They Built a Business on Someone Else's Game
In June of 2014, the people running Minecraft's biggest servers were running real businesses, and most of them believed they were doing nothing wrong.
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They Built a Business on Someone Else's Game
In June 2014 the people running Minecraft's biggest servers were running real businesses — and most of them believed they were doing nothing wrong. This episode follows the server economy that grew up on top of someone else's game, the week Mojang tried to put it back inside the lines, and what that cost on both sides.
The story in short
Minecraft's multiplayer arrived in August 2010, and the software that made big public servers possible was written by volunteers, not by Mojang. Bukkit, the plugin platform most public servers ran on, was a community project; when Mojang hired its lead developers in 2012 to build an official version, that API never shipped. By 2014 the biggest server networks had more players at once than many independent games, and they paid for it by selling ranks and perks — some purely cosmetic, some that changed how the game played.
The players found these servers the way they found the game: through video. Half of Hypixel's players told the server they had first heard about it from a YouTube video, and the big networks built their minigames as content for the channels that covered them. A few servers paid for that coverage in undisclosed bidding wars; Hypixel and MCGamer said they did not.
On the twelfth of June, 2014, Mojang published a plain-language list of what servers could and could not charge for. The rules themselves were not new: the licence had always forbidden charging for gameplay, and the only exception Mojang had granted was for videos. What was new was that the company said so out loud, added permissions that had never existed — access fees, donations, advertising, cosmetics — and told every server to comply by the first of August. Persson's own summary was that the new rules were "more liberal than things were before" 1.
The complaint was never that the rule was invented in 2014. It was that the rule had gone unenforced for three years while an industry was built on top of it — and that at least one large owner had been told in person, at Mojang's own convention, that what he was doing was allowed. Enforcement only became real in early 2016, when Mojang began blocking non-compliant servers outright 2. A year later the company opened the Marketplace, its own legal route for creators to sell inside the game — described by a Mojang producer as a way to "enable entrepreneurs to set up businesses on our platform" 3.
The timeline you hear
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| August 3, 2010 | Alpha 1.0.15 adds survival multiplayer, so a player can enter someone else's server address. 4 |
| August 4, 2010 | The first survival multiplayer server software is released, a day after the client. 4 |
| February 28–29, 2012 | Mojang announces it has hired the four lead developers of Bukkit — Warren Loo, Erik Broes, Nathan Adams and Nathan Gilbert — to build an official API. That API is never released. 5 |
| April 13, 2013 | Hypixel launches, one of the first of the big minigame networks. 6 |
| May 2014 | Mojang launches Realms, its own paid hosting service for private worlds. 7 |
| June 12, 2014 | Mojang publishes "Let's talk server monetisation," listing what servers may and may not charge for. 8 |
| June 14, 2014 | Markus Persson publishes "Literally worse than EA." 1 |
| June 16, 2014 | A follow-up Q+A sets the compliance deadline at August 1, 2014. 9 |
| June 24, 2014 | The Guardian reports the community split. 7 |
| September 2015 | Rock Paper Shotgun reports on the big servers and finds Hypixel's income back above its pre-2014 level. 10 |
| Early 2016 | Mojang hires enforcement staff and begins blacklisting non-compliant servers. 2 |
| 2017 | The Minecraft Marketplace opens to community creators, with nine at launch. 3 |
The numbers behind the episode
Minecraft had sold about fourteen million copies on PC by June 2014, and Mineplex's owner estimated that nearly a quarter of all PC accounts had played on his server in the previous eight months — a claim worth treating as the operator's own, since it comes from him. 7
Hypixel, reported a year after the rule change, had a core team of twenty-six people plus about a hundred volunteers, and running costs of nearly a hundred thousand dollars a month; it said it was attracting 1.9 million players a month. Ranks sold for between roughly sixteen and ninety-eight pounds. 10
On an ordinary Friday in September 2015, Mineplex had 12,022 players online at once and Hypixel 16,449 — enough, the reporter noted, to put Mineplex among the twenty most-played games on Steam at that moment. The same piece records the other side of the enforcement: Hypixel's income was by then higher than it had been before the rules changed. 10
Kotaku, covering the change in June 2014, found servers selling ranks priced "as high as $500," and noted that the only things Mojang's clarification allowed servers to charge for were entry to the server and cosmetics that did not affect gameplay. 11
Quotes you hear
"You are allowed to charge players to access your server … You are not allowed to split your playerbase into paying, and non-paying users." — Mojang, 12 June 2014 8
"This was never allowed, but we didn't crack down on it because we're constantly incredibly swamped in other work." — Markus Persson, 14 June 2014 1
"I feel bad for the people who have built businesses around this, though." — Markus Persson to Rock Paper Shotgun, 23 June 2014 12
"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." — Gregory Bylos, owner of Mineplex, in an open letter to Mojang, June 2014 7
"The press doesn't exist in this subculture." — Aaron Donaghey, operations manager of Hypixel, to Rock Paper Shotgun, 2015 10
"Income crashed to levels below what was sustainable. It was looking like an extinction event." — Rock Paper Shotgun, reporting on the server networks a year later 10
"It was actually quite frightening. At this point we'd spent over four years on our games, and it was quickly set in stone that we could be finished on a whim." — Navarr Barnier, owner of Shotbow 2
"We want to enable entrepreneurs to set up businesses on our platform." — John Thornton, Mojang, to BBC Newsbeat, 2017 3
One claim the episode does not make
You will often hear that the EULA fight is what caused Mojang to be sold. The two events sit three months apart, and Persson's own tweet connects them, so the reading is understandable. What the record supports is narrower: Persson described the abuse he was taking and his loss of connection with the audience, and said it was about his sanity 12. The episode says the two are close together. It does not claim the licence change caused the sale.
References
- 1Literally worse than EA — Markus Persson
web.archive.org
- 2Kotaku
kotaku.com
- 3BBC Newsbeat
bbc.com
- 4Java Edition Alpha v1.0.15 — Minecraft Wiki\
minecraft.wiki
- 5Eurogamer\
eurogamer.net
- 6Hypixel — Wikipedia\
en.wikipedia.org
- 7The Guardian\
theguardian.com
- 8Mojang, archived\
web.archive.org
- 9Mojang, archived\
web.archive.org
- 10Rock Paper Shotgun\
rockpapershotgun.com
- 11Kotaku\
kotaku.com
- 12Rock Paper Shotgun\
rockpapershotgun.com
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