Some history. This has been going on in Minecraft for more than 10 years. Large servers can pull millions of unique players a month and have >50,000 concurrent

Some history. This has been going on in Minecraft for more than 10 years. Large servers can pull millions of unique players a month and have >50,000 concurrent players. Some even employ competitively paid full time engineers. Even fairly generic servers that are well monetized and supported by a large youtuber can pull the range of 6 figures a year. There's even a solid argument that the earlier predecessors to modern battle royale games were Minecraft Hunger Game servers in as early as 2011. We didn't even get DayZ until mid 2012. Between the ease of the bukkit API, ease to setup a server, and flexibility of the client, there was a lot of rapid prototyping of what essentially were software startups going on back in the earlier days. I'm not sure what the scene looks like today, but it was a blast back then. It's really amazing to see games that can host mods in an accessible way doing well. I wonder how much better Minecraft could have been if they weren't actively hostile to developers.