Minecraft Set to Launch Its Own Currency | Hacker News Reader

Minecraft Set to Launch Its Own Currency

bloomberg.com

170 pointsrayuela151 comments

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.

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.

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

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.

This isn't about servers.

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

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

While that would be great, I don't think it's going to happen. It smells like this is a feature limited to the relatively closed ecosystem of the non-Java version of Minecraft. Is it even possible to create heavily modded servers with the non-Java version. I'd be surprised, but maybe things changed in the recent year. If not, this doesn't help the existing server networks at all.

Do you think it will be an option?

Dealing with payments may be hard, but being a "sharecropper" is terribly risky.

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

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

Source: used to be really involved in the MC community

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).

>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.

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.

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.

Does it ever work though?

First thing I do is do the math on what each individual item I'm interested in costs in dollars based on the price of both the most and least expensive coin pack or whatever.

> First thing I do is do the math

Me too, but I guarantee we're outliers. You probably look at your credit card statements sometimes too :)

They could easily choose to make the exchange rate easy (at least in e.g. USD), or even better, forego the fake currency system entirely and allow transactions in the user's local currency. Instead they erect multiple layers of obfuscation to keep you from thinking about the idea that you're actually spending real money. Something tells me they spend the resources on this system because it results in increased net profits.

I'm not so sure - I think it's more for other reasons, I wouldn't necessarily attribute it to something so complicated when there's a few quite less complicated good reasons I can see for it too - like lowering transaction fees by performing less transactions (if I buy a big pack of tokens, I only make 1 purchase, rather than doing a ton of small transactions which will kill you on fees from many payment gateways) - or easing the burden on customer support to explain why they can't refund a partially spent balance.

When I buy a pack of tokens rather than depositing USD or similar into an account, I'm more likely to spend all of those tokens. I'm also not likely to say "hey, I demand you give me my remaining balance back" after buying a single cheap item. It also makes giving rewards easy and makes sure that money will be spent in the same place.

Some free to play games, World of Tanks for example have larger things that are sold both in gold and in USD - because they make it possible for people to earn gold in game through multiplayer competitions but want it to be easy for someone who just wants premium time to buy it with cash.

> When I buy a pack of tokens rather than depositing USD or similar into an account, I'm more likely to spend all of those tokens.

In my experience, it's exactly the opposite, since packs of points/tokens are not typically divisible by the price of common purchases. For example, you might have the option to buy 500, 1500, or 3000 points; items then cost something like 740 or 800 or 1600 points. To spend your last point/token you almost certainly have to buy more than you originally intended.

Hmm, maybe I'm used to different games, but typically there are some nickel-and-dime type purchases with premium money that you can pretty much extract the full value from one way or another. Clash of Clans has a speed boost, World of Tanks has premium rounds and experience exchange fees, etc.

They're perhaps not the reason you bought the premium currency, but they're worth enough that you'll spend them.

Casino chips are 1:1 and refundable, I'm not sure that works the same way.

I've never been to a casino where I can't use cash to get chips for that hand's stake at any dealer's table. The friction of cashing out has always been low as well by going to the cash-out points by each exit.

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

Couldn't that be said about any business that sell products aimed at children?

Yes, but widespread precedent doesn't make it any less despicable.

Currently, Minecraft servers are already having in-game currencies and are heavily taking advantage of children. I think Microsoft want a piece of the pie, but maybe also they want to regulate the market a bit. Then it becomes less shady for the parents compared to some random server.

100%. This looks like the same idea as my old "favorite" example: the xbox live store, where players were forced to convert from their local currency into "Microsoft Points" before buying anything. Of course, the exchange rate was always something weird and difficult to mentally calculate, like $10 = 830 points or whatever, as a further hurdle to clear in order to find out what something in the xbox live store actually costs in real money. Total scumbaggery.

Right, and the smallest conversion was $5, so more often than not you'd have to spend an extra few dollars.

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.

This is one reason I prefer Foodcoops.

I can't help but see this as an opportunity. In a way, the store is providing for you an environment to reliably reproduce bad behavior in your child.

You could establish some reward (choosing a movie to watch, game to play, a sweet snack, etc). You could then teach a lesson in temperance or read an appropriate child's book. After, you can test the lesson by bringing your child to the store. If he behaves well, then you've succeeded. If not, you remove the previously established reward for a day or two, and then try a different teaching method.

You can also go to the gym three times a week, give 10% of your income to charity, call your mom every weekend, never raise your voice in anger, and never have more than two beers.

On the other hand, to those of us not 24/7 paragons, the goddamn store being deliberately set up to stimulate three year olds to beg for sugar is a pain in the ass.

I think you read too much into that commenter's expectations. Parenting is forgiving enough where only a few minutes of hard, engaging teaching is sufficient to help improve behavior.

Your examples are way harder. Never raise your voice in anger? That's unachievable and absurd for most people. Take ten minutes per week to work with a child to improve unacceptable behavior? It sucks but is pretty realistic.

Ah, I was mostly attempting humour and mildly teasing the parent for advocating such wholesome behaviour. It's pretty obvious to any parent but very hard to do 100% of the time.

Sometimes you have no choice but to drag an already tired kid into the store, in a hurry, with seven things on your mind and after a long day, and the teachable moment may be out of reach. And then the kid-eye-level candy bars are very annoying.

Thanks for the clarification; it went over my head. I definitely run into the same issue; different vices but same response.

While I take your comment with the levity with which it was intended, and I agree with you that the advice is wholesome or idealistic, I disagree with the implication that my advice was anything very hard to do.

You write "It's pretty obvious to any parent but very hard to do 100% of the time" but I don't think my method requires that. It could be more like - "I have some free time today, I'll take my kid to the store to help teach him self-control". That is, you can still be upset with store designers that they arranged their items to cause your kids to frustrate you, and you can still usually leave your kid at home while you go to the store, but you can also sometimes take advantage of the environment that the store has created for you.

Similarly, I was listening to a podcast recently about the moral virtue of becoming a vegetarian due to the various evils caused by factory farming. It's one thing that I've always struggled with, because while I see the moral case, I really like the taste of meat. One point that was made on this podcast was: Eating 10% less meat is about 10% as good as being a vegetarian. And, if you can't force yourself to become a vegetarian, it is better to be 10% of a vegetarian than 0%. Likewise, applying rigorous parenting techniques may be too challenging to do consistently, but applying them 10% of the time may be 10% as good - but better than nothing!

Your original comment seemed to me to leave no room for the non-ideal case, where you have no choice but to take the kid to the store and no one is in shape for a teachable moment. That's hardly the 'opportunity' you invoked. It's more of a pain in the ass.

Of course, reality is more like your most recent paragraph, where we do what we can and every little counts. We don't disagree.

Here's a trick - just say nyet.

After a few times of that, the kid will come to the conclusion that (s)he won't get it and just forget it. It's the same way you train your body in response to certain desires.

I find infuriating that people tells me that I'm lucky to have such a nice kid. Of course they weren't there when the work was done.

In the supermarket I need to bit my tongue when I see a parent doing it all wrong. They are terrified when their children start to throw a tantrum. And of course the children smell the fear and do it every time.

I offer a complicity nod when I see a smarter mother acting as if it's nothing and smiling even when the child is rolling on the floor crying.

Absolutely. In the OP's defense, often parents are pressed for time and can't focus on using these as training moments. It's important to try to have completely unambitious days with children -- where there aren't any scheduled activities to be late for. I feel for parents who are in a perpetual rush and are under too much stress to engage in unpleasant confrontation with their children.

Even without a reward or punishment, simple repeated resistance to the behavior makes a difference. Starting early is easier; a five-year-old is more set in his ways than a 2 or 3-year-old, but there is still plenty of opportunity before friendships take priority over parental influence (around 11 years old).

If these opportunities aren't taken, then the child will grow up with less impulse control and delayed gratification than he would have had otherwise.

I'm not saying he'll be a bad kid, I'm saying it's a lost opportunity, e.g. the difference between being able to concentrate on studies for 30 minutes versus 60 minutes; deciding one doughnut is enough instead of going for the second one; being able to walk away from a confrontation with a loved one instead of attacking with the perfect sarcastic barb.

Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the practice is kind of fucked up on a conceptual level.

5 year olds don't have the prefrontal cortex to cope with this. The reward has to be as close to instant as possible, and "when we get home" is nothing like instant.

Also, this technique is going to work very much better with some children than others.

It's important for kids to respect their parents guidance. It is a PITA to discipline kids, but they are so much better off for it. It's self-reinforcing (in both directions). Kids who get discipline and have heard "no, you cannot have that" before will not pitch a fit when they hear something they don't like.

I hate to be in the position of advocating in favor of a reality TV show, but "Super Nanny" was transformational -- it's got a handful of simple, effective suggestions for parenting.

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.

the fact that the world is set up this way doesn't stop me from not liking it (not OP, also parent). shops and goods are designed to take advantage of both children and parents, sometimes it simply feels wrong.

True, but my parents taught me very early on that this is the case. Same with ads on childrens' TV channels. Did I go through a phase, like most kids, of wanting and begging for stuff at the store? Of course, but they never caved. Depending on the time of year, it was "put on your Christmas/birthday list".

They are doing their child a HUGE disservice!

Kids need to learn they don't get everything they want. I needed to leave behind a shopping cart more than once to carry my child out of the store. But he learned, and is now a beacon of delayed gratification.

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.

Don't they wake up extremely early if they go to bed at 7:15pm? My son already wakes up at 6:30am when bed time is 8:00pm.

I am not looking forward to waking up at 5:45am instead!

They mostly follow the sun these days. Now that they are both older (5+) we tend to flex the schedule +/- 1 hour or so. Read them a story for a few minutes and they have all the skills to put themselves to sleep easily now.

The specific time does not matter so much as the routine and consistency. The trickiest thing to work around is the Sun. My kids tend to do best when the Sun is mostly set. Some of the time they do pop up earlier. But like all things it changes. At my kids age my role in the morning is quite different from what it used to be :)

Mine is just a year old so yeah, it's a different situation. But also in Berlin during summer day time is ~4:30am to 9:30pm and in winter it's extreme in the other direction, so having them follow the sun doesn't work quite as well as it would be in regions closer to the equator!

Ahh, yeah. I live in the south east United States. We change our clocks by an hour in spring and fall. It is the trickiest when the Sun sets later because they tend to want to be up a little later in the day (800-830) now before the Sun doesn't make the house so bright, but it is still fine. We just used heavier drapes when they were younger to trick their mental clocks a little.

Easy to forget the planet isn't the same for everyone else :)

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.

Yeah, I hope this advice didn't seem too totalitarian. We did that all the time and still do. I think it is more of a "most of the time be consistent". And bed time is only one component. The routine is also super important, possibly more important than a specific time, but the timing certainly helps. The routine before bed is like programming to their brain that helps them hit their off switch easily. After a few years they can do it with very little help from an adult. So it is also all about the age where they are going to most easily learn these skills. To me it is worth doing it when they are younger because it is just another invisible life skill that really helps them be happy and whole.

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.

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.

The kid might have some mental problem the parent has no control over. Being unable to pass through supermarket at age of 5 is highly out of norm even if the kid is spoiled.

And that attitude gets you a kid who has missed significant cultural influences, can't share the excitement over it with other kids and who won't be able to share the nostalgia for it with friends of similar age.

Yes, I'm salty that I never was allowed to have a console or watch most popular TV shows because they're too banal/grapic/sexualized/adult. It sucks only being able to experience those things at friends' houses, because you'll be terrible at it if it's games and not know the lore if it's shows, so you still can't really share the experience. It sucks to be an outsider as a kid and I wish my parents had not made me that. Its one of the few things I really regret.

I think parents should set an allowance, rather then a straight no.

kid wants a lolly from the checkout? subtract from the allowance, and make sure the kid knows the remaining. don't restrict what the allowance can be used for, but strictly police the amount per month.

they have to learn from early on, this useful skill of trade off and long term planning. it's never too late to start.

Thats doubly clever, because it makes the child complicit in not getting the candy. "Well, you spent all your money yesterday" is a much better reason than "I've decided you won't have that". Children don't yet have the skills to question the system their choices are embedded inside. (That comes waaaay later - arguably not until your 20s.)

Letting kids waste their allowances is an incredibly useful tactic.

My parents gave me an allowance, then carefully audited every purchase and refused to let me spend it on things they didn't think were good value. Which is 1) a waste of their time 2) frustrating for the kid and 3) utterly defeats the purpose, because I never got to learn restraint or budgeting, and it bit me on the ass when I was in my early 20s.

I...no, that's an issue with parenting, not the store.

The earlier your kids learn about delayed gratification, not always getting what they want, not throwing tantrums, and not paying too much attention to advertising, the better.

You're just saving up bigger problems.

Edit: My parents went through a hippy phase when I and my brother were growing up; we went vegetarian, and we were not allowed refined sugar, caffeine, etc. What treats we did get were all organic, wholewheat, honey sweetened, carob flavored, etc. Quite horrible, honestly.

And while the rules were silly and arbitrary, they were enforced consistently. As a result, neither I or my brother ever threw a tantrum about wanting candy, because we knew it wouldn't do any good. It didn't even occur to us to try; it would be like throwing a tantrum because we wanted to fly.

If your kids sometimes get candy, want more candy, and know they can throw a tantrum and get the candy, they will. They're 5, of course they will. There's a lesson to be taken from that, and it's not "pretend candy doesn't exist half the time".

Thanks for reminding me why I don't want kids ;)

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

I knew someone was gonna beat me to this!

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

You laugh, but...

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

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

Yeah, the title led me to expect a cryptocurrency.

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.

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.

Yea, I think it passed that mark a long time 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.

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

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

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.

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.

The worst thing about video game culture is that idea that only some kind of games count. It is not enough to say "I don't like it", the games one does not find enjoyable are abominations and wrong for just existing.

Anyway, there is no innovation without mistakes. If you want new kind of high quality experience, you need to accept a lot of failures will happen in the process.

Also, Halo: Reach, the last great Halo game.

Limbo is the most canonical example of overhyped Mario reskin. What's good in it? Just stupid gore, halloween-grade "darkness" and use of little boy as protagonist to generate more pity points.

I provided multiple examples of great games from a variety of genres. I included a footnote acknowledging the criticism of Limbo that you would have. I addressed your points about both quality of gaming and what this particular thing means to Minecraft.

All you have to say to me is a boring complaint about Limbo. Have you played through the game? It's a short, well-crafted puzzle-platformer with interesting art, animations, and sound design. It's just fine if you personally didn't like what the game did, but dismissing it as a Mario reskin is ridiculous.

I'm not sure what your point is with bashing on creative indie games. Are all of them amazing? Obviously not. Are there some really bad ones in there? Sure. But I would never even dream of getting rid of em.

The democratization of gamedev tools was the best thing to ever happen to gaming. Yes, it also brought a sea of low hanging games, but at the same time, there is more variety and original ideas as ever.

Sure, those games may not be traditional "solve a puzzle" or "kill all the monsters", but trying to lock video games to such a narrow focus is silly. Video games are a very rich and powerful medium, and we still are discovering brand new genres, tropes and mechanics every year, most of them born out of small experimental games. Minecraft being one of them.

He's saying we hit a wall of originality that Notch broke by creating a new genre of game. It's definitely true.

I played other games that were good as they came, but from about 2010-2014 Minecraft consumed a very huge chunk of my video game time because the gameplay was fresh, original, and there was so much content for what at the time was a $10-15 game license.

Ever since Notch got rich and depressed and couldn't get excited working on Minecraft anymore (it's not his fault and he has every right to move on), things started going downhill. Jeb and the boys kept it up for a while but the game lost its focus and gave way to preferring 'content' updates over much needed bugfixes and gameplay expansion. Then Microsoft came and Notch would have been a fool to turn it down, probably because he knew this trajectory was inevitable and didn't want to watch his baby die a slow death in his arms. It grew too big for him to control anymore.

I think many of us from the original MC community (it has largely been replaced by 2nd and 3rd gen users, a generally much younger demographic) saw this coming after the Microsoft deal. Most of us have already tried moving on to other games because it's just not the same anymore. What was once a pretty tightknit and niche community has been replaced by little kids with credit cards and no concept of "gameplay" or "bugfixes". They just want to play watered down Minecraftified versions of other games and more content. The soul of the game has been lost.

/rant

> I'm not sure what your point is with bashing on creative indie games.

The way I read the comment, he's calling them uncreative.

Both of your claims are wildly exaggerated.

The second one is particularly childish. Philosophical or socially relevant games are not "eating" indie games; there are still hundreds and hundreds of conventional indies coming out. You're basically saying "stop liking what I don't like."

It's possible to make a good game with a message, but it's like politics - the only people who want to do it shouldn't be allowed to. So they tend to come out very lecturing (Braid, text adventures) or be low-effort (that one platformer that just has rectangles that teach you about friendship).

Western AAA studios also seem to get lazy about everything somehow, like Bioware's games where all the romances are carefully diverse and bisexual, but also are just giving someone presents until they suddenly love you.

Japan is doing well with "intellectual AAA" lately (NieR, Persona 2/3/5).

Have you actually played Thomas Was Alone? It's an excellent game in its own right, as is Braid. "Simple graphics = poor game design" is another gaming meme that's pretty toxic.

Played it once, some time ago. I think using rectangles is acceptable, but you could go more places with it, and a platformer is not a very interesting game.

Here's a similar better game from 1989: http://fools-errand.com/04-3T/index.htm

See, I love platformers. You don't like them, and that's fine, but your preferences are not objective truth. It seems like you're doing the same thing as ungzd, just in a more highbrow fashion and with genre instead of subject matter.

Thomas Was Alone is on the same level of expression as tumblr pics of Mona Lisa with cat face. But the difference is that Thomas Was Alone creators are confident that they've created Masterpiece Of Serious Museum-Grade Art. Just by reskinning Lode Runner with filled rectangles.

Interesting that you accuse Braid of lecturing. Beyond the basic plot of the game, any further meaning that Blow might have meant was fairly opaque and not forced on the player in any way (I certainly didn't see any deeper meaning on my own).

Well, there's always Minetest. http://www.minetest.net/

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Not only did you not buy the game or the shopping mall, you bought a ticket to get inside a shopping mall.

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.

> 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.

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.

> “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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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...

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.

+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...

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

At which point MS gets a nice visit from the Feds like Linden Lab did (see wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Policy_Regarding_Wagering_in_Second_Life for the resulting policies).

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.

I'm pretty sure the "currency" will be one-way only. I think they already had something like "credits" in xbox store. The idea is just to make people spend more money, because it is harder to think about the actual price when you are using "minecraft tokens".

Also no refunds on block purchases.

I'm working on something like this if you're interested

Yes, I am. Contact me by going to https://qbix.com/about and please send me an email :)

Mention HN

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). 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

I'd buy that.

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?

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

Here is Microsoft / Minecraft blog post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079145

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Both are OK.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Why are you assuming that we're OK with it? The top 3 or 4 threads here are critical of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com