Minecraft Server Tutorials and Helpful Documents

Minecraft EULA. What is it?

Author - Ryan Herman - July 14th 2014

It’s now only a couple of weeks to the enforcement of Mojang’s extremely unpopular Minecraft EULA comes to the server owner community, starting on 1st August 2014. But what does the actually mean?

There are lots of rumours and speculation about how Mojang plans to make servers comply with the new rules and how they will be able to control the community after leaving this current state of affairs, server owners running a Pay-to-Win model, for so long.

Here is what we know:

• Server owners will not be able to charge for ANY part of the game, unless all users on the server (paid or not) have access to it.
• Server owners can charge for things such as hats, particle effects and other cosmetic items. Anything that does not affect the gameplay but just makes you look awesome.
• Server owners can also charge for access to the server. An example of this is paying a monthly fee to be able to login.

The problem lies in what server owners now do to try and make ends meet. This is the main reason for all of the uproar and controversy over this subject, and that a lot of people won’t be making as much money as they used to.

Petitions have been started around the clock since the announcement (and being removed), with the most recent attack on the EULA being launched under the name ‘Operation Blackout’. A collaboration between Minecraft servers in which they will kick all players and leave them with the message “to share this website, sign the petition and tweet to @MojangSupport”.

The main problem isn’t the Minecraft EULA itself, but more that the fund raising for keeping a server alive is now much harder, if not impossible, to achieve. Many people don’t think that simply selling cosmetics will be enough to keep the large scale servers afloat.

Notch, the creator of Minecraft, has stated on numerous occasions that the EULA has always been there but never enforced. As a company Mojang has grown at an insane rate and Notch has stated that only now is there enough time to really focus on the issue.

A quote for Notch’s blog:

“Someone saw that the EULA says you can’t charge for these things, and asked one of the people working at Mojang about it. That person said that yes, it is indeed against the rules, and then everything exploded. A lot of people got the impression that we’re changing the EULA somehow to only now disallow these things, but they were never allowed. A lot of people voiced their concerns. A few people got nasty. Someone said we’re literally worse than EA.”

What does this mean for Minecraft and its Multiplayer communities? No one is really sure, but what we do know is that on August 1st there could be a storm on twitter that will probably least to the same outcome, the EULA being strong as always.

If you yourself are a server owner and want to make money with the EULA, check out our blog posts on the current plugins available to help you.