Oh wow. Minecraft. I have an 8yo boy, so I spend a lot more time thinking about this than I would like.
I think Mojang has it's priorities slightly wrong here. At the moment much of the interesting stuff in Minecraft is done via mods. But the user experience for that is pretty close to pre-Google search: browse through random forums to find links to dodgy download sites that attempt to push malware or porn to you.
Then when you find a working download, you have to install. Inevitably that means clashes with existing mods, and hours trying different versions of things that some random person on a forum claims work.
FFS, I'm a Java programmer, and I can't work out how to make this shit work most of the time.
In my view Mojang should do the following:
Build a working, stable official Mod API, which at least attempts to make it possible to determine if different mods will work together
Implement an in-game app store, and let mod authors sell their mods.
I'd much prefer to spend a dollar on a new mod rather than the horrible, horrible experience it is now.
I'd much rather people pay for stability. Tricking people to pay for 64 bytes of code and a new color pallet for a diamond encrusted pixel sword in order to offer stability was a mistake. Education needed to happen, this shit is hard, and it's a lot of work. When I go to a store, I don't see a sign "Pizza is free" only to walk over and find that if I want to put toppings on the pizza, well those cost $0.99 per single slice of pepperoni on the pizza. In order to get a full pizza experience, including peppers, cheese, and sauce, I'm not paying $30 for the free pizza. It's dishonest, and we're the ones allowing it to happen.
Firstly, Pay-to-play (which I think you are talking about?) isn't the same as an app store for mods. I'm not sure if you play Minecraft, but there is a very diverse range of mods available, of differing qualities and all hosted on malware infested download sites. That's a real problem that deserves to be looked at.
I'd never advocate that core features of Minecraft be made pay-to-play. Instead, I'm advocating exactly the same model as we see in Android or iOS: the core system is free, and there is a simple way to get extra features onto it. Some of those maybe free, and some may not.
Secondly, the number of bytes doesn't determine the value of anything.
Thirdly, "It's dishonest, and we're the ones allowing it to happen" - who, specifically is the "we" you speak of here? I'm not doing anything to allow it to happen. (I'm not specifically doing anything to stop it, either: I'm simply not involved. I'm genuinely curious who you are talking about).
Sell me a service, or a product, not a gimmick. That's what I'm saying. Im talking about IAP.
The value is in scarcity, but it's artificially scarce. It's contrived.
Seriously? On a forum dedicated to startups and development, many who like me do app and game development or lead app and game development teams; you can't figure out who I'm talking to? Seriously?
The value is in scarcity, but it's artificially scarce. It's contrived.
Couldn't this statement apply to gaming as a whole, too?
Is it that being stopped half way through a game and forced to pay for some gizmo to keep playing is worse than having to pay up front for the whole game? Financially there may be no difference at all, right?
(Not a gamer here)
Seriously? On a forum dedicated to startups and development, many who like me do app and game development or lead app and game development teams; you can't figure out who I'm talking to? Seriously?
HN is hardly a game focused forum. The vast majority of people on here don't have anything to do with games.
It was difficult to tell if your "We" meant "game developers" in general or was somehow more specific to Minecraft mod developers (which is what I didn't understand).
I think the common theme is Minecraft's ecosystem. Mojang addresses a problem (EULA-breaking monetization within the ecosystem) by changing the rules to address the problem. What they should do is circumvent the immediate problem by redefining the ecosystem itself.
Furnishing developers with a stable, predictable API redefines the ecosystem, and creating an "app store" for mods (et cetera...) could finance it, with ongoing revenue. With Mojang's current attitude I see it being more of a "google play", especially given the ease that mods could be repackaged. Still, better than having kids pull executable code off forums.
I don't think you've played minecraft and done modding.
If your server requires 1.6.4 and railcraft 1.2.3.4.5.6 well then anyone who connects requires MC 1.6.4 (free, no problem) and ALSO requires railcraft 1.2.3.4.5.6 and mods are stereotypically hosted on the scummiest pr0n-iest adfest drive by download sewers of the internet (sorry, but its true)
So say you want to host a server called "jiggy's minecraft". Simply require a mod to log into your server called jiggy-2014 for the entire year of 2014 and sell it in the in app store for "annual fee". Maybe drop the price by 1 / 12 every month thru the year. Guess the mod name you'll require in 2015, yes your mod will be called jiggy-2015 and be priced at your annual fee.
The mod might even provide something useful to the players. Maybe. This will probably kill/damage the ecosystem, maybe you'll never get to play railcraft, TE, and buildcraft on the same server ever again. That would suck. It is possible "real mods" won't be balkanized and only "subscription mods" will be balkanized.
Wouldn't it be more profitable to simply develop and sell mods rather than running servers since your costs will be lower?
Unless you mean just using the mod as a key to access the server in which case you'd be better off just charging for passwords to the server because otherwise you have to worry about people using pirate copies of your mod to connect.
Most of the people running servers are doing it as a desire to be the part of the ecosystem who runs servers. They aren't interested in making money off the ecosystem as much as becoming a part of the ecosystem, and as server ops have been since the first days of IRC and the earliest dialup BBSes decades ago, there's more than a little power trip involved. If they wanted money they'd spend time on mturk and easily make more, unless they somehow go pro and make it into the really big leagues. Much like pro sports.
I'm guessing the pirate effect wouldn't be an issue because the "pro mod writers" would be about 10x more excited about the topic than "pro server operators" for obvious reasons so the mod store writers wouldn't do anything too dumb... I hope. One rather trivial and easy to implement solution is MC currently has a centralized auth system for MC users that existing servers talk to (I have a server in my basement, and I am made well aware from my kids when the MC auth servers are down), and extending that a tiny bit to auth both MC and mods isn't much work other than a bit more traffic to the auth server, which they can probably afford by skimming off mod sale prices. So you can tell the server all day that you have a copy of mod name jiggy-2011, but when the server turns around and asks the existing centralized MC server if username jiggy has actually paid for mod name jiggy-2011, then ...
I wasn't really thinking of it as targeted at servers only - more improving the Minecraft ecosystem.
But since you mentioned it - Minecraft has a central authorisation system. It would be trivial to sell subscriptions to particular servers through an app store and have Mojang enforce that via the central authorisation.
That are lots and lots of benefits that could come form this, not least locking young kids down to play only on "family friendly" servers (which is pretty much impossible at the moment).
Damn.. I think this is even a better idea than my original one.
Someone on HN must know someone at Mojang? Please tell them to do this!!
But I think Mojang's focus on keeping things cheap (whether it be with the problems monetisation servers - especially now with competition from Minecraft Realms - or the lack of an official way to download and install mods) shows a slight misalignment of priorities.
They should be trying to make playing Minecraft as enjoyable as possible, not as cheap as possible.
True, but OP is on-target here. I've got two boys who were rabid Minecraft players, and although I'm not a (current) Java developer I can confirm that the modding process is a horror.
How does this relate to the monetization issue? Well, from a technical perspective Mojang seems to be phoning it in these days, in terms of Minecraft.
The console and mobile versions seem to be getting regular love while the core PC version has been in near-limbo for most of 2014. The plugin API, promised for well over a year (and I suspect over two) is still nowhere to be seen. Notch, creator of the game, isn't even involved with it anymore beyond the occasional "voice from the mountain" posts such as this. While I'm sure they have some talented people touching the code (e.g. Jeb and Dinnerbone), the focus and drive appear to be missing.
So when I hear about the EULA debacle and the half-assed cloud of confusion and conflicting messages coming from Mojang, I'm not surprised. I like the game, but have no idea if anybody's really steering that ship with a particular destination in mind.
Initally called the Modding API, it has been planned in some capacity since at least July 5, 2010, shortly after the release of Alpha 1.0.1_01. It was then stated to be released in Beta 1.8.[6] The Modding API was then rebranded as the Plugin API, with the release originally stated to be planned for 1.3, then for 1.4, and then it was accidentally stated by Curse that it would be implemented in 1.5, but has since been delayed...At MineCon 2012, Mojang shared their vision for the future of the plugin API....As of October 26, 2013, the Plugin API/Workbench cannot be found on its GitHub page. Furthermore, the developer website has also been taken offline[1]
They have been delaying, but they have also hired several of the developers from CraftBukkit, which did create a plugin API for Minecraft. Their experience with CraftBukkit showed that they had created the API too soon. The code is messy and not amenable to mods.
The 1.8 update, currently in development, has added features, but it has mostly focused on refactoring and cleaning code. For example, they recently rewrote the entire block id system, removing numerical ids and instead using namespaced identifiers. This will allow mods to coexist rather than try to claim the same block ids.
Back in 2012 there was actually talk of them doing an app store like model to host mods/plugins when they got the API done. However, they were doing it for the opposite reason: to ensure no one was making money from the mods. The idea was without doing the crap you have to do now the only place to get mods would be from their "store" but they wouldn't charge any money. I don't know if that was ever a serious idea or if they're still going to do it but that should show how long they've been trying to avoid a microtransaction/DLC model.
Modding API - (Community worked) There was work done since Alpha to implement this called "Plugin API." It had a github page and was eventually abandoned.
Again, this is the misconception that game developers can only ever do one thing at a time. True for one or two person developers, not true for Mojang. They can afford lawyers. Developers will have nothing to do with the implementation of this policy. They are working on the modding API, just as before.
Also, this was triggered from the outside. Someone asked for clarification on the policy, Mojang looked over all the feedback and came back with this response. It’s purely reactive, not an initiative.
You are talking nonsense. Plausible sounding nonsense, but still nonsense.
It's good that they are (allegedly) working on a plugin API[1]. That is necessary but insufficient to fix the problems I outlined.
Additionally, the plugin API is clearly a low priority: it was supposed to be released in 2010, then spoken about in 2012, and now the website and github page have been taken down (according to [1]). At the practical level "working on it for over 4 years with signs it might not be shipped" and "it doesn't exist" are pretty close to the same thing. But hopefully my pessimism in this is misplaced and it ships.
I haven't heard anything about Mojang implementing an app store model. Unless I've missed something it seems to me you are talking past me, since that was basically the whole thrust of my comment.
I didn't say anything at all about their statement - my post was an offtopic rant about other problems in the Mincraft ecosystem. Specific to the statement, I think it sounds good but shows misguided priorities: keep it cheap rather than fix problems.
If you could point out specifically which parts of my post you believe are nonsense that might be useful.
Hosting game servers is hard, expensive work. Hosting Minecraft servers is even tougher since the hardware requirements are pretty steep and the main userbase doesn't have much money to kick into the pot.
Minefold was a YC company that tried to make a go of monetising Minecraft hosting in the Right Way. They were smart guys and built a great platform, but they're not around any more. I believe it's because it was just too hard to get Minecraft users to pay anything for their servers.
We looked into ways to incorporate advertising into Minecraft in a player-friendly way. Mojang weren't interested in helping, but it wasn't the technical barrier that stopped us. It was inability to find buyers for the ad slots given the perceived demographic of the game.
Online multiplayer doesn't happen well without servers to mediate the experience. Those servers cost money. This remains a massive unsolved problem in the gaming industry.
> inability to find buyers for the ad slots given the perceived demographic
I would love for you to expand on that. Is there an age range that no buyers in the ad business are interested in? What aspect of the demographic was toxic to them? How do they measure how effective a demographic is?
The perception amongst the buyers we spoke to was that Minecraft was for 9 to 13 year old kids. The only people they were familiar with interacting with the title were their own children and their friends.
Advertising to kids is ethically problematic and often has strict legal restrictions. I'm not aware of any of the large video exchanges operating in the space at all. None of our existing buyers were interested. If advertising to kids was a path we even wanted to go down, we'd need to broach a whole new market.
Which might be the most approachable answer - purchase subscriptions to minecraft servers for your kids. However I would be reluctant to purchase anything that was not officially blessed - and would assume I could run a minecraft server for my own kids anyway ...
By the way, I personally want to puke when my kids play Minion Rush and I see three minutes taken up by thirty seconds running and 2.5 mins of sweeping through "buy buy buy" pages. Fucking disgusting.
I'd imagine that you're selecting for gamers (often young people with little money) playing a nearly-free game (further selecting for "little money") that they usually keep playing for a long time (so even if they had money, they're not looking to spend it).
What I can't understand is how there is so much money in YouTube views for the same demographic. Who is buying ads on Tobuscus, Captain Sparklez, etc. for a primarily 8-12 year old male audience? I guess I could just watch some and see, if I could stand it.
I get that you don't enjoy their content, but it seems like you are missing the point on purpose just to shit on those creators.
Every basic cable channel has ads, including ones mostly watched by children. Nick Jr type shows are pretty intolerable to me, but I get it - it's eyeballs.
The channels you're describing have long videos with high engagement, viewers watching multiple 15+ min videos in a row are some of the most valuable on YouTube.
I used to work for a mod for Battlefield (PoE) - we had a few tens of thousands of regular players and a few hundred servers running it at the peak. There was no money in PoE at all, the whole thing was built by volunteers and all the servers were run by the community - groups of people who just wanted to support the game.
The costs were pretty low, a few hundred dollars a month, and they'd be split amongst a group of 10 or 20 people who all got a sense of ownership over their own server.
I don't really see it as a massive unsolved problem, it's the digital equivalent of kids throwing a house party - you trade a little bit of cash / effort for a sense of ownership in a community.
In what way is it unsolved? For what type of games? In my experience, for any games that allow you to easily run your own server for you and your friends (e.g. Counter Strike), finding servers is no problem.
I ran a Counter Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2 gaming community for years and neither of the two were extremely challenging or expensive to maintain in the technical sense. The hardest part was keeping the servers populated and dealing with internal drama that occurred amongst clan members.
Back in the early 2000s there were companies who offered server for quake3 / Counterstrike but these were usually rented to clans who wanted a private low latency server for practise or competition to play against other clans.
In these cases it was pretty common for clan members to divide out costs amongst themselves and basically every serious clan had it's own private server.
I wonder if the non competitive nature of minecraft makes this more difficult because there is no advantage to be gained by paying for a server beyond being able to control the rules.
I sometimes wonder if Minefold was too early too market. The market is much bigger now, and there are plenty of kids who's parents would pay a coffee per month for a server for their kids and their friends.
I've actually had a semi-serious look at having a go at doing it.. have Docker powered scripted setup etc all working.
But I think Minecraft Realms has (or will) sucked the money out of that market... maybe - it does seem quite highly priced though.
> Online multiplayer doesn't happen well without servers to mediate the experience. Those servers cost money. This remains a massive unsolved problem in the gaming industry.
Coming to think of it, I believe Disney has a good solution in their Club Penguin setup. The way it works is that the basic multiplayer game is totally free, has no advertising and is supervised (you earn a 24 hour ban for saying 'shit' ;-). The child registers a penguin avatar, which collects points in games and runs around common spaces.
However, for the penguin to be able to use the points to collect fuzzy pets or buy some clothing items requires a paid subscription, which runs around 5 euro/month. I've authorized spending (via credit card, but out of the piggy bank) for one or three months per year ...
Shouldn't that be a massive indicator to get out of that business, then? I play Minecraft with my younger siblings and have the Minecraft server loaded onto a personal server that also streams media to our PS3. In another situation, my alma mater offers free shell access to every student, so there were quite a few people who had Minecraft servers going. These smaller, ad hoc servers are better for Minecraft since they're used by people who know each other and don't need to be policed for griefers.
I really don't see any benefit that a public server would provide players, especially if I either have to pay or get inundated with ads.
"have the Minecraft server loaded onto a personal server"
Ditto. My kids love it. Finally my "fileserver" CPU has something to do. Doesn't take much resources until its ridiculously big/modded. Its fun. It doesn't take much static NAT work for their friends to get access too.
The problem is a bathtub curve where anyone can run a server in their basement on an old/free PC for basically no cost and no effort. And there is a use for a huge server with 100s of people on it and massive creativity and hopefully not much griefing and its going to be expensive but worth it. Minecrack will probably always survive? And in between is a medium sized dead zone where nothing can live. In the middle a 10 year old can't pay for it, and it wouldn't be worth paying for anyway.
The marketplace looks like journalism. You're always going to have people commenting for free in blogs, and you're always (maybe) going to have the new york times. In between, the market has simply died and blown away and isn't coming back.
> This remains a massive unsolved problem in the gaming industry.
No. Very much no. There is absolutely no shortage of servers for almost any game. Getting hosting, either private or public, is extremely easy and comparatively cheap for most games. Even alpha level releases get dedicated servers set up on most hosting services.
If you mean the "massive unsolved problem" is that servers cost money I don't know what you're thinking.
Although slightly weird to say, I am hosting a Minecraft server for my son and his friends to play on (14-16 year olds). It is a fast machine with 32gb of RAM, enterprise drives and it holds up great with 10 people on it. They are using over 400gb a month.
But I can totally see that a company trying to host minecraft servers as a business would really need a decent amount of hardware. This all costs money, plus electricity, plus bandwidth.
With our game for example each active player costs less than 3c per month in server costs. If you have your user pay up front than you are blowing that out of the water almost regardless of how many months they are active for or how much you are charging. You just provide the servers for the game.
If your game is free and funded with microtransactions then you really should be able to get 3c per month per active user.
I imagine minecraft hosting is a lot more expensive. The server has to keep substantially more state as well as deal with users potentially consuming a lot of CPU server side resources (why most servers ban things like TNT and fire). There are all also a ton of mods that users may want. I imagine your 3c/mo game doesn't have the same amount of interactivity involved.
The real issue is that there are a fair amount of people who want to run minecraft servers for free anyway that it forces out commercial operators.
Sounds like a terrible business to get into. Which begs the question: are you doing this for money, or are you doing this because you find it fun?
Sometimes, the two are not the same. When they aren't the same, you should go out and try and find something that is both fun and rewarding for you.
Running into a saturated market, losing money, dealing with DDOS-happy griefers immature ungrateful *wipes seems like a terrible job to get yourself into. Sure, we all just want to play Minecraft, but your customers are toxic, and dealing with the politics is crap, and now I learn that its unprofitable to boot.
So if you aren't having fun and you aren't making money... there's something that needs to change. I can't think of any other community where griefers, trolls, and DDOS attacks are as big of a problem. It really seems like a Minecraft-specific phenomenon.
(outside of MMORPGs, where the competitive play between clans sometimes leads to Out-of-character real life DDOS attacks)
"The EULA for Minecraft says you can’t make money of
Minecraft. If you make mods, they have to be free."
I don't understand the legal theory behind this. Is this contract law? If a programmer wrote a third-party mod without buying the software (say by reading an API description), would they still be bound to its terms?
Also, does restricting modification like this infringe on "first sale" rights?
A court held that when a defendant purchased old copies of National Geographic magazine, tore out articles, and bound them together for sale with articles relating to a common subject matter, it had infringed on the owner’s exclusive right to prepare derivative works. Nat’l Geographic Soc’y v. Classified Geographic, Inc., 27 F. Supp. 655 (D. Mass. 1939).
Even if you do not do any copying, you can still infringe under copyright law. The theory is that the copyright owner has exclusively power to decide who should compile, adapt or arrange a copyrighted work.
Minecraft does not have an API currently. If you are making mods you are decompiling the original Minecraft java source code, modifying it, and releasing a modified version of their original works.
> Installing mods is done by copying compiled .class files into the client .jar
This is no longer true, except for Forge. What you're talking about is the old-style mod system, which has been obsolete for some number of years; nowadays they're dynamically linked from iterating over the mods/ folder.
The causes of action are: direct and secondary infringement of registered copyrights, trafficking in circumvention devices, breach of contract, and intentional interference with contractual relations.
A couple of those might not apply in a clean room implementation, but the others would.
Well I'm no lawyer, but one legal theory you could argue is the one from MAI vs Peak. This is the one that holds that loading a computer program into ram for running is a copy that requires permission from the copyright holder. Therefore one would argue that by running this program, they ratified the EULA, or else they blatantly committed copyright infringement, which is probably worse than simple breach of contract.
I know there are lawyers who seem to argue otherwise, for example the GPL states "You are not required to accept this license to receive or run a copy of the program". But I don't know if that statement has any legal basis in general, or if it's just the FSF granting permission to run covered software without accepting the GPL. As far as the US goes, I think it's the latter, but it may be different in other jurisdictions.
I'm not a lawyer, please go hire someone if you really need to know.
Well there are well-known noncommercial clauses about redistribution of software. But this license is about restricting third-party modifications, like plugins, which don't contain copyrighted code, but do link to it and target its API. So yes I'm asking if that's enforceable, and what type of law allows for that (contract or copyright?).
Or did you mean noncommercial use, as in evaluation licenses?
I think the recent Oracle vs Google case is relevant here as it involves the question of whether APIs are copyrightable. The case is about a subset of Java APIs included in Android. Note that the Android implementation exposed by those APIs is new and did not involve copying code from Java standard libraries (modulo rangeCheck()).
The district court ruled that so long as implementation is different you are free to provide the same API. A federal circuit court reversed this ruling this year. The case is now back in the district court for consideration of whether the use of the API falls under the fair-use clause.
But I don't think either of those are really similar. Android is emulating the Java API, without Oracle code being involved. Programs that link against GPL libraries are intended to make runtime calls to copyrighted code. And game mods modify the copyrighted program's runtime behavior, having the program make calls to the modding code (in place of its own). I can't think of an analogue of the last situation.
Minecraft doesn't have an official API, so modding involves decompiling and shipping recompiled Mojang-owned code. I'm pretty sure a restriction on that would hold up in most jurisdictions.
Following the link on that page to the "translated" version of the new EULA, their reasoning seems to still be "we don’t want our players to be exploited or to have a frustrating time unless they pay." [0] I find a lot of things wrong with this mentality, mostly in that it assumes that the servers that charge for gameplay have some kind of monopoly over the servers. If you don't want to pay for gameplay, just visit another server. You don't have to put up with them. Heck, if you really wanted to you could host your own. The bottom line is you don't need to pay anyone, they're not exploiting you. If you're getting frustrated because they're charging you then that's your own dumb fault for visiting that server and putting up with it. If you want to pay, go ahead, support the server hosts. All of this is under the false assumption that people are being forced into paying, which simply isn't true.
Yes Minecraft is awesome, however the selling of addons is just one more revenue stream to keep a server alive and the user base engaged. There has to be perceived value in having the addon to make the user experience better.
However, that is EXACTLY what you’re encouraging here.
Now not only will players who don’t want to pay not be able to
have access to every custom-built feature or gameplay experience,
they won’t have access to any of them because they won’t be able
to get into the server in the first place.
What kind of strawman arguement is that?
Players unwilling to pay for feature X (previously unavailable to non paying customers), will now not be able have access to it as it wont exist at all.
What a compelling argument.
I suppose they wont have the luxury of watching other people having more fun than them now. How terrible for the players.
(I suppose there are some valid points in there, but after reading that I found it hard to take seriously)
Good article, just goes to show that best sentiments from the maker doesn't necessarily add up to best solution for the end users - hope these people will end up in dialogue, seems worthwhile since their goalpost (getting people to enjoy, and keep enjoying, Minecraft) is pretty much the same.
If the players come to those server networks looking for the custom gameplay experiences they provide and every network stands to lose a lot of money from the EULA change what prevents them from hiring developers to replace Minecraft with a custom client? I mean this as a genuine question.
You are falling in to the very trap that this entire article is about.
Nobody is losing money from this EULA change. The EULA already forbade this and always did. The EULA is only more liberal than it was before. If they were willing to flout it before than there is no reason they shouldn't be willing to continue to flout it now.
In the post that awjr links to above the author claims that a Mojang employee has interpreted the previous EULA for them as allowing this ("I personally discussed our rank system with a member of your business team at Minecon last year and he confirmed we were in compliance with the EULA. The only rule was to not sell Mojang IP [...]"), although it does not make it clear as to how official their discussion was.
With my question I didn't mean to imply that I have an opinion on this matter either way. I'm mostly wondering if the big server networks could try to cut out Mojang based on their shared (I assume) interpretation of how to the EULA has changed over time, whether it be right or wrong.
Maybe this is a little off-topic, and I don't want to sound like an ungrateful player of minecraft. I actually really love the game and have put more hours into it than just about any other game but a few key titles like the Diablo, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout series. But, can someone explain to me how a game that has grossed roughly half a billion dollars (based on estimates I've read for all platforms) is still so feature bare compared to other games in its financial ballpark? I am honestly curious, because it doesn't sound like Notch is cruising the Caribbean in a 175' yacht or anything.
It is strategy, they want to use money to finance other future projects. According to one interview I have read, money from Minecraft are used to pay bills and development of other games until they luck out again and have another hit.
Developing games is risky and there are no guarantees of success. So, the successful projects have to pay for unsuccessful ones.
Just to add to your last sentence, successful projects have to pay for projects not yet ready to release as well as unsuccessful ones (whether due to them flopping or lack of critical mass.)
Well, not just fun for certain definitions of fun.
Not all good quality games are great examples of what some would call "fun".
Loneliness is an interesting flash game/ interactive experience, (and while I don't think anyone would pay for it, it is very simple), I do think it is good and interesting. I'm having a hard time thinking of a game that is for sale that doesn't fit the term fun as much as might be expected, I think that looking for "fun" as the core determination of success is likely insufficient, even if one also adds advertising.
Is the modding community not offering enough for you? Just wondering, as it seems quite unusual for such a big hit to have modding encouraged the way minecraft does. (I know that part of this is due to Mojang being an indie studio). Other big studio with big selling franchise are barely having what would be considered as passable ten years ago (yes I am talking about the omni present call of duty x): no dedicated server and no modding capability.
I am more concerned about minecraft being still running on the JVM and being such a slow cow running on a half decent modern hardware when C++ is still the main language for written game engine. You would have thought that in 4 years, a new iteration of the game optimized for rendering and speed would have been made available.
/off-topic
Back on topic, I think Notch is taking this too much at heart and should just ask Mojang to put a huge notice exonerating themselves from private server charging their customers.
Essentially, the only reason there is a modding community for Minecraft is because it's Java-based and people can just decompile the shipped code and hack stuff onto it.
So you have the modding community adding value for free, while Mojang sells the game and takes the profits, but doesn't seem to be investing it back.
See, deep down, this is what bothers me about it. They haven't even added a decent questing system but modders have, and Notch gets the cash while articles like this prevent anyone from really making any money at it.
I don't know if that is the only reason. I mean Quake had quite a good set of mods pretty much written in C++ type of code. More recently you can find modded server for games using Python or LUA for their game logic, official or not.
I think estimates are that notch personally pulled in about $100m a year during the initial boom. I guess he just doesn't like boats. Which is understandable for a guy who grew up in front of a keyboard
Seems like reasonable player-friendly rules, I think minecraft has a ton of servers and sub-communities though so it will probably be quite hard to police. The idea of individual server ops creating mini-businesses seems a little odd. They could probably do more to streamline the multiplayer experience for players and server-ops.
As someone who actually runs a Minecraft server and has developed several mini games and around 50 plugins, I'd like to clarify a few things to people who aren't involved in Minecraft.
* Minecraft is pretty expensive to host. The top servers are paying tens of thousands a month in hosting. Only a few servers make enough to cover wages. Most just barely scrape by. DDOS protection is pretty much essential to any server over a certain size, which increases costs significantly.
* Most Minecraft servers are no longer vanilla Minecraft servers. The Minecraft server software is pretty bad in both functionality and performance. Most servers use Craftbukkit or Spigot, which has a plugin API (Spigot is a patched version of Craftbukkit with mostly performance fixes). Craftbukkit is open source, but is a legally gray area as it contains the decompiled code from the Mojang server. There is an API for writing plugins called Bukkit which is totally separate from the craftbukkit server implementation.
* The large servers have tried to work with Mojang to get a set of rules they can work with. Mojang listened to them and actually added clauses prohibiting some of the things they said they needed to even have a chance of this working for them.
* While Mojang claim their EULA never allowed servers to make money, their first one actually did. They've also granted written permission to some servers. Last year they had a panel at Minecon were top server owners actually talked about how their server makes money. Despite what their EULA says, Mojang has been basically telling servers it was fine to monetize up until now.
* Their new terms force servers to remove perks that have already been sold to players. Many server owners are objecting to this as it forces them to "steal" things that players have bought.
* Bungeecord is a proxy system that allows players to switch between multiple servers without logging out. The Minecraft clients multiplayer server list support has barely improved since Alpha. Mojang's new EULA treats a bungeecord proxy as a single server. This means that although they allow owners to charge players to access a server, it's pretty much impossible to do without inconveniencing players.
* The Minecraft network protocol is not patented. A number of open source server implementations exist which do no use any Mojang code. Since these changes have been announced these projects have become much more active with disgruntled developers starting to contribute. It is believed that the EULA cannot legally be enforced on these servers, although one Mojang developer made a statement to the contrary.
* No final draft for the new EULA has actually be made available, but a date for compliance has already been set. 1st August 2014.
* Mojang released their Realms hosting service worldwide just before making these changes, prompting many to accuse them of trying to eliminate the competition. However, they could simply stop releasing their server software if that was their intention, so most people don't believe this to be true.
So it’s expensive and hard. So what? Doesn’t mean scummy play to win bullshit is something to be proud of, especially when targeting children.
I mean, what Mojang now permits I consider just barely ethically acceptable. Do know that these pay to win schemes are extremely disgusting and that you are far from behaving ethically if you use them. If you can live with that …
The legal discussion is kind of boring to me in that context, since it seems so obvious that the behaviour of many server owners is so disgusting. I’m happy that Mojang is trying to crack down on that and I hope they don’t fail. Maybe they will, but that doesn’t change anything about how wrong these pay to win schemes are.
So what? So it's incredibly hard to even enforce what Mojang says they're targeting, and in trying to do so, they're spooking a ton of legitimate developers and server owners.
The real question is how children are spending hundreds of dollars online without parental consent.
No, that's not really "the real question". Kids are smart. The know how to get what they want and parents can't be everywhere at any moment. SOME percentage of kids are going to figure out how to pay for goods with very little understanding of their relative value. Preying on kids in this position skirts the borders of what's ethical. I'm not saying all server owners are guilty of this, but Mojang has their position for a reason and it's not just the profit motive.
If kids outwit their parents and spend their money then that's the parents fault, not the servers. True, the parents can't always be everywhere which is why they need to teach children to act responsibly. If that kid keeps continuously taking money out of your bank account when you're not looking and blowing it on Minecraft then the parent is doing something wrong. If there was no Minecraft they'd spend the money on something else. I don't see why server hosts should be punished because some parents failed to bring their children up properly.
Some ten year old kid wants a $300 item on a Minecraft server. The kid has been told he can't use his parent's credit card without permission, he knows he can't, but guess what: even good kids break the rules, and he knows his parents have the money. He just saw them write a $5,000 check for his private tuition! (they want to raise him right) That $5,000 check though left them with $200 in the bank for the rest of the month...
I'm not for or against server monitization, but trying to blame the parents is ridiculous. Kids are not exact molds that their parents have shaped.
Then take away that kids computer and all technology, and ground them for a month.
These problems were solved by previous generations, when did parents become such pussies?
When my generation was growing up (and I'm only 29), if we acted up we were expecting a beating at home... And we didn't get our own computer, TV and iPad or console...
My generation did not have the ability to spend $300 on my parents' credit cards by pressing buttons on my walkman in exchange for prettier outfits for my fake characters.
A "good kid" who breaks the rules isn't a "good kid", it's a bad one. If the parents never found out about the child spending the money, then the blame would not fall on them. However I don't consider this a very likely scenario not only because money doesn't tend to vanish into thin air, but because a responsible parent would monitor their child's spending. They might be able to get away with it for a while, but eventually they'll find out. If they gave them a $5000 check then they can't just forget about it, it doesn't magically vanish from under their noses. Even if they do just give the check and forget about it, it is again, their fault and theirs alone. They caused the scenario in which they couldn't monitor the child's spending. They can't assume the child will act responsibly; they need to monitor their spending. Kids aren't the exact molds their parents have shaped, but they should at least be taught basic survival skills, such as the ability to spend money responsibly.
And in the meantime, their child (like my niece) might have clicked her way through $300+ of scummy iap that my sister didn't realize was hooked up to her credit card. People who facilitate kids spending money without their parents permission are not good people, even though the parents have the duty to supervise children. To take this to it's logical conclusion, it's the same reason that -- though parents are legally required to supervise kids -- we also put fences around attractive nuisances like pools, and throw pool owners in prison if they don't.
Device that is not dangerous by itself and wasn't dangerous at all until recently - the danger is created by people who want to monetize kids. There's malicious intent there.
A better analogy would be a kid getting mugged on it's way to school. Should we blame parents and parents only for leaving the kid unsupervised? Should we let the robber go because "it's parents responsibility to protect their child from danger"?
That's extremely true, but at any rate, I can't see any way around the fact that the actions of their child and the use of their credit card are more their responsibility than the server owner's. (Even if they don't control their child, neither does a random Minecraft server owner!)
Yeah I generally don't think it'd be a good idea to give kids access to parental bank accounts. Maybe I'm wrong, but it just seems like a poor decision.
Guys, this isn't "about the kids", it's about all minecraft players and server admins.
The contract doesn't only apply to kids, it applies to everyone. So saying this is a "poor decision" because you don't want to encourage kids to use their parents credit card... is a poor argument.
(as an aside - I know zero kids that play minecraft, but I know an awful lot of adults that do... so let's not just jump and assume it's only kids playing this game).
I know the EULA is universal, but all the defenders of "no-free-to-play" cite the "for the children" defense as the reason why this is such a pressing issue now.
As a player, Minecraft is only free-to-play if you voluntarily pay a server owner. If someone doesn't like a server, log into a different one! If you want to put in dozens of hours on a world without fear of it being griefed/having the rules changed, run your own small server!
My thesis is that this is basically a non-issue. If Mojang wants people to know they're not the ones charging for server access (the parent anecdote in the article), they should have a big, permanent banner in the server browser: "If you're paying for items on a server, you're paying too much! Minecraft server access is free by default!" and so on.
When you've added enough patches, operations, and hardware to the initial game, I think it's totally reasonable to be able to charge for that. Mojang should just sell a license of the server software (perhaps with better patches, yeah?) to resellers, ala cPanel or what have you.
They basically have this one-trick-pony which is now effectively maintained by the community at zero cost to them--no wonder they're being silly.
EDIT: Somebody should just release an extendable open-source clone of the game, with art assets, and just force their hand.
There is really no "play to win" in Minecraft, because there is no "winning". You just keep doing things until you get bored and stop playing.
As someone who can run my own server for myself and a few friends (and have on multiple occasions), I don't see how allowing servers to charge for some things is bad... don't want to pay for access to an item -- go play someplace else or host your own.
For the same reason that the elderly will call their web browser "the Googles", children will also tend to think of the first implementation of a concept they find as the definitive one. The idea will never occur to them that there's any other Minecraft server than Bob's Private MineCraft Capitalism Extravaganza that their friend introduced them to and plays on.
Children aren't smart, this much is known. This is fighting the symptom, not the cause. The real issue is that children who can't spend their money responsibly shouldn't have that money in the first place. If we go by the assumption that a child won't know when they're paying for a legitimate product or being exploited then why give them any money? If they don't spend it on a pay-to-win server then they'll spend it somewhere else and be "exploited" just as much, possibly on an iPhone game or something. If I give my child $1000 and they blow it on a Minecraft server then that's my fault for giving them that much money, not theirs. Children shouldn't be given that much disposable income if they can't use it properly. Punishing server hosts for the mistakes of poor parenting is not the right solution.
As chc said, I wouldn't apply the same reasoning to elderly people. Also, the issue that most people were bringing up was that children specifically were being exploited, so the point is moot.
I think that's besides the point. This contract isn't "about the kids", it's about all Minecraft players and server administrators. If a server administrator feels they need to, or want to charge for some item or plugin, they should have the freedom to do so...
...after all, they aren't obligated to run a minecraft server in the first place, and if the only thing keeping the lights on is selling some in-game item, let it be.
What's scummy about a server owner giving me a nice starting house in return for a payment? What's scummy about a server owner giving me /feed or /fly in return for payment?
There's nothing deceptive; there's nothing unfair about offering a free server with perks (anyone is free to pay or do without). I'm an adult, and I choose how to spend my disposable income.
* Their new terms force servers to remove perks that have already been sold to players. Many server owners are objecting to this as it forces them to "steal" things that players have bought.
The servers don't have to remove the perks, they just have to give them to everyone.
What's pretty clear in all this is that Notch does not want Minecraft to become some kind of pay-to-win game (which would inevitably damage the reputation of the game). I think he is absolutely right to stand by this. He also has stated numerous times on Twitter that Mojang doesn't care about server admins getting money for the service (if anything to pay for the hosting costs), as long as any gameplay modification that is distributed is available for all players without paying.
> The servers don't have to remove the perks, they just have to give them to everyone.
Either way, I imagine you get a bit of an uproar - either you're giving things away for free that you sold before, so the people who bought them are upset and want their money back; or you steal the items back so no one can have them, so the people who bought them are upset and want their money back.
Or you do it the same way everyone else does it when the rules change: everyone who already has Banned Thing is grandfathered in but it's no longer transferrable or acquirable.
Or you do it the Valve way: give everyone the Thing and make existing Things the Extra Special Limited Edition Thing that's functionally identical but still confers bragging rights - this would still be within Mojang's rules.
If you don't want to pay for things you can play on a different server. You don't have to buy things but if it is worth it for you then you should have the option.
Can you cite the claims you make, like the original EULA, and correspondence which said it was okay to monetize gameplay? Otherwise, I have to disregard this comment. You may be right, but without those pieces of information, I have to defer to the post by the founder which could have legal ramifications if proved false.
>The top servers are paying tens of thousands a month in hosting.
Are you just speculating? This seems extremely high. I've hosted a couple Minecraft servers and even with a mild constant population (~30) it wasn't even breaking 100/mo.
>DDOS protection is pretty much essential to any server over a certain size, which increases costs significantly.
I've had many dedicated servers in my day, and this has never been the case. Not sure where you're getting this data from.
To point 1, Minecraft chews memory and processor for breakfast. I understand that some of the larger server have thousands of players logged in simultaneously over huge areas in a minecraft world, so I can imagine 4-5 digit hosting bills.
To point 2, you're hosting a server with lots of attention, one that is DDoS friendly, and you've got the eyes of lots of young technical people. In the world of one-click DDoS, I don't doubt it can pose an issue quickly.
My point with #2 is that DDoS protection is included with most dedicated server plans. It doesn't cost "significantly extra" as this guy claims- at least I've never seen that.
Well, we'll just have to rely on our experience then. I haven't dealt with dedicated servers plans, but my impression of "DDoS" protection in that regard is that your traffic will get blackholed if it's bad enough.
Vendors like Cloudflare, Akamai and Prolexic sell plans where all your traffic is routed through their networks first, filtered based on various DDoS-detecting algorithms, then sent to you. $$$$
One price for all player teirs seem pretty reasonable in my oppinion.
The freemium business model is really only viable if you can hook the few so called 'high payer' users and everyone else gets a rubbish experience.
Notch is notoriously anti '"free to play" ... with in app purchases', and keeping that away from minecraft will ultimately benefit the players.
There's been some pretty heavy vitriol from seever hosts about this, but honestly, when you play in someone elses playground, its their way or the highway. Thats what you get.
Since Spout never really existed as a working Minecraft server and SpoutCraft was a vanilla client mod I'll assume you mean they were doing selling while being vanilla mods. In that case, the most likely reason they got away with it isn't because it was a loophole but because it was so under the radar Mojang didn't notice or care.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with server owners offering improved gameplay in return for financial support. Minecraft allows griefing (destruction of another player's work); there is nothing wrong with a server owner enabling an anti-griefing mod (incidentally, not offered by Mojang: literally the only thing which makes public servers tolerable is 100% not Mojang's work) only for paying players, but not for non-paying players. The alternatives would be to offer it to everyone—meaning that folks could cause trouble with the anti-griefing features, requiring admin time (and hence money)—or to not allow the general public on, meaning that prospective players would be unable to evaluate the server, or to turn off anti-griefing and leave the server public, meaning that everyone would have to have hidden bases and live in perpetual fear of griefers.
That doesn't sound like an improvement.
Skyblock is a style of gameplay made possible by modmakers (not by Mojang); there is nothing wrong with offering additional starting resources in exchange for financial support.
Mojang have made approximately half a billion dollars from Minecraft; society has rewarded them well. How 'bout they start giving back, rather than seeking to exploit their monopoly position?
(No, I don't run a public server, but I do play on them, and it sickens me to see their business model destroyed by a monopolist)
So, the question becomes who is going to enforce these rules? If you have these rules in your EULA, but you aren't enforcing them, you might as well not have them.
Are they going to start suing people? I can't see a whole lot of alternatives here.
I think Mojang has it's priorities slightly wrong here. At the moment much of the interesting stuff in Minecraft is done via mods. But the user experience for that is pretty close to pre-Google search: browse through random forums to find links to dodgy download sites that attempt to push malware or porn to you.
Then when you find a working download, you have to install. Inevitably that means clashes with existing mods, and hours trying different versions of things that some random person on a forum claims work.
FFS, I'm a Java programmer, and I can't work out how to make this shit work most of the time.
In my view Mojang should do the following:
I'd much prefer to spend a dollar on a new mod rather than the horrible, horrible experience it is now.Rant over..