (BBG) version of TW 2002, Space Merchant, a Shareplay production.  Thus, he set out to create a BBG that would show the folks at Shareplay just how a great space strategy game ought to be done.

At first, the introduction of his new game, BlackNova Traders (BNT) , went well.  It gained 2,000 players within months of its debut as well as a neat write up at Slashdot.  However, Harwood did not want to run advertising on the grounds that banner ads slowed the game down.  This resulted in financial losses for the free to play game.  Harwood then took the fateful step of making BNT an Open Source (OS)  game.  Soon, all sorts of would be developers/operators stepped in and eventually there were 20+ servers running BNT games.

The end result of all this was that the player base became all spread out and instead of a thrilling 2,000 player game, what you had were a lot of low player games that were not challenging resulting in boredom.   OS has been nothing short of disastrous for BNT.  Nowadays, the BNT project is just barely lingering on and its difficult how to see a scenario in which the game is able to survive too much longer, let alone stage a turnaround and regain its former glory.