Quote from Owen »
Hello!
Let’s get one thing clear: we love it when Minecrafters host servers. Tiny or massive, running vanilla Minecraft or a heavily modded version, we think they’re all great. Playing with friends in persistent worlds is awesome. Everyone knows that.
Over the past week there’s been lots of discussion about Minecraft servers and your right to monetise them. Legally, you are not allowed to make money from our products. There has been one exception to this rule so far – Minecraft videos. We’re about to make a second exception – Minecraft servers.
Hosting servers can be expensive. We want to give community members a way to cover their costs. That said, we don’t want our players to be exploited, or to have a frustrating time unless they pay. The following rules, which may be tweaked at a later date, have been created with those points in mind.
You are allowed to charge players to access your server
So long as the fee is the same for all players, you are allowed to charge for access to your server. You are not allowed to split your playerbase into paying, and non-paying users, nor can you restrict gameplay elements to different tiers of player.
Basically, if you’re charging for access to your server, you are selling a “ticket” and there can only be one type of ticket, no matter how much people are willing to spend.
You are allowed to accept donations
You are allowed to accept donation from your players. You can thank them publicly, or in-game, but can’t give them preferential treatment for donating. You are not allowed to restrict gameplay features in an attempt to make money.
You are allowed to provide in-game advertising or sponsorship opportunities
Running servers can be expensive, with that in mind, you are allowed to put adverts in your Minecraft worlds to help with costs. Used within reason, adverts and sponsorship can be good ways to fund a server.
You are allowed to sell in-game items so long as they don’t affect gameplay
We don’t mind you selling items in game, but they must be purely cosmetic. Pets, hats, and particle effects are OK, but swords, invincibility potions, and man-eating pigs are not. We want all players to be presented with the same gameplay features, whether they decide to pay or not.
There is one exception to this rule – capes! We have a lot of fun making cool capes for extra-special members of our community and Minecon attendees. We’d like to keep them as exclusive as possible. So, yeah, no capes please, for free or otherwise.
You cannot charge real-world cash for in-game currency
We don’t mind you making up currencies which players earn through playing but you are not allowed to sell it for real-world cash. Remember – if the stuff you sell affects gameplay, we’re not cool with it.
Don’t pretend to be us, and provide your customers with loads of info!
If you do decide to monetise your server, you must clearly state that the purchase is not associated with Mojang, declare who the money is going to, and provide a purchase history and contact details. You should also check up on the legality of selling digital items in your specific region.
Thanks for reading!
As I hope you’ve noticed, these rules are making attempts to prevent Minecraft servers becoming “pay-to-win.” We hate the idea of server hosts restricting Minecraft’s features to players who have already bought our game! It seems really mean.
We’re hoping that these rules will give hosts opportunity to continue creating awesome Minecraft worlds, and for our players to enjoy them without worrying about cash.
Have a good day!
Not all of the servers are crappy but that kills almost every fair and legit payed for server so there mojang now you have done it
Before: donators have fun winning and non donators have fun trying to win and even winning too.
After: donators have fun winning but less fun because of less players and non donators are wiped off the server.
If you do this all of us players who like playing servers for free will stop likeing Minecraft because we cant do anything, and then only people who record or people that are willing to empty there wallets will play Minecraft. Even then the people who record will make less money because people only watch them if they like the game.
One of the most important things for a business to know is that if you want money you got to make it without money in mind. Minecraft looks like its starting to forget this. Proof of this is also with Bungie. They made halo for fun and put fun things in it like easter eggs and what do you know its tied up at number one game. and then right when they left halo we find that halo 4 was disappointing to all the halo fans. Why? because it was no longer made for fun but for money.
Woah woah woah, a representative of mojang calling others 'retard' ? Now this gives me a real reason to promote to others not to listen to mojang if that is how one of their employees has to act
http://goo.gl/IgUUb5
Mojang aren't adding this to the EULA, it's always been there, this whole announcement thing is simply because they're re-wording it to make it more clear. They're not shooting themselves in the foot, if anything they did that when they first wrote the EULA.
How are the Serverhosts going to be affected?
Think about it, if massive servers that take a lot of space (and ergo make a lot of money) for serverhosts like Creeperhost for example go down in the aftermath of this, they will still need to make enough money to pay for all that space and other expenses that businesses generally make. The question will be, where are they going to get it? Not enough small servers will pop up to take over, because people will be too frightened by the Big Bad Mojang Legal Division to make a server.
The Answer: The small servers
This change is going to cause small servers who may not be breaking the EULA agreement to have their monthly bills skyrocket just so businesses like CH can keep their budget inline. Mojang is going to put a lot of servers out of business that aren't affected by this change, or force other servers to break the EULA in order to pay the massive overhead.
So yeah, I think this is just a big case of "Good idea, bad execution"
Cheers -Dimensional Squirrel
having /back is hardly pay to win.
I get what your saying and it makes me mad because if the kids are spending too much the parents need to put some limits and stuff to keep them from buying so much not blame the game and now i'm worried about servers i like to play on close.
So you prefer more restrictive EULA? One that says you can't charge for anything at all? That makes total sense.
Ozi
What EULA did you read? The updated one I read in no way prevents free trials.
No one with any imagination will have any trouble coming up with ways to entice paying customers without breaking the EULA.
My favorite Idea so far is a pair of servers, one that is 100% free, and one that 100% paying customers (with and optional free 1 week trial). The free server has all the same _permanent_ content, but the map on the free server is reset (or copied over from the pay-to-play server) once a month. This means that free players get a server to play on, but all new construction and such on the free server only lasts for a month.
There are also lots of people that plan to just switch to the donation model with periodic fun raising events. All players participate in the events, but only donating members get a vote on what the next event will be. Since every can participate, this should be completely compatible with the EULA.