Mojang to introduce paid, private Minecraft server hosting
By Tim Colwill on March 14, 2013 at 1:20 pm
Approximately one hojillion children (and just as many adults) are playing Minecraft at any given second, and it’s those Minecraft-playing families that Mojang is targeting with a new, paid Minecraft server-hosting service they will soon be offering.
Known as Minecraft Realms, the service is expected to cost between $10 – $15 a month and offer a simple, private server where players have full control over who has access, with only one person per world actually required to have a Realms account. Other players only need a copy of Minecraft and an internet connection as normal.
“In the end I think this will get Minecraft new players, since there is a viral aspect of Realms,” said Mojang CEO Carl Manneh to GamesIndustry International. “Kids will probably invite friends who don’t have Minecraft yet to play with them.”
“But since we have about 10 million paying PC gamers and, soon, as many mobile gamers, there’s definitely potential. And yes, if we look ahead, I do think [Realms will] be the biggest source of income in the future, and to bring in more money in total than the game itself.”
A beta launch of the service is tentatively planned for May.
Source: GamesIndustry International
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Very clever idea I have to say, should bring in a nice stream of revenue plus the ability for people to group up and pay pittance for their servers.
Would be a lot cooler to sell one-off server packages to allow people to host their own private servers.
I.e. not trying to suck people into a subscription model.
caitsith01,
Are you serious? Show me where else on the net game server hosting comes at a one time fee.
I doubt that would be very financially viable due to running and maintenance costs. Not that they haven’t already made a kajillion dollars from the game…
Hope they’ll allow server mod support, but it doesn’t sound like it. Should be interesting to see though
That would be rather expensive…
Could’ve done with this last year. :P My friend wanted a private server and had to go with people called GameTacos or TacoNation or something, the server was unreliable at best.
Can’t you run your own server anyway? Just run like… minecraftserver.exe or whatever, modify those .ini files or whatever and leave your computer running.
tacitus42,
Sure, but there is a huge number of youngin’s playing this who likely have parents that have no idea how to do that stuff, and the ability for them just to have that option of a small cheap rental server would probably work well for them
tacitus42,
mearehear,
And the bandwidth for running minecraft is absurd (worst netcode ive ever seen in a game, figures from a dev in a country that has T1 net)
While you could host your own server, its usually not playable with more than 2-4 people on residential net, so a high-bandwidth external server is much more desirable
Part of me thinks that they should have done that from the start, they should have had online only be on Mojang hosted servers. The same goes for DayZ, it could have been a dramatically bigger money spinner and the server quality could have been higher if they did it all in house/contracted.
Of course the downside would probably be slower growth.