Can see this panning out like any other thing Notch has gone up against. Lots of tweeting and throwing money at the problem for a week then go on holiday and forget all about it.
> Erik Broes: running servers is NOT A BUSINESS*
Just as much of a business as running a "Let's play" channel mate, but you're not going to attack them are you because they have a bigger voice than you.
Face facts your companies lack of action has made the community stronger than the creators.
I agree with you. But, IANAL so I have no idea if it's legal or enforceable.
Given the "what right does Mojang have?" question, though, the answer is that assuming the EULA for the server code is enforceable, copyright is the right they have.
Which begs the question...does copyright sensibly mean anything when it is being run entirely on a machine owned by somebody else, especially with functionality introduced not by the original authors?
I could buy a trademark infringement argument, perhaps, but copyright doesn't seem to really make sense.
IANAL, but I think if server owner's jurisdiction prevents them from using software without obtaining a license and this jurisdiction allows this exact kind of noncompliance to void the whole license (which is not always the case) - probably yes, it has a meaning.
Obviously, it only matters if someone notices the noncompliance and lack of the license. For example if Mojang actually sues.
And to them I say "good luck with that" in the most sarcastic tone I can muster. There are tens of thousands of private servers out there - the effort they play at expending on shutting down the despicable and horrible and bad and terrible practice of paid perks could be better redirected at further developing their games.
This is the kind of priority fail I'd expect from EA or some other massive publisher, not an indie rockstar like Mojang.
You see, the discussion - as I get it - was about very status of the copyright law - i.e. whenever there's a legal basis for a lawsuit or Mojang threats are void. It wasn't about server operators who don't give a damn about that - sure there are some.
Looks like it hinges on a clause in the EULA, so their right to do this probably depends on the legal status of EULAs in your jurisdiction (they're not enforcible everywhere).
Ignoring the legal aspect, this strikes me as a dick move. I'm certainly not interested in pay-to-win minecraft servers, but if people want to use them with their purchased copies of the game, they should be able to.
The issue is you're paying money to a third party for mojang's work, more precisely something which you have already paid for by purchasing the game. If you ignore the game itself and look at it from a purely technical view, what people are essentially doing is running code on their own servers (Which is allowed) but then charging people for bits of the code written by mojang (Which is not allowed).
For most private servers you see, they will have a list of "donation" amounts and a "reward" for each, however this is quite clearly a sale since you are exchanging a commodity for money. To be classed as a donation, you would need to donate money without the requirement of something in return.
I think Mojang are clearly right here, but not to the advantage of the minecraft community.
What's wrong with charging to expose functionality on a server you own, just because that functionality involves code written by somebody else?
For example, let's say I run Mac OS X server on a computer somewhere and charge for user accounts on it. I'm charging people for the bits of code written by Apple, right? But surely this is completely reasonable of me, and Apple has no place to tell me that I can't charge money for this.
Taking it further, maybe I allow free accounts which only have access to a few shell commands, and then you can pay more to unlock other commands. Again, I see nothing wrong with that, even though I didn't make those other commands.
The players did pay mojang already to have access to everything, it's not like someone is required to play on a private server. I don't see how it's an issue if the players are choosing to pay a server operator for offering a specific service
> ...paying money to a third party for mojang's work
Is this really the case though? Aren't these people paying for a specific economy type created in game? they could go play any number of free servers or run their own, but they choose to play a P2W server. The server ops are really charging money for the service of the in game economy being micromanaged.
> you're paying money to a third party for mojang's work
Most servers are run using Bukkit [1] which is licensed under GPL [2]. The client and the protocols are Mojang's but the server's code is free to modify without such restrictions.
10 years ago ISPs, and internet-cafés in Denmark had reserved slots for paying members on their counterstrike-servers. I guess such a system would also be disallowed under the Mojang license.
One of my friend also hosted a Minecraft-server where you would get access to a /teleport-command if you supported the servers. I guess that would also violate the Mojang license.
What about Youtube-streamers? I guess they are using Mojang code to monetize as well.
I guess so, yeah, the EULA is pretty clear about it. I think the article hints at Mojang being upset at server hosters locking features that are in the game itself though, like certain ranges of tools or items, in exchange for money.
In the US there have been cases where EULAs have been upheld, not sure about outside. There is a lot of misinformation on the internet about whether they're valid, whether you have to explicitly accept them and so on. I think in a lot of cases it depends on how much money the prosecutors have - in most cases it's more than you.
I believe they're invalid if the terms are confusing to the lay-user, i.e. if there is so much legalese that nobody actually understands what they're signing up for. Or if it makes ridiculous claims like "Buy buying the product you forfeit your soul".
El Reg reckons it's not worth testing it, for the lawyer-money problem. There haven't been enough lawsuits outside the US to really say one way or the other.
"Even if the license terms were agreed when buying, their effectiveness can be restricted. Then they are general business terms and their content is governed by the content control of the Civil Law Code.".
Thus many of terms in EULAs are not valid under German law - the terms that are allowed are rather restricted (and thus lots of Germans will not understand the fealty that US citizens seem to have to EULAs).
They are not considered a contract under law, as they are only available after buying the product, so the consumer cannot know before hand what s/he getting into.
Mojang seem to be forgetting that it costs money to operate a server, and a "freemium" model is a completely viable and legitimate way to fund that operation (other ways such as accepting donations and paid-players only exist).
Some may say you are in essence paying a third party for Mojang's work, when in fact you have already done so by purchasing the game in the first place. What position do Mojang feel they are in to dictate how people play the game?
Ultimately it comes down to what players want, players are not afraid to vote with their feet and abandon servers which operate in this way; as of yet there seems to be no widespread trend in abandoning these servers.
As an aside, I believe this is more likely a push by Mojang to shut down paid servers and move people onto their Minecraft Realms product which does exactly this.
The problem is a lot of server admins claim it costs $1000-2000+ a month to run a unmodded minecraft server (with ~100 players). And a lot of players simply accept that as true.
To be fair, it would take a very beefy server to run the vanilla server with 100 players. When dealing with a high volume of players, using mods like spigot is essential.
Depends on your country but I was involved in the running of a Minecraft server a couple of years ago with about ~100 simultaneous players and our server costs were about £400 ($650?) a month in a UK datacentre; so $1000/month wouldn't be impossible.
We could have saved some money by using a cheaper European provider (iirc OVH had a similar spec'd server for £200), but we were all based in the UK so the low latency was a major benefit. The UK server provider market really needs some disruption.
Yup. Both vanilla minecraft and bukkit are terrible at multithreading. Bukkit's plugin API doesn't use locks (iirc), so having the plugins be able to run in a safe multithreaded fashion is a clusterfuck. It's possible to do that, it's just a lot of tedious work, rewriting essential parts of the code, etc.
Mojang ain't helpin' here. If you run a server and have lots of players on, or whatever, you'll see all but one of your server's cores idling by. 'tis sad.
..so lots of things will be cpu-frequency-bound. Memory consumption is another thing, but if you have lots of memory and SSD, your server will be able to do things. Still though, I believe the way everything is written, it's a very uneconomic use of hardware resources.
Instead of focusing on core code and overall quality and performance improvements, Mojang just keeps shitting out new game features. I see their rationale (short term $, etc.), but when they then go about talking about how they don't like large expensive server operators taking money, it kind of puts me into an angry mood.
Larger, when you start to get into 100-200+ concurrent players I can start to understand but when you have about 100 total users its around 3/4 to half that cost.
give copies of our Game to anyone else;
make commercial use of anything we‘ve made;
try to make money from anything we‘ve made; or
let other people get access to anything we‘ve made in a way that is unfair or unreasonable."
That's a conspiracy theory that doesn't hold water. Preventing servers from selling items does not encourage people to use Minecraft Realms, Realms serves a completely different player base. Realms are limited in capacity and limited in ability, the servers that operate as successful businesses selling items (that will be affected by this change) have up to 10,000 players online at any one time running hundreds of plugins, the maximum players a Realm can have is 10 and they do not support any plugins. They're not comparable services.
From my position (I manage a third-party Minecraft website) I completely believe that Mojang are starting to take their EULA seriously in an effort to protect their customers, I don't know if it's the right decision or not but I don't believe they're trying to be anti-competitive.
> Preventing servers from selling items does not encourage people to use Minecraft Realms
If it eliminates revenue streams from their competitors, what do you think is going to happen? I have to imagine that Mojang will offer more robust features in the future, so they might not be comparable now, but in the future it will be closer. Maybe they will offer "add a plugin" option to their service. They could offer cash to plugin providers if their plugins get used. (ala the Apple Store)
> I completely believe that Mojang are starting to take their EULA seriously in an effort to protect their customers
I generally agree with this assessment but I don't see "protecting their customers/improving the overall Minecraft environment" and providing a better experience than third party vendors sa mutually exclusive. In fact, they are likely closely aligned up to a point.
The problem with this is that now Mojang is paying the developers, where as before (as it is now), the players who got enjoyment out of it are paying the developers of those plugins.
Seems like doing it that way would just take more cash out of Mojang's coffers.
They're not just threatening servers which selling items, but ones which provide any kind of in-game benefit in exchange for money. From what I can tell essentially all public and semi-public Minecraft servers rely on this in order to afford their running costs. The only viable kind of server with Mojang's new rules is small ones run by individuals for their friends - exactly the market Minecraft Realms is aimed at.
> From my position (I manage a third-party Minecraft website) I completely believe that Mojang are starting to take their EULA seriously in an effort to protect their customers…
How in God's name does removing incentives for server owners to provide me with service protect me from anything?
I play modded Minecraft; the vanilla game isn't even interesting to me anymore. It takes quite a lot of work to get all those mods to play well together; it takes even more work to get them to play well together with the server-side mods which make playing on a large server fun.
Removing the ability for server owners to make money from the game removes those servers from existence, which destroys my ability to have fun with the game I paid for.
Once I stop playing, I stop suggesting Minecraft to other people, and they stop buying it, and Mojang stops making money.
A significant number of Minecraft players do not understand that servers are not ran by Mojang, they don't understand that the servers they're playing on are ran by independent third parties (often individuals with no business registration) so when they're asked to spend $10, $20, $100 by a server they believe they're spending money on the game itself (much like buying something on the xbox market place), they believe they're paying to play Minecraft and that because Minecraft is a big popular game that they have all of the consumer protections that come with purchasing from a legitimate company... They don't have any consumer protections though, they're 10 year old kids paying other kids $10 for a chest of diamonds and when that 10 year old gets banned it's Mojang who deal with the fallout.
As I said I don't know if it's the right decision but I do believe that this is a move to protect their customers and that it isn't a conspiracy to sell more Realms. My experience managing a third-party website backs this up because I deal with tickets from parents regarding server purchases, just as Mojang have said they do.
What a load of nonsense. Realms is aimed at young children and parents who don't want a complicated server setup. The large servers being targeted here are an entirely different market.
Conversation with a job applicant that I had a while back:
"I run this minecraft server. I've modded it so that if someone kills you, you are banned for a week. But, you can unban yourself at any time for $5. This pays my rent."
"So, people come to your server specifically because it adds a heavy penalty that does not exist in the standard game and then they pay you to remove that penalty?"
"Yes."
It sounds ridiculous, but it makes sense for a subset of hardcore players. They want PvP. But, ganking you just isn't satisfying if you just respawn next to me a second later. However, if I know that over on the other end of the internet you are genuinely pissed that I ganked you --that's satisfying! Similarly, if I know that getting whacked has real consequences, it makes the game much more exciting and intense.
That's fascinating. A friend of mine ran a server a bit like this, for his friends, although there was no pay-to-unban. We enjoyed the extra challenge, but it eventually died out because people got banned too often.
These are called hardcore survival servers. They are basically what made me attracted to the idea of playing minecraft multiplayer, actually.
I remember seeing a picture of someone discovering a random build in the middle of a forest (in a large map) on /r/minecraft. Apparently people still do builds on these kinds of servers! Even if that's usually dangerous! And how interesting it is to find such a build.. or bump into someone, and do a bit of game theory ("should we try to kill each other, or should we trade?") (the latter is not that usual, granted!)
(Normally, you start by running away from the spawn point (which is a safe zone), to find food (nearby food sources are usually nonexistent), and make a small shelter. You then move on to building an underground base (e.g. under an ocean floor), building up armour, maybe going back to spawn eventually.. Or maybe you stack up resources, and just roam around the lands, or go out with some friendly people to found a city. There are spawn-campers who try to kill noobs, and then sometimes there are people who try to hunt down the noob-killers. Sometimes there are also people who plant seeds around the spawn to help out... etc.)
I think this was brought about by a recent conflict that occurred (and gained some attention on reddit at least) on twitter. Mojang has been well aware of servers that "sell" in-game items and in-game features (the ability to teleport or fly, for instance) for a fee. This is against Mojang's TOS, and Mojang has taken down several servers in the past for various TOS violations including this pay-to-win stuff. During the recent twitter bout, a Mojang representative stated there was a distinction between a server accepting donation, and a server rewarding donations/selling ingame benefits. A server accepting donations in order to continue running is A-OK, but a server selling benefits violates the TOS.
This recent activity from Mojang to reclarify their TOS and actively tackle violations was likely a result of last week's twitter bout.
It'd be interesting to see what an HN server would look like.
I'm glad Mojang is protecting their (often very young) userbase. Perhaps they also need a "Minecraft for non-players" faq that they can point paying adults to.
54 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread> Erik Broes: running servers is NOT A BUSINESS*
Just as much of a business as running a "Let's play" channel mate, but you're not going to attack them are you because they have a bigger voice than you.
Face facts your companies lack of action has made the community stronger than the creators.
However, what right does Mojang have to dictate this?
Given the "what right does Mojang have?" question, though, the answer is that assuming the EULA for the server code is enforceable, copyright is the right they have.
I could buy a trademark infringement argument, perhaps, but copyright doesn't seem to really make sense.
Obviously, it only matters if someone notices the noncompliance and lack of the license. For example if Mojang actually sues.
This is the kind of priority fail I'd expect from EA or some other massive publisher, not an indie rockstar like Mojang.
Ignoring the legal aspect, this strikes me as a dick move. I'm certainly not interested in pay-to-win minecraft servers, but if people want to use them with their purchased copies of the game, they should be able to.
If they were hosting the servers, sure. But on a private server?
For most private servers you see, they will have a list of "donation" amounts and a "reward" for each, however this is quite clearly a sale since you are exchanging a commodity for money. To be classed as a donation, you would need to donate money without the requirement of something in return.
I think Mojang are clearly right here, but not to the advantage of the minecraft community.
For example, let's say I run Mac OS X server on a computer somewhere and charge for user accounts on it. I'm charging people for the bits of code written by Apple, right? But surely this is completely reasonable of me, and Apple has no place to tell me that I can't charge money for this.
Taking it further, maybe I allow free accounts which only have access to a few shell commands, and then you can pay more to unlock other commands. Again, I see nothing wrong with that, even though I didn't make those other commands.
Is this really the case though? Aren't these people paying for a specific economy type created in game? they could go play any number of free servers or run their own, but they choose to play a P2W server. The server ops are really charging money for the service of the in game economy being micromanaged.
Most servers are run using Bukkit [1] which is licensed under GPL [2]. The client and the protocols are Mojang's but the server's code is free to modify without such restrictions.
[1] http://bukkit.org/ [2] https://github.com/Bukkit/Bukkit/blob/master/LICENCE.txt
One of my friend also hosted a Minecraft-server where you would get access to a /teleport-command if you supported the servers. I guess that would also violate the Mojang license.
What about Youtube-streamers? I guess they are using Mojang code to monetize as well.
In the US there have been cases where EULAs have been upheld, not sure about outside. There is a lot of misinformation on the internet about whether they're valid, whether you have to explicitly accept them and so on. I think in a lot of cases it depends on how much money the prosecutors have - in most cases it's more than you.
I believe they're invalid if the terms are confusing to the lay-user, i.e. if there is so much legalese that nobody actually understands what they're signing up for. Or if it makes ridiculous claims like "Buy buying the product you forfeit your soul".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/25/microsoft_eula/
El Reg reckons it's not worth testing it, for the lawyer-money problem. There haven't been enough lawsuits outside the US to really say one way or the other.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-03-eu-rules-publis...
In case you can read German,
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endbenutzer-Lizenzvertrag
in Germany, a EULA is only valid if the consumer is able to fully read it before paying for the respective product.
"Even if the license terms were agreed when buying, their effectiveness can be restricted. Then they are general business terms and their content is governed by the content control of the Civil Law Code.".
Thus many of terms in EULAs are not valid under German law - the terms that are allowed are rather restricted (and thus lots of Germans will not understand the fealty that US citizens seem to have to EULAs).
Some may say you are in essence paying a third party for Mojang's work, when in fact you have already done so by purchasing the game in the first place. What position do Mojang feel they are in to dictate how people play the game?
Ultimately it comes down to what players want, players are not afraid to vote with their feet and abandon servers which operate in this way; as of yet there seems to be no widespread trend in abandoning these servers.
As an aside, I believe this is more likely a push by Mojang to shut down paid servers and move people onto their Minecraft Realms product which does exactly this.
We could have saved some money by using a cheaper European provider (iirc OVH had a similar spec'd server for £200), but we were all based in the UK so the low latency was a major benefit. The UK server provider market really needs some disruption.
Mojang ain't helpin' here. If you run a server and have lots of players on, or whatever, you'll see all but one of your server's cores idling by. 'tis sad.
..so lots of things will be cpu-frequency-bound. Memory consumption is another thing, but if you have lots of memory and SSD, your server will be able to do things. Still though, I believe the way everything is written, it's a very uneconomic use of hardware resources.
Instead of focusing on core code and overall quality and performance improvements, Mojang just keeps shitting out new game features. I see their rationale (short term $, etc.), but when they then go about talking about how they don't like large expensive server operators taking money, it kind of puts me into an angry mood.
https://account.mojang.com/documents/minecraft_eula
"you must not:
Optimistically, they are trying to bring uniformity and clean up some of the more toxic servers that are out there.
https://minecraft.net/realms
($1.5/mo)
From my position (I manage a third-party Minecraft website) I completely believe that Mojang are starting to take their EULA seriously in an effort to protect their customers, I don't know if it's the right decision or not but I don't believe they're trying to be anti-competitive.
If it eliminates revenue streams from their competitors, what do you think is going to happen? I have to imagine that Mojang will offer more robust features in the future, so they might not be comparable now, but in the future it will be closer. Maybe they will offer "add a plugin" option to their service. They could offer cash to plugin providers if their plugins get used. (ala the Apple Store)
> I completely believe that Mojang are starting to take their EULA seriously in an effort to protect their customers
I generally agree with this assessment but I don't see "protecting their customers/improving the overall Minecraft environment" and providing a better experience than third party vendors sa mutually exclusive. In fact, they are likely closely aligned up to a point.
Seems like doing it that way would just take more cash out of Mojang's coffers.
Normally I wouldn't reply, but you have a history of trying to skew the truth in your favor.
How in God's name does removing incentives for server owners to provide me with service protect me from anything?
I play modded Minecraft; the vanilla game isn't even interesting to me anymore. It takes quite a lot of work to get all those mods to play well together; it takes even more work to get them to play well together with the server-side mods which make playing on a large server fun.
Removing the ability for server owners to make money from the game removes those servers from existence, which destroys my ability to have fun with the game I paid for.
Once I stop playing, I stop suggesting Minecraft to other people, and they stop buying it, and Mojang stops making money.
How is this good for anyone?
A significant number of Minecraft players do not understand that servers are not ran by Mojang, they don't understand that the servers they're playing on are ran by independent third parties (often individuals with no business registration) so when they're asked to spend $10, $20, $100 by a server they believe they're spending money on the game itself (much like buying something on the xbox market place), they believe they're paying to play Minecraft and that because Minecraft is a big popular game that they have all of the consumer protections that come with purchasing from a legitimate company... They don't have any consumer protections though, they're 10 year old kids paying other kids $10 for a chest of diamonds and when that 10 year old gets banned it's Mojang who deal with the fallout.
As I said I don't know if it's the right decision but I do believe that this is a move to protect their customers and that it isn't a conspiracy to sell more Realms. My experience managing a third-party website backs this up because I deal with tickets from parents regarding server purchases, just as Mojang have said they do.
"I run this minecraft server. I've modded it so that if someone kills you, you are banned for a week. But, you can unban yourself at any time for $5. This pays my rent."
"So, people come to your server specifically because it adds a heavy penalty that does not exist in the standard game and then they pay you to remove that penalty?"
"Yes."
It sounds ridiculous, but it makes sense for a subset of hardcore players. They want PvP. But, ganking you just isn't satisfying if you just respawn next to me a second later. However, if I know that over on the other end of the internet you are genuinely pissed that I ganked you --that's satisfying! Similarly, if I know that getting whacked has real consequences, it makes the game much more exciting and intense.
I remember seeing a picture of someone discovering a random build in the middle of a forest (in a large map) on /r/minecraft. Apparently people still do builds on these kinds of servers! Even if that's usually dangerous! And how interesting it is to find such a build.. or bump into someone, and do a bit of game theory ("should we try to kill each other, or should we trade?") (the latter is not that usual, granted!)
(Normally, you start by running away from the spawn point (which is a safe zone), to find food (nearby food sources are usually nonexistent), and make a small shelter. You then move on to building an underground base (e.g. under an ocean floor), building up armour, maybe going back to spawn eventually.. Or maybe you stack up resources, and just roam around the lands, or go out with some friendly people to found a city. There are spawn-campers who try to kill noobs, and then sometimes there are people who try to hunt down the noob-killers. Sometimes there are also people who plant seeds around the spawn to help out... etc.)
This recent activity from Mojang to reclarify their TOS and actively tackle violations was likely a result of last week's twitter bout.
However, as far as I'm aware, the actual code is not available. If and when it is available, it won't be under a free license.
If you have no Mojang code, media assets nor use the Minecraft name anywhere, on what grounds would they try to shut you down?
I'm glad Mojang is protecting their (often very young) userbase. Perhaps they also need a "Minecraft for non-players" faq that they can point paying adults to.