15 ms·

Minecraft Set to Launch Its Own Currency

170 points by rayuela 10y ago

Melon_Bread 10y ago
So my question is: How come people got all up in arms about Steam charging for mods, but for Minecraft it is okay?
- JeremyBanks 10y ago
  Mobs of entitled children are not rational.
  - hatsunearu 10y ago
    Steam already had a history of problematic mod behavior--people posting copyrighted material, stolen mods, etc. Allowing for mod sales made it from a nuisance to actual IP theft/stolen revenue. I suspect the exact same for this minecraft store, unless MS actually starts whooping ass for IP theft. edit: oh yeah, the steam revenue sharing model was a hilarious joke, IIRC.
    - strictnein 10y ago
      If you want to see IP theft and stolen mods on a grand scale, check out Roblox. Complete with micro-transactions on a grand scale as well.
    - palunon 10y ago
      >I suspect the exact same for this minecraft store, unless MS actually starts whooping ass for IP theft. Seems like they are only allowing accredited (by them) companies to use it, so they should have less problems...
- reitzensteinm 10y ago
  Both are OK.
- dageshi 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      > 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.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  Edit: Never mind, after a re-read it looks like this has nothing to do with the PC version... for now. Who said it was okay? I for one am disgusted with it. I'm sure they'll catch my kids eye with some lame skin or map and I'll have to have yet another argument with him about how it's absolutely insane to buy virtual clothes in exchange for real money. He's already done it, and I've caved, several time with the XBox version. He moved to PC about a year ago so it hasn't been an issue. I knew MS was going to turn this great game into a shit hole as fast as they could. This game will eventually be completely centralized.
  - zepolen 10y ago
    That sounds like bad parenting. Kid wants skin? Fine, make them understand the value of it and work for it though. Teach them that buying an overpriced skin will cost them eg. 10 hours of actual work - like chores.
    - bitJericho 10y ago
      My kid didn't understand until the vurtual items he bought with his hard earned money, about 80usd, vanished when the company shut down. It was a brilliant educational moment. Alas Minecraft is probably good for another decade!
      - zepolen 10y ago
        Yeah your kid probably wouldn't have felt the 'blow' if he didn't work for that money. The problem isn't virtual items, everyone pays money for non material experiences/services - and on a long enough timescale even material things wear down/break. The important thing to teach a kid is if the value they derive from buy a skin eg. and whatever it brings to them (happiness, bragging rights) is more important that opportunity cost of paying for that. If the cost is always zero (daddy pays) - then the kid will not stop to think about it ever. Something about telling a kid that the iron is hot vs the kid needing to burn himself to learn.
- krisdol 10y ago
  Why are you assuming that we're OK with it? The top 3 or 4 threads here are critical of it.
EGreg 10y ago
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_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_value_transfer_syst...
- joezydeco 10y ago
  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.
  - Navarr 10y ago
    The money can't be spent "in-game" if that makes sense. Marketplace essentially adds another layer to Minecraft - it's not in the game, it's outside of it. You don't give coins to other players, you buy things from registered third party companies that are then paid in real money.
  - dlhavema 10y ago
    +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 10y ago
      This is very much illegal in many places, fair warning.
yaacov 10y ago
Alternate title: Microsoft to add more in-app purchases to Minecraft.
uncensored 10y ago
They're not yet thinking outside the box and I think if they did we would be in a better place. You simply don't need to measure the give and take. The act of measuring that and putting value to it is the cause of all trouble and gain. If you don't want the gain or the trouble, you might find it easier to participate in an experiment where life is about the act of giving and receiving, not about it's material value. There are theories out there and ways have been suggested aplenty. There is nothing detering any of us from giving up on currency once we have the collective means of survival. Till then let's aaa and wooo at the advances of modern science. A virtual world with its own currency? What you say??! Get out of here. LOL. Funny, sorry.
shuntress 10y ago
Calling this "a new form of currency" seems a bit odd. Its the same "fake" money used by every freemium game or arcade (tokens).
- fastball 10y ago
  Yeah, the title led me to expect a cryptocurrency.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  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.
janwillemb 10y ago
I don't like this. I bought the game, I didn't buy a shopping mall.
- tzakrajs 10y ago
  Not only did you not buy the game or the shopping mall, you bought a ticket to get inside a shopping mall.
- fastball 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  I bought the game. Later, a platform for building modified versions grew around it. Even later, another platform with pricetags on the modified versions appeared. All along, the game that I've bought has been gaining features for free, although I'm also free to be a traditionalist and load+play the game that I originally bought. None of this seems like something that's harming me.
mathlizard 10y ago
I always imagined a minecraft currency would be block-chain for some reason
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mungoid 10y ago
  I knew someone was gonna beat me to this!
- tantalor 10y ago
  Sure, you try implementing SHA-256 with redstone and sticky pistons.
  - nebabyte 10y ago
    You laugh, but...
hueller 10y ago
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_ 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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 10y ago
      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.
- Tepix 10y ago
  I'm doing a programming workshop for kids using Minecraft and Python and looked at alternatives so not everyone would need a copy of Minecraft (for 24€ or so). My experience with Minetest is that it's not in a good shape. I stumbled over several serious bugs (I reported them but they weren't fixed quickly) and gave up on it. Usability also wasn't very good. They really need a lot more polish. Too bad really. It has the potential to be great for sure.
neolefty 10y ago
Does this mean they are getting serious about a plugin API?
- Tepix 10y ago
  They have "Add-Ons" for the (incompatible) Windows 10 version but as far as I know they're not yet documented properly.
jerguismi 10y ago
I hate these in-game currencies. Makes comparing prices just harder. Thank god steam hasn't invented anything like that.
- shuntress 10y ago
  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).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
xemoka 10y ago
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).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- aphextron 10y ago
  >I despise fake currency created to form a disconnect between the real-world costs of items and their "in-game" price. That's the entire point; it's a psychological hack. It's the same idea as gambling chips at a casino. If they force you to purchase "coins" in bulk, then you are much more likely to spend them freely once you have them than you would with actual cash, as the value is too abstract. They will also set the prices in such a way that you just need to buy one more "coin pack" even though you only need a few individual coins to get what you want.
  - gdulli 10y ago
    Many casino games don't work well with cash. You'd use plastic or ceramic chips even if you were playing at home against friends. Common coins have too little value, larger coins get very heavy and loud in bulk. And paper money doesn't work well. You can't toss it to the center of the table as easily as chips, it's harder to count a stack of dollars, paper money would tear when handled so heavily, etc. There are very practical reasons to use chips instead of cash in a casino. Slot machines, which don't have those considerations, can be played with your choice of cash or cards that can have value loaded onto them, as of the last time I checked.
    - ballenf 10y ago
      Very true, but it sure is a lot easier to toss a "chip" tip to your dealer or waitress than cash. Or place a long shot bet that you don't expect to win. And I mean psychologically less painful, not logistically even though it is both. You have the added pain of turning chips back into dollars, so your mind starts to play tricks on you making parting with the chips ever so easier than parting with cash. You discount for the hassle of getting back to cash. In addition you get chips from any and every dealer in the casino. You get cash from one of a couple cashiers placed very inconveniently around the periphery where there are often lines or uncertainty about which windows are open. Just a touch of uncertainty. Virtual game currencies are, amazingly, even worse. It is incredibly painful and difficult to walk away from them since you lose all that fake "value" you've built up or bought.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ryanmarsh 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
ungzd 10y ago
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.
- veddox 10y ago
  Yea, I think it passed that mark a long time ago.
- mintplant 10y ago
  I think this is different, in that what's being sold is community-generated content: custom maps, texture packs, and skins. They're not locking pieces of the actual game behind paywalls.
- tyrust 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
driverdan 10y ago
> “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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
andoon 10y ago
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.
- jandrese 10y ago
  The Java version is still being maintained, but the pace of development is as slow as it has always been. The great thing about the Java version is the huge modding community that has been built around (specific versions of) it.
- C4K3 10y ago
  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.
binthere 10y ago
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.
mikelyons 10y ago
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
pyrophane 10y ago
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?
- woodrowbarlow 10y ago
  i think microsoft points have gone by the wayside for the xbox one; purchases are simply listed in real currencies now. still, i agree: why not integrate with the system payment platform?
- khedoros1 10y ago
  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.
ilaksh 10y ago
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.
debt 10y ago
Bloomberg has been absolutely killing it with their tech journalism. I've been feeling more informed reading them directly then HN.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  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.
adambratt 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Minecraft Youtubers with over 500,000 subscribers were routinely making $15k for a 10 minute video a couple years ago. Probably higher now.
  - kahrkunne 10y ago
    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.
patja 10y ago
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.
lifeformed 10y ago
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.
nkrisc 10y ago
My archived pre-Microsoft version of Minecraft feels more and more valuable to me. I should remember to back that up again.
- SquareWheel 10y ago
  You can download any version of the game from Mojang's servers already. The .jars are all listed in the launcher.
jumpkickhit 10y ago
I hope this means a 3rd party will lazily port a VR version for PSVR owners. I'd buy that.
LinuxBender 10y ago
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.
skizm 10y ago
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 10y ago
  It already is. Plenty of people make a full time income from building mods for servers.
nottorp 10y ago
Stupid clickbait article. Please edit title to "Minecraft to sell mods".
zitterbewegung 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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/
richardboegli 10y ago
Here is Microsoft / Minecraft blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079145

170 points by rayuela 10y ago

Melon_Bread 10y ago

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

JeremyBanks 10y ago
Mobs of entitled children are not rational.
- hatsunearu 10y ago
  Steam already had a history of problematic mod behavior--people posting copyrighted material, stolen mods, etc. Allowing for mod sales made it from a nuisance to actual IP theft/stolen revenue. I suspect the exact same for this minecraft store, unless MS actually starts whooping ass for IP theft. edit: oh yeah, the steam revenue sharing model was a hilarious joke, IIRC.
  - strictnein 10y ago
    If you want to see IP theft and stolen mods on a grand scale, check out Roblox. Complete with micro-transactions on a grand scale as well.
  - palunon 10y ago
    >I suspect the exact same for this minecraft store, unless MS actually starts whooping ass for IP theft. Seems like they are only allowing accredited (by them) companies to use it, so they should have less problems...
reitzensteinm 10y ago
Both are OK.
dageshi 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
jasonkostempski 10y ago
Edit: Never mind, after a re-read it looks like this has nothing to do with the PC version... for now. Who said it was okay? I for one am disgusted with it. I'm sure they'll catch my kids eye with some lame skin or map and I'll have to have yet another argument with him about how it's absolutely insane to buy virtual clothes in exchange for real money. He's already done it, and I've caved, several time with the XBox version. He moved to PC about a year ago so it hasn't been an issue. I knew MS was going to turn this great game into a shit hole as fast as they could. This game will eventually be completely centralized.
- zepolen 10y ago
  That sounds like bad parenting. Kid wants skin? Fine, make them understand the value of it and work for it though. Teach them that buying an overpriced skin will cost them eg. 10 hours of actual work - like chores.
  - bitJericho 10y ago
    My kid didn't understand until the vurtual items he bought with his hard earned money, about 80usd, vanished when the company shut down. It was a brilliant educational moment. Alas Minecraft is probably good for another decade!
    - zepolen 10y ago
      Yeah your kid probably wouldn't have felt the 'blow' if he didn't work for that money. The problem isn't virtual items, everyone pays money for non material experiences/services - and on a long enough timescale even material things wear down/break. The important thing to teach a kid is if the value they derive from buy a skin eg. and whatever it brings to them (happiness, bragging rights) is more important that opportunity cost of paying for that. If the cost is always zero (daddy pays) - then the kid will not stop to think about it ever. Something about telling a kid that the iron is hot vs the kid needing to burn himself to learn.
krisdol 10y ago
Why are you assuming that we're OK with it? The top 3 or 4 threads here are critical of it.

EGreg 10y ago

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_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_value_transfer_syst...

joezydeco 10y ago
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.
- Navarr 10y ago
  The money can't be spent "in-game" if that makes sense. Marketplace essentially adds another layer to Minecraft - it's not in the game, it's outside of it. You don't give coins to other players, you buy things from registered third party companies that are then paid in real money.
- dlhavema 10y ago
  +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 10y ago
    This is very much illegal in many places, fair warning.

yaacov 10y ago

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

uncensored 10y ago

They're not yet thinking outside the box and I think if they did we would be in a better place. You simply don't need to measure the give and take. The act of measuring that and putting value to it is the cause of all trouble and gain. If you don't want the gain or the trouble, you might find it easier to participate in an experiment where life is about the act of giving and receiving, not about it's material value. There are theories out there and ways have been suggested aplenty. There is nothing detering any of us from giving up on currency once we have the collective means of survival. Till then let's aaa and wooo at the advances of modern science. A virtual world with its own currency? What you say??! Get out of here. LOL. Funny, sorry.

shuntress 10y ago

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

fastball 10y ago
Yeah, the title led me to expect a cryptocurrency.
Apocryphon 10y ago
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.

janwillemb 10y ago

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

tzakrajs 10y ago
Not only did you not buy the game or the shopping mall, you bought a ticket to get inside a shopping mall.
fastball 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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.
khedoros1 10y ago
I bought the game. Later, a platform for building modified versions grew around it. Even later, another platform with pricetags on the modified versions appeared. All along, the game that I've bought has been gaining features for free, although I'm also free to be a traditionalist and load+play the game that I originally bought. None of this seems like something that's harming me.

mathlizard 10y ago

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

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mungoid 10y ago
I knew someone was gonna beat me to this!
tantalor 10y ago
Sure, you try implementing SHA-256 with redstone and sticky pistons.
- nebabyte 10y ago
  You laugh, but...

hueller 10y ago

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_ 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    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.
Tepix 10y ago
I'm doing a programming workshop for kids using Minecraft and Python and looked at alternatives so not everyone would need a copy of Minecraft (for 24€ or so). My experience with Minetest is that it's not in a good shape. I stumbled over several serious bugs (I reported them but they weren't fixed quickly) and gave up on it. Usability also wasn't very good. They really need a lot more polish. Too bad really. It has the potential to be great for sure.

neolefty 10y ago

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

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

jerguismi 10y ago

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

shuntress 10y ago
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).
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xemoka 10y ago

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).

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aphextron 10y ago
>I despise fake currency created to form a disconnect between the real-world costs of items and their "in-game" price. That's the entire point; it's a psychological hack. It's the same idea as gambling chips at a casino. If they force you to purchase "coins" in bulk, then you are much more likely to spend them freely once you have them than you would with actual cash, as the value is too abstract. They will also set the prices in such a way that you just need to buy one more "coin pack" even though you only need a few individual coins to get what you want.
- gdulli 10y ago
  Many casino games don't work well with cash. You'd use plastic or ceramic chips even if you were playing at home against friends. Common coins have too little value, larger coins get very heavy and loud in bulk. And paper money doesn't work well. You can't toss it to the center of the table as easily as chips, it's harder to count a stack of dollars, paper money would tear when handled so heavily, etc. There are very practical reasons to use chips instead of cash in a casino. Slot machines, which don't have those considerations, can be played with your choice of cash or cards that can have value loaded onto them, as of the last time I checked.
  - ballenf 10y ago
    Very true, but it sure is a lot easier to toss a "chip" tip to your dealer or waitress than cash. Or place a long shot bet that you don't expect to win. And I mean psychologically less painful, not logistically even though it is both. You have the added pain of turning chips back into dollars, so your mind starts to play tricks on you making parting with the chips ever so easier than parting with cash. You discount for the hassle of getting back to cash. In addition you get chips from any and every dealer in the casino. You get cash from one of a couple cashiers placed very inconveniently around the periphery where there are often lines or uncertainty about which windows are open. Just a touch of uncertainty. Virtual game currencies are, amazingly, even worse. It is incredibly painful and difficult to walk away from them since you lose all that fake "value" you've built up or bought.

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ryanmarsh 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

ungzd 10y ago

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.

veddox 10y ago
Yea, I think it passed that mark a long time ago.
mintplant 10y ago
I think this is different, in that what's being sold is community-generated content: custom maps, texture packs, and skins. They're not locking pieces of the actual game behind paywalls.
tyrust 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

driverdan 10y ago

> “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.

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andoon 10y ago

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.

jandrese 10y ago
The Java version is still being maintained, but the pace of development is as slow as it has always been. The great thing about the Java version is the huge modding community that has been built around (specific versions of) it.
C4K3 10y ago
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.

binthere 10y ago

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.

mikelyons 10y ago

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

pyrophane 10y ago

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?

woodrowbarlow 10y ago
i think microsoft points have gone by the wayside for the xbox one; purchases are simply listed in real currencies now. still, i agree: why not integrate with the system payment platform?
khedoros1 10y ago
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.

ilaksh 10y ago

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.

debt 10y ago

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

jfoutz 10y ago
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.

adambratt 10y ago

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

patja 10y ago

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.

lifeformed 10y ago

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.

nkrisc 10y ago

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

SquareWheel 10y ago
You can download any version of the game from Mojang's servers already. The .jars are all listed in the launcher.

jumpkickhit 10y ago

I hope this means a 3rd party will lazily port a VR version for PSVR owners. I'd buy that.

LinuxBender 10y ago

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.

skizm 10y ago

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 10y ago
It already is. Plenty of people make a full time income from building mods for servers.

nottorp 10y ago

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

zitterbewegung 10y ago

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 10y ago
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/

richardboegli 10y ago

Here is Microsoft / Minecraft blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079145