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Hosting game servers is hard, expensive work. Hosting Minecraft servers is even tougher since the hardware requirements are pretty steep and the main userbase d

Hosting game servers is hard, expensive work. Hosting Minecraft servers is even tougher since the hardware requirements are pretty steep and the main userbase doesn't have much money to kick into the pot. 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.

espadrine 12y ago
> inability to find buyers for the ad slots given the perceived demographic 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?
- JoachimSchipper 12y ago
  I'd imagine that you're selecting for gamers (often young people with little money) playing a nearly-free game (further selecting for "little money") that they usually keep playing for a long time (so even if they had money, they're not looking to spend it).
- ableal 12y ago
  We're talking ten year old children, in my experience. I'm slightly amazed at how much they love playing Minecraft. 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.
  - Anderkent 12y ago
    From what I remember, children are great advertisement targets - they're going to whine at their parents until they get what they want.
    - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
      But what they want is minecraft. 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.
    - watwut 12y ago
      Isnt advertisement for kids highly regulated in many countries?
- davidbanham 12y ago
  The perception amongst the buyers we spoke to was that Minecraft was for 9 to 13 year old kids. The only people they were familiar with interacting with the title were their own children and their friends. 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.
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    A lot of older folks I imagine would just setup their own server and port forwarding. There's a million guides out there for that.
- ja27 12y ago
  What I can't understand is how there is so much money in YouTube views for the same demographic. Who is buying ads on Tobuscus, Captain Sparklez, etc. for a primarily 8-12 year old male audience? I guess I could just watch some and see, if I could stand it.
  - tehwebguy 12y ago
    I get that you don't enjoy their content, but it seems like you are missing the point on purpose just to shit on those creators. 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.
gearhart 12y ago
I used to work for a mod for Battlefield (PoE) - we had a few tens of thousands of regular players and a few hundred servers running it at the peak. There was no money in PoE at all, the whole thing was built by volunteers and all the servers were run by the community - groups of people who just wanted to support the game. 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.
Negitivefrags 12y ago
Is it really unsolved? 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.
- asdfaoeu 12y ago
  I imagine minecraft hosting is a lot more expensive. The server has to keep substantially more state as well as deal with users potentially consuming a lot of CPU server side resources (why most servers ban things like TNT and fire). There are all also a ton of mods that users may want. I imagine your 3c/mo game doesn't have the same amount of interactivity involved. 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.
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    Sounds like a terrible business to get into. Which begs the question: are you doing this for money, or are you doing this because you find it fun? 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)
rmrfrmrf 12y ago
Shouldn't that be a massive indicator to get out of that business, then? I play Minecraft with my younger siblings and have the Minecraft server loaded onto a personal server that also streams media to our PS3. In another situation, my alma mater offers free shell access to every student, so there were quite a few people who had Minecraft servers going. These smaller, ad hoc servers are better for Minecraft since they're used by people who know each other and don't need to be policed for griefers. 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.
- VLM 12y ago
  "have the Minecraft server loaded onto a personal server" 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.
jiggy2011 12y ago
Back in the early 2000s there were companies who offered server for quake3 / Counterstrike but these were usually rented to clans who wanted a private low latency server for practise or competition to play against other clans. 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.
alkonaut 12y ago
In what way is it unsolved? For what type of games? In my experience, for any games that allow you to easily run your own server for you and your friends (e.g. Counter Strike), finding servers is no problem.
- wldcordeiro 12y ago
  I ran a Counter Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2 gaming community for years and neither of the two were extremely challenging or expensive to maintain in the technical sense. The hardest part was keeping the servers populated and dealing with internal drama that occurred amongst clan members.
nl 12y ago
I sometimes wonder if Minefold was too early too market. The market is much bigger now, and there are plenty of kids who's parents would pay a coffee per month for a server for their kids and their friends. 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.
ableal 12y ago
> 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. 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 ...
jason_slack 12y ago
Although slightly weird to say, I am hosting a Minecraft server for my son and his friends to play on (14-16 year olds). It is a fast machine with 32gb of RAM, enterprise drives and it holds up great with 10 people on it. They are using over 400gb a month. 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.
59nadir 12y ago
> This remains a massive unsolved problem in the gaming industry. 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.

espadrine 12y ago

> inability to find buyers for the ad slots given the perceived demographic 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?

JoachimSchipper 12y ago
I'd imagine that you're selecting for gamers (often young people with little money) playing a nearly-free game (further selecting for "little money") that they usually keep playing for a long time (so even if they had money, they're not looking to spend it).
ableal 12y ago
We're talking ten year old children, in my experience. I'm slightly amazed at how much they love playing Minecraft. 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.
- Anderkent 12y ago
  From what I remember, children are great advertisement targets - they're going to whine at their parents until they get what they want.
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    But what they want is minecraft. 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.
  - watwut 12y ago
    Isnt advertisement for kids highly regulated in many countries?
davidbanham 12y ago
The perception amongst the buyers we spoke to was that Minecraft was for 9 to 13 year old kids. The only people they were familiar with interacting with the title were their own children and their friends. 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.
- bitJericho 12y ago
  A lot of older folks I imagine would just setup their own server and port forwarding. There's a million guides out there for that.
ja27 12y ago
What I can't understand is how there is so much money in YouTube views for the same demographic. Who is buying ads on Tobuscus, Captain Sparklez, etc. for a primarily 8-12 year old male audience? I guess I could just watch some and see, if I could stand it.
- tehwebguy 12y ago
  I get that you don't enjoy their content, but it seems like you are missing the point on purpose just to shit on those creators. 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.

gearhart 12y ago

I used to work for a mod for Battlefield (PoE) - we had a few tens of thousands of regular players and a few hundred servers running it at the peak. There was no money in PoE at all, the whole thing was built by volunteers and all the servers were run by the community - groups of people who just wanted to support the game. 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.

Negitivefrags 12y ago

Is it really unsolved? 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.

asdfaoeu 12y ago
I imagine minecraft hosting is a lot more expensive. The server has to keep substantially more state as well as deal with users potentially consuming a lot of CPU server side resources (why most servers ban things like TNT and fire). There are all also a ton of mods that users may want. I imagine your 3c/mo game doesn't have the same amount of interactivity involved. 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.
- dragontamer 12y ago
  Sounds like a terrible business to get into. Which begs the question: are you doing this for money, or are you doing this because you find it fun? 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)

rmrfrmrf 12y ago

Shouldn't that be a massive indicator to get out of that business, then? I play Minecraft with my younger siblings and have the Minecraft server loaded onto a personal server that also streams media to our PS3. In another situation, my alma mater offers free shell access to every student, so there were quite a few people who had Minecraft servers going. These smaller, ad hoc servers are better for Minecraft since they're used by people who know each other and don't need to be policed for griefers. 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.

VLM 12y ago
"have the Minecraft server loaded onto a personal server" 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.

jiggy2011 12y ago

Back in the early 2000s there were companies who offered server for quake3 / Counterstrike but these were usually rented to clans who wanted a private low latency server for practise or competition to play against other clans. 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.

alkonaut 12y ago

In what way is it unsolved? For what type of games? In my experience, for any games that allow you to easily run your own server for you and your friends (e.g. Counter Strike), finding servers is no problem.

wldcordeiro 12y ago
I ran a Counter Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2 gaming community for years and neither of the two were extremely challenging or expensive to maintain in the technical sense. The hardest part was keeping the servers populated and dealing with internal drama that occurred amongst clan members.

nl 12y ago

I sometimes wonder if Minefold was too early too market. The market is much bigger now, and there are plenty of kids who's parents would pay a coffee per month for a server for their kids and their friends. 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.

ableal 12y ago

> 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. 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 ...

jason_slack 12y ago

Although slightly weird to say, I am hosting a Minecraft server for my son and his friends to play on (14-16 year olds). It is a fast machine with 32gb of RAM, enterprise drives and it holds up great with 10 people on it. They are using over 400gb a month. 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.

59nadir 12y ago

> This remains a massive unsolved problem in the gaming industry. 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.