
Minecraft Set to Launch Its Own Currency - rayuela
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-10/microsoft-s-minecraft-set-to-launch-its-own-currency
======
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.

~~~
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.

------
xemoka
Yeah, this stinks. I despise fake currency created to form a disconnect
between the real-world costs of items and their "in-game" price. It's used as
a form of manipulation—and if that wasn't the original intent then they really
need to re-think their reasoning.

It's taking advantage of children and their connection with their funders
(parents).

~~~
powvans
I cannot take my 5 year old son into a supermarket. Entering and exiting
requires passing by so much candy and other garbage that it's just not worth
it. He will invariably pitch a fit when I say no and we will invariably have a
tear filled exit from the store. The store is effectively weaponizing my child
against me to extract money from my pocket.

This is similar. My kids don't play video games, but I have friends who will
hear no end of whining and crying when their kid needs more Minecraft $$$. Of
course they can refuse to participate, but as a parent it's frustrating.

~~~
e40
_I cannot take my 5 year old son into a supermarket. Entering and exiting
requires passing by so much candy and other garbage that it 's just not worth
it. He will invariably pitch a fit when I say no and we will invariably have a
tear filled exit from the store. The store is effectively weaponizing my child
against me to extract money from my pocket._

I'm a parent, so I don't say this lightly. It's not the store. It's you. Get
used to the fact that your kid will see stuff everywhere they aren't supposed
to have. Not taking your kid into situations like this will pay terrible
dividends in future years. Deal with this now.

~~~
bitexploder
This is true. Sorry GP, but if your kids are of the fairly typical variety
then parent is right. I remember when our son was younger and we would chat
with other parents. Our son was always in bed by 7:15pm and getting up at a
reasonable morning hour. Other parents became amazed as bed time was always a
fight for them. How do you do it, they would ask, as if we possessed some
secret knowledge of child taming. My wife would then explain the routine and
consistency required to achieve this magical feat. You could see their faces
fall as the process was described. No magic this "consistency and routine"
thing could never work for them and their house. Precious Jimmy or Sue are
just different....

So many times this. We thought maybe our kids really were abberant. But then
we met other parents with this secret knowledge as our son aged and we had a
daughter.

I accept my children's disappointment. May they learn it young. I am here to
guide them to the most productive life possible. Productive in the fulfillment
sense, not the material sense. This will always require weathering the storm
of their sometimes outbursting disappointment. Funny thing, though, after a
while they learn that no actually means no and they don't lose their cool so
much over it these days.

Edit: just want to say it actually is hard. It requires a lot of the parents
to be consistent and show up regularly. It is so hard in fact that it is a
sort of secret. But within the confines of this sacrifice and constraint there
is a sort of calm and freedom that makes day to day life flow better. It isn't
for everyone, but modifying a young child's behavior in most cases is anything
but mysterious.

~~~
watwut
If I had to have exactly same routine every evening, I would personally hated
it and go crazy. Occasional difficulty to wake up is low price for not having
to structure all family life and my life around 7:15 sleeping time. I really
like to be able to stay on playground longer when whether is right or be with
my adult friends a bit longer or, well, anything like that.

If the kid would be autistic I would do it, but otherwise nope.

~~~
thomastjeffery
The point is to have a normal routine that you can break. Rules are meant to
be broken.

It turns out that you will always have a routine whether you are aware of it
or not.

Everyone enjoys the rush of freedom that comes from breaking the rules.
Remember they are only rules, not laws. Rules and routine aren't simply
restrictive, they can give a backdrop to all the other moments.

~~~
photojosh
Yup. Our kids are normally in bed by 7:15, and they're in the older 7-9
bracket. (Up at 6am, but so are we.)

Their delight when you do something special like going out for dinner or a
"late" night walk is wonderful. Can be as often as 1-2x a week or even more
during school holidays.

------
mathlizard
I always imagined a minecraft currency would be block-chain for some reason

~~~
tantalor
Sure, you try implementing SHA-256 with redstone and sticky pistons.

~~~
nebabyte
You laugh, but...

------
yaacov
Alternate title: Microsoft to add more in-app purchases to Minecraft.

------
shuntress
Calling this "a new form of currency" seems a bit odd. Its the same "fake"
money used by every freemium game or arcade (tokens).

~~~
Apocryphon
I don't know how many years ago was when I started seeing Target electronics
aisles have entire racks dedicated to gift cards for iTunes Store, Google Play
Store, Amazon, Xbox Live Store, Playstation Network, World of Warcraft,
Farmville, etc. etc. credits, but it's been a long time now. Cyber store
credits are nothing new or interesting.

------
ungzd
In 2010, when AAA games totally became interactive hollywood with "press x to
win" and vulgar pathetic, when indie games scene started to being eaten by
cancer of making "philosophical", "artsy" highly-hyped Mario clones, Minecraft
came out (as alpha). It was entierly new type of game, giving many hopes for
stinky game industry.

Now it's being converted into another Clash of kings.

~~~
tyrust
2010 was an amazing year for games, AAA and indie alike. Just googling [0]
will show you this. On the AAA side you had Mass Effect 2, Fallout: New Vegas,
Red Dead Redemption, Starcraft II, Civ 5, and much more. On the indie side
Super Meat Boy, Limbo [1], VVVVVV, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and of course,
more.

I think it's cool that Microsoft is giving Minecraft players a way to support
content-creators. They aren't forcing content-creators to offer their content
for a fee; free mods will continue to exist. And they certainly aren't putting
base gameplay behind paywalls like some mobile games do.

[0] -
[https://www.google.com/search?q=best+games+released+in+2010](https://www.google.com/search?q=best+games+released+in+2010)

[1] - Which was an awesome game that you might dismiss as a ""philosophical",
"artsy" highly-hyped Mario clone".

~~~
ehsankia
Even the so called "walking simulators" have grown to be a powerful genre with
games such as Firewatch, or even more extreme story games such as Her Story.

Dismissing these games just because they're not conventional "games" is
insanely stupid. Video game are an insanely powerful medium for story telling,
and limiting yourself to one narrow subset is just a shame.

~~~
xinyhn
Personally these type of games have lately revived my identity as a gamer.

Soma, Talos Principle, The Valley, Kona, Firewatch, To the Moon, Everybody Has
Gone to the Rapture. Have all been extremely enjoyable experiences.

Really hoping for more to discover in this genre.

------
hueller
Well, there's always Minetest.
[http://www.minetest.net/](http://www.minetest.net/)

edit: It even has nuclear reactors!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfBwygvEJNA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfBwygvEJNA)

~~~
erlehmann_
Under the hood, Minetest is way cooler than it looks: It actually implements a
generalized 3D cellular automaton framework in which each cube in the world is
driven by a small Lua program – which makes it much easier to mod than
Minecraft. Many people like the Minecraft-style mod, but there exists, for
example, an implementation of Wireworld:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld)

Disclosure: I was an early Minetest contributor when you still had to provide
C++ patches to add new features (2011) and drew some textures.

~~~
nightcracker
> It actually implements a generalized 3D cellular automaton framework in
> which each cube in the world is driven by a small Lua program

That doesn't seem scalable at all.

~~~
Dylan16807
Cellular automatons scale great. What do you think the problem is?

And minecraft is stuck on a single sim thread, it can't even split of
worldgen. Almost any threaded method could beat it.

------
ryanmarsh
This sounds in-part like a response to the popularity of Roblox.

Also, I see no reference of Etherium so I assume this isn't really an app coin
but rather an arcade coin.

~~~
lloydde
My thought exactly; chasing Roblox after having missed the boat on also
providing hosted service. It seems like these platforms provide a repeat of
the knockoff industry of gaming on Facebook.

------
janwillemb
I don't like this. I bought the game, I didn't buy a shopping mall.

~~~
fastball
The game won't change. You still have the exact game you paid for.

Except maybe with more bug fixes now that Microsoft has a justification for
continued expenditure.

~~~
nebabyte
> The game won't change. You still have the exact game you paid for.

This idea died for me with (and I got into gaming kinda late, and have always
been kinda a casual gamer) TF2.

"The game you paid for" can absolutely change over time; especially something
as multiplayer-centric as TF2. More specifically, it's not the changes to the
engine or such, but the community, and the assets/etc that can cause it.

------
driverdan
> “We have a model that allows us to give more than 50 percent of revenue to
> the creators,” he said. “They’re all happy with that revenue split and we’re
> happy with that as well.”

Sounds pretty bad to me.

------
LinuxBender
Maybe I misread the entire article, but the title is very misleading.

This is not some new currency (in the senses of crypto-currency); but rather,
virtual money to be used by all the Microsoft services.

I would equate this to the gold that Blizzard sells to WoW players and that
players earn in game by crafting and selling items.

------
patja
Hopefully this will have the ancillary benefit of creating a marketplace of
mods, worlds, etc. that actually work without having to wade through adfly
downloads, rambling YouTube videos where a paragraph of text would be better,
and outdated and false information about compatibility.

------
jerguismi
I hate these in-game currencies. Makes comparing prices just harder. Thank god
steam hasn't invented anything like that.

~~~
shuntress
Steam uses 'Steam Wallet' which is 1:1 with real currency. This prevents the
obfuscation/disconnect with what you are actually spending.

As far as I know, it is functionally identical to any other 'fake' currency
(it's like store credit).

------
lifeformed
I was hoping the currency would be blockchain based and you have to actually
mine it in game. Like a super rare mineral in the ground that you find.

------
binthere
This reminds me when Steam created payable mods in it's ecosystem and received
a huge backslash from the community. The thought is always that companies are
greedy into milking more revenue from their customers.

However I feel this push back from the community (which you can also see here
on this thread) ignores the fact of hundreds of hours a team of developers put
into making the mod. Yes they do it for fun and not about money but I bet you
they would rather make a living off of it.

I've once thought they could make a living with donations but the reality is
that almost no one cares about donations. I believe one of the most popular
addons of World of Warcraft (back in the Pandaria expansion), oQueue, only
made 5 dollars in a month with donations. So the mod community in WoW had to
rely on the ad revenue from the distribution platform (Curse).

I believe that introducing this type of system is beneficial to the longevity
of a game. It supports the mod community to make a living creating what people
are willing to play.

------
EGreg
What is the regulatory regime about these virtual currencies?

Are you considered a money transmitter in the USA?

What about other countries?

I would like to introduce a decentralized currency that lets every community
install their own copy of an "open source social platform" (imagine Wordpress
but for social apps instead of blog plugins) and then instead of paying with a
credit card or bitcoin, the community would have its own currency.

For emergencies and other things, the currency would enable the community to
function even when cut off from a federal money (EU, US) and perhaps even
invest in its own projects by having an elastic money supply for local
projects. That would make communities more resilient, which in my opinion
would have stemmed the decline of jobs in Detroit, PIIGS countries etc. who
cannot have their own monetary policy.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_value_transfer_syst...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_value_transfer_system)

~~~
joezydeco
The article doesn't talk much about the currency's ability to liquidate back
into local money, but you can be sure there will be exchange houses (legal or
not) that pop up.

I'm waiting to see who makes the first slot machine out of redstone.

~~~
dlhavema
+1 for this..

I'm guessing the proprietors would have to sell chips in the marketplace to
actually get money, unless Microsoft adds a Player.takeMinecraftCoins(int)
function...

~~~
a_t48
This is very much illegal in many places, fair warning.

------
zitterbewegung
Mojang's relationship between its users, modders and people who run its
servers has been going downhill to the point that I can fairly say that Mojang
has practiced Embrace, Extend and Extinguish and to a fairly effective degree
(and this is before Microsoft bought Minecraft).

At first Minecraft was a simple game but it caught on and a modding toolkit
called Bukkit was created. Basically Bukkit was violating copyright law by
patching Minecraft but Mojang let it happen because it makes the game usable
in multiplayer settings. Minecraft has had the notion of servers but to
actually administer a server you need bukkit to effectively police your
server.

One of the oldest running servers of Minecraft is mcpublic
([https://nerd.nu](https://nerd.nu)). This is a community run server which has
fundraising drives. I was a mod and there was a very complex nonprofit (we had
a notion of VPs, Managers and Moderators and the staff consisted of more than
20 people).

Minecraft wouldn't be there without modders patching their game or any
multiplayer aspect. Then Mojang vaguely announced a modding API and never
released it (it was vaporware). They hired key people on Bukkit. As Minecraft
grew so did the modding community and also for profit servers.

Many people note that there are servers that are predatory and seem to take
advantage of children with credit cards. I don't disagree about this point.
But there is a great amount of modders that are technically skilled and enjoy
the game. They don't actively ask for money and they are who helped make the
game work in a multiplayer environment. Minecraft created realms and this is
where they started of the extend part of the journey.

After awhile once Notch got fed up with Minecraft and wanted to sell out is
when everything really started to go downhill. To extinguish modding would
require them to just start enforcing the copyright that they were neglecting.
Minecraft was built on modders but didn't need them and were a liability if
they were to sell to Microsoft. Once wolverness performed the DMCA on bukkit
thats when pretty much most people started giving up on modding. When mojang
started banning servers that was pretty much the end and I only think that
there will be non profit servers for the original java version of Minecraft.

~~~
Tepix
At least it's still possible and extremely simple to build bukkit by yourself:
[https://www.spigotmc.org/wiki/buildtools/](https://www.spigotmc.org/wiki/buildtools/)

------
neolefty
Does this mean they are getting serious about a plugin API?

~~~
Tepix
They have "Add-Ons" for the (incompatible) Windows 10 version but as far as I
know they're not yet documented properly.

------
nkrisc
My archived pre-Microsoft version of Minecraft feels more and more valuable to
me. I should remember to back that up again.

~~~
SquareWheel
You can download any version of the game from Mojang's servers already. The
.jars are all listed in the launcher.

------
ilaksh
Only 9 companies can sell. The free mods will be better/more interesting
anyway.

Minecraft has become a giant cow made out of blocks with millions of kids
being sucked up and stuck on, with Microsoft and about a million others
underneath milking it for all its worth.

------
pyrophane
Now that MS owns Minecraft, have they made any moves to integrate it with the
rest of the MS ecosystem? I'm asking because doesn't MS already have its own
virtual gaming currency for Xbox, aka Microsoft Points?

~~~
khedoros1
I know they've got a version in the Windows Store, which is either a non-Java
implementation, or massively optimized compared the the original version of
the game.

I've never looked to see if there were payable add-ons for it, because I don't
roll that way, but it wouldn't have surprised me to find some already
available.

------
jumpkickhit
I hope this means a 3rd party will lazily port a VR version for PSVR owners.

I'd buy that.

------
skizm
Serious question: It seems like Microsoft is making an "App Store for
Minecraft". Does HN think being a "Minecraft App developer" will be a full
time job in the future?

~~~
nl
It already is. Plenty of people make a full time income from building mods for
servers.

------
richardboegli
Here is Microsoft / Minecraft blog post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079145)

------
debt
Bloomberg has been absolutely killing it with their tech journalism. I've been
feeling more informed reading them directly then HN.

~~~
jfoutz
I jump to comments first sometimes too. It's good you've identified a source
you trust enough to read consistently before going to comments.

Or maybe you meant 'than'.

Either way.

------
nottorp
Stupid clickbait article. Please edit title to "Minecraft to sell mods".

------
mikelyons
shame, it doesn't say it's available on mac, so not on the java version, and
it's just microsofts first step in ruining what's been an amazing revolution
in gaming

------
andoon
This probably is only for the "Minecraft for Windows 10" version of the game,
not the original Java version.

I play a lot, but only a pirated Java version, so I don't know if, after
Microsoft bought Minecraft, they have stopped supporting the Java version.

~~~
C4K3
That makes it somewhat misleading when the article says the game has 121
million players. I somewhat doubt 121 million people play the Windows 10
version. I wonder if the journalist even knows the difference.

------
Melon_Bread
So my question is: How come people got all up in arms about Steam charging for
mods, but for Minecraft it is okay?

~~~
dageshi
The pricing structure for one? The publisher, Bethesda in that case wanted
40%, Valve taking 30% leaving the author of the mod 30%. I was up in arms
because that split should be the opposite way around.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
According to this article:

>We have a model that allows us to give more than 50 percent of revenue to the
creators

So it seems worse than both of those?

~~~
Roujo
> So it seems worse than both of those?

That was a single model (40% Bethesda + 30% Valve + 30% Creator), not two
separate models from Bethesda and Valve.

