Literally worse than EA
notch.net
notch.net
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.
Rant over..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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 really this could work so much better if Mojang implemented it.
One of the first instructions on how to make a mod was -- first, download this decompiler. Wat?
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).
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?
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).
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.
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.
But this has nothing to do with monetizing servers, which is the point of the post.
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.
Draw your own conclusions.
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.
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.
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?
With home WiFi they can run their own servers in their touch devices, and run around in each others play areas.
P.S. I greatly appreciate Markus Persson's integrity, and consider this game one of my best purchases ever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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'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.
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 ...
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.
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.
"The EULA for Minecraft says you can’t make money of
Minecraft. If you make mods, they have to be free."
Also, does restricting modification like this infringe on "first sale" rights?
Or did you mean noncommercial use, as in evaluation licenses?
(edit: several edits because I am confused)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lin...
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.
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.
Mods are created using the decompiled client, and built against that. But when they are released, they do not contain any of Mojang's code.
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.
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.
I recommend further reading at: http://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
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.
[0] https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/
I think this sums up the sentiment from a server's point of view: http://sterlingplays.com/
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.
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)
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.
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.
Edit: clarified last sentence.
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
He did however recently make news by buying the most expensive apartment in Stockholm.
Developing games is risky and there are no guarantees of success. So, the successful projects have to pay for unsuccessful ones.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
* 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The real question is how children are spending hundreds of dollars online without parental consent.
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).
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.
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.
In your own analogy, your sister would be the one who bought the dangerous device and left her kid unsupervised with it.
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"?
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...
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.
...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.
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'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.
Now your ownership of that is being seen by a kid, who assumes he's your peer. That kid never had a chance.
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 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.
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. $$$$
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.
Spout used that loophole (where Spout was a voxel mod API and SpoutCraft was a Minecraft implementation of it) to allow selling mods.
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)
Are they going to start suing people? I can't see a whole lot of alternatives here.