

Mojang is restricting Pay to Win / Pay for Perks servers to operate as a business or make money by selling game features, perks or cosmetic skins or in-game titles.

If you do not play on these custom servers, you won’t notice any chance but it is a huge setback for those operating Private Minecraft Servers.

One of the guys behind PlayMindcrack.com and creator of Dwarves vs. Zombies shared his feelings about this recent change:

Erik not only wants that part dead, but the part where we gave titles, reserve slots and lobby items. He wants it to be 100% donation base and not allow us to give ANYTHING through the client even if it’s stuff we create. I have no idea how the bigger servers that pay people to answer support tickets, deal with hackers, develop content all as a hobby can exist if Mojang pushes the issue. My bet is they won’t.

Erik ‘Grum’ Broes is a Mojang developer actively involved with the Minecraft community. He is also of the opinion that Youtube isn’t behind Minecraft success and has asked community rather nicely to stop selling game features and stick to donations.

How nicely? Well, you be the judge of that:

Erik Broes: doesn’t matter at all, based on plugins or not, you cannot make money with Minecraft without our permission 🙂

Erik Broes: donations are no problem, but only in that purest sense, you get NOTHING back for a donation

Erik Broes: We’ll ask nicely and then send really mean lawyers 🙂

You can track this discussion at Gist, Reddit or Minecraft PvP.

The popularity of Minecraft is increasing every single day, and that is the main reason behind the success of pay for perks as they help sustain costs of managing Minecraft servers.

The debate is whether the community which creates a lot of plugins, game mods, skins and accessories for Minecraft should be allowed to profit from their creations or not, and if they are restricted, how they should recover costs of running Minecraft servers?

If Mojang restricts it completely, it will disappoint a large portion of the community who has put thousands of development hours managing the game Worlds, creating plugins, mods and swag accessories to sustain the costs of running Minecraft servers.

Mojang is expected to change End-User-License Agreement to prohibit making commercial use of Minecraft or make money from any modified version of the game or plugin without permission from the developer.

Although the developer plans to restrict making money from Minecraft, they seem to favor Pay for Entry or Donations model to help Minecraft Servers recover costs of running them.

We still haven’t received any official statement from Mojang but surprisingly, Notch took it to twitter to answer the concerns or make matters even more ambiguous:

You can charge for hosting servers, but not for gameplay features. — Markus Persson (@notch) June 6, 2014

Don’t forget to share your take on the issue by commenting below!