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!
unauthorized jobs with little to no job security?
I don't know much stuff about this but doesn't bukkit use minecraft code? I know u don't need to download anything from mojang when u use bukkit.
As for the folks who are saying hurr hurr I can do whatever I want and they can't stop me"... they're simply wrong. The Minecraft world is inside the real world, where Mojang has both technical recourses (account bans) and legal remedies (court orders, possibly criminal charges for some cases).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that nothing should have been done. I just think that it should have been done differently.
Okay, to be fair, colored names do not give advantages and are allowed.
I don't think he means to be anti-consumer, it's a trait he picks up from his rash outbursts of uninformed opinions that he seems to defend to the death for the sake of pride (Something a lot of people on the internet learn is a bad idea).
His friends in the industry tend to always disagree with his comments and I've seen CEOs openly advise him to pipe down with uninformed opinions.
His ego is fueled by popularity and ignorance from his fans (He won a programming award for Minecraft, which has webpages dedicated to laughing at how bad it is...).
The guy made my vision of a perfect game, but he is not the smartest guy and he skipped out on the internet lesson of keeping your mouth shut until you can give an informed opinion that grows discussion.
It's always been offcial. Read the EULA.
I thought they didn't want P2P
If I have to start paying money to join servers, burn my hard drive, then run over it with my truck, Then I will strap some fireworks to it and launch it into a lone standing brick wall. Then I will upgrade to a new one without downloading minecraft.
I already paid for the game, I am not going to pay again.
The sad part about this is that it could be a possibility.I have a question. Is this EULA a thing yet or what? I know with the current EULA this is banned anyways so id does not really matter.
Bukkit does actually download the original Minecraft server software for it to run, Bukkit's code itself doesn't contain any Minecraft code, so they can do anything they want within Bukkit, but as soon as it touches the Minecraft official server software then it's within Mojang's EULA around that.
Haha, his work with King was on contract I believe so he never had a chance to absorb the company's policies and practices. I have a friend who has a job offer from King that they are going to accept but they are putting it off for as long as possible to keep some sanity
YOU CAN:
If you have an issue with this ruling, feel free to discuss it here.
Any violations of this ruling following this post will be handled as piracy advocacy.
Before you ask - no, you won't get a warning for stating your opinion. We all have an opinion on this, and open discussion is perfectly okay.
All of these things were already prohibited by the EULA. These proposed changes are LOOSENING the restrictions. As for finding your hosts... that's not even remotely difficult. Every time a player connects to your server, your server contacts Mojang to validate their session. Heck... it took me all of 10 seconds to find out who your server hosting provider is, and I had no idea who you were before today, nor am I employed by or otherwise affiliated with Mojang in any official capacity.
It's a proprietary protocol. If you're connecting Minecraft clients to it you're using their intellectual property even if you're running a custom server you wrote in Pascal. This isn't difficult. If you're licensing a product from a company you either have to comply with the license agreement or stop using it.
You (or your hosting provider) may own the hardware your server is running on but you do not own the rights to the Minecraft server or any other Mojang code to resell it.
I don't keep my hosting secret, or my server secret in anyway. You can find it, I'm not exactly fighting that. But a lot of people hide their servers. I'm sure they can be found, but will Mojang really go through the hassle? I'm not sure. Also I don't care much now that I'll likely be fine with this change.
Clarifying (and potentially enforcing) the EULA isn't about Realms. Mojang gets flooded with thousands upon thousands of trouble tickets from angry parents, wanting to know why their kids ran up $800 on their credit cards. They don't understand that it's servers, not Mojang, that ultimately need to be spoken to. It is clogging up their customer support system. Reducing the frequency that servers can abuse a system with will reduce this considerably. This isn't the sole motivation, of course, but it's certainly a big one.
Discussing the EULA itself is the scope of this thread, so i am presuming we are allowed to discuss the extent of the EULA?
Openly defying the end user license agreement is openly breaking a license agreement, which holds potential legal ramifications, no one do that (Especially considering it is on a public-facing community that is endorsed by the EULA's holder!).