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Microsoft's Minecraft Set To Launch Its Own Currency (bloomberg.com)
Minecraft's popularity shows no signs of slowing down. Microsoft, which acquired the game's maker, Mojang, in 2014, has recently launched the game in China and continues to market it well in the U.S. The next big step for the game is the introduction of a new marketplace and brand new currency -- within the game itself. What this does is it "[opens] up the opportunity for businesses to sell their original content and creations to tens of millions of the game's players for the first time," writes Nate Lanxon via Bloomberg. From the report: Set to go live in the spring, nine businesses will be selling feature packs within Minecraft -- such as new storylines, in-game activities or landscapes to explore -- with prices ranging between about $1 and $10 per creation. Other companies can apply to be allowed into the marketplace over subsequent months. Users wishing to purchase content will need to buy a form of new currency -- Minecraft Coins. A store within the game does already exist but is limited to only items created by the Minecraft development team. The change to allow third-party developers to sell their wares within the same ecosystem opens up an entirely new business model for independent creatives.
s/Second Life/Minecraft/g
Nothing ruins a game faster than in-game currency & micro transactions.
Fare thee well minecraft... it was fun while it lasted!
Given what mods already give you for free, I fail to see the business model of microtransactions in Minecraft.
And kids into it are very savvy about modding it.
Oh wait, you mean in consoles? yeah, those poor souls have to suck it up.
On the contrary - I'd argue that Minecraft has needed a central repository of content for a long time.
I started on the Minecraft bandwagon as a freshman in college, back when Alpha was just getting started, and have played consistently every year since then (thousands of hours over the last ~8 years). So many people here are arguing that micro-transactions etc. are going to ruin the game by making it expensive / unpleasant / pay to win / etc, but I doubt these people have ever even really played the game. Then just as much as now, the thing that makes Minecraft an amazing game is what creative people have built on top of it - not the base game itself.
There are mapmakers that spend literally years building an immersive dungeon crawler map with 30-40 hours of gameplay, and then just give it away on the forums hoping for donations. A unified way for users people to post up their map on some official Microsoft-owned store and have users find it? A central location where people with no technical skills could click one button, pay $5, and get many hours of extra gameplay content? That would be awesome - and I bet they keep giving it away for free on the forums too.
Have you ever tried to actually install Minecraft mods? They're great - but even with the simplest of mods, eventually you get two together that conflict. Sites like ATLauncher have been adding wrappers around Minecraft for years to provide "modpacks" to users (often with 100+ mods), but there's still no way the average user is going to get it to work. Maybe Microsoft could figure out a way to package (and monetize!) these packs - that would be good for both the players AND the people who created the packs.
Not to mention the number of outright scam websites that use search engine optimization to list their scummy mirror with 100 ads for every legit creative work (map/mod/etc) that people have developed.
Sure, I also worry that Microsoft could turn this into a walled garden and block out people from doing anything *except* through the store. But that would be the real cause for alarm, and I'm not willing to say they've jumped the shark just yet.
Nah. This is only for the Win 10 and Mobile versions (not the original java beastie). Who cares what they do with this?
Meh, my experience is that when these are added it usually means that the game is past its peak. From Google trends Minecraft is now below the halfway point - https://trends.google.ca/trend...
"The next big step for the game is the introduction of a new marketplace and brand new currency -- within the game itself."
And let the scamming begin!
This will attract loads of scumbags who will pollute and game the system in order to steal money and accounts and whatever else they can get. It happens with every other kind of in-game currency and I guarantee that Minecraft will be no exception.
When Microsoft bought Minecraft they might as well have just renamed it "Minecrap".
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
MineTest is crap though -- the dev's don't know what the fuck they are doing half the time. If you follow the issue tracker like I do you quickly see things are _constantly_ being broken, half-assed, and bike shedding.
None of the open source clones that I've seen come close to just working like Minecraft.
Well, The way this ruins games is usually the addition of some sort of currency, followed by a hardcore locking down of the game, heavy DRM, heavy anti-tamper, removal/sanitization of mods, and removal of any kind of community control or modding.
This is because heavy DRM and anti-tamper and a real crackdown on community engagement and modding goes hand-in-hand with selling any kind of thing in-game that the community would have made for free... if you can mod things you could just mod coins in or whatever items / stories are the equivalent of the ones you get from coins. Gotta put a stop to that.
Same kind of thing happened when they had the bright idea of selling people cheat codes in the Assassins Creed games. They realized that hang on, people just have cheat codes on PC anyway, without paying, because its PC. So a large portion of the 'anti-cheat' measures in a mostly single-player game were there to stop you from accessing single player cheats/trainers purely so that they could then sell them to you as DLC.