[adambratt]

There's a few reasons why they're doing this.

My little brother ran one of the top 10 Minecraft servers a couple years ago. On a good day, he'd average 1000 players online during US hours. His server had a bunch of minigames with the most popular ones being a clone of Call of Duty and Star Wars Battlefield in Minecraft.

This was monetized on the backend by charging players money for in-game items. It was fairly regular for a player on his server to pay $100+ to have access to an in-game gun or other virtual item he'd created on his server. I won't say how much he was making but it definitely was enough to pay several thousand dollars in monthly server bills and $3-5k/month to Youtubers who would drive traffic to the server.

The top 3 servers were pulling well into 7 figures a year each for virtual items that would often disappear or for a kit loadout in a minigame that would be gone the next month. A lot of these guys churned through user bases pretty quickly but it didn't stop the endless flow of 13 year olds with their parents credit card. None of them offered support options and there wasn't really a way to get a refund after you'd spent $100 on a virtual kit on a 3rd party server mod.

I think part of the reason Microsoft is doing this is to regulate the number of angry calls they were getting by parents of kids who spent way too much money on servers that Microsoft had no control over. Not to mention this will let them get a scoop of what I'd estimate to be a side income stream of at least $200m/year in revenue through 3rd party servers.

[harrygallagher4]

I think this is slightly different. Minecraft created a EULA that servers have to agree to a few years ago, basically saying you can't charge people for items. A lot of servers get around this by charging for "ranks" that are basically a prefix before your name and then a couple of added permissions, one of which is usually regular access to a kit containing some fixed items. People are still paying for items, but there's no fixed price of "$1 for 64 diamonds" or whatever. That's how server monetization works (last I checked).

This looks to be monetizing client-side content like maps, textures, and skins. Basically just charging for things that have, until now, just been free to download that don't actually change the experience in-game, but just the look and feel of the game.

Source: used to be really involved in the MC community

[narag]

Thank you for the info. I had made some obvious guesses (the servers part) but could not have figured out that youtubers were so expensive or the profit so great.

I've seen that a well known server pays €20 an hour to developers. Mods use to work for free. Kids thinks that the server is "a community" so they're not very demanding.

[adambratt]

Minecraft Youtubers with over 500,000 subscribers were routinely making $15k for a 10 minute video a couple years ago. Probably higher now.

[kahrkunne]

A friend of mine used to develop for minecraft servers essentially professionally. Getting paid $100 for an hour's worth of work was not too uncommon. Back then they typically paid on a project basis, though.

[1637362]

This isn't about servers.

[adambratt]

Yes, but I'm guessing they will open up the currency so that 3rd party servers can use it rather than having to deal with payments on their own.

Hopefully it will help legitimize a lot of the current server networks.