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[neshcom]

Today, the Mojang blog updated with a new post, "Let's talk about promotions built into Minecraft."

We’re adding a new section to our Commercial Usage Guidelines. It relates to promotions within Minecraft, and will mostly affect advertising agencies and corporations.

Considering it’s such a hot topic right now, it’s worth mentioning that these changes won’t affect the usual server and video monetisation. This is a completely unrelated thing.

Anyway, back on topic: the number of Minecraft players has grown massively over the past few years. In fact, it’s now so big that Minecraft has become a viable place for companies to advertise unrelated products or for organizations to promote their causes.

We want to empower our community to make money from their creativity, but we’re not happy when the selling of an unrelated product becomes the purpose of a Minecraft mod or server.

That doesn’t feel right, or more importantly, fun. The new rules are an attempt to stop these things from happening. You can read the new rules in the section of the Guidelines called Building Promotions with Minecraft, but here’s a quick breakdown for convenience.

Here are the actual guideline changes, since the examples in their post don't seem to cover all the modifications:

BUILDING PROMOTIONS WITH MINECRAFT

Corporations, businesses, advertising agencies, non-profits, governments, and other entities MAY NOT use Minecraft gameplay to promote or market unrelated brands, products, campaigns, or services.

Specifically, if you are one of these entities or someone who is hired by them, you MAY NOT exploit Minecraft or Minecraft assets to:

• build or commission others to build, a Minecraft mod, map or server that promotes or markets unrelated products or services in playable form; for example, you are NOT allowed to market or promote a branded automobile using a mod that depicts branded automobiles within Minecraft game play;
• build or commission others to build, a Minecraft mod/map/server that promotes or markets a company’s movie or TV show; for example, you are NOT allowed to build maps and/or videos using Minecraft blocks that build out the world or characters of a movie to promote and market your company’s or your client’s movie or TV program;
• offer Minecraft gameplay displayed or projected publicly within physical locations; for example, you are NOT allowed to promote or advertise big-screen Minecraft gameplay inside restaurants or other commercial venues; and you are NOT allowed to charge money for Minecraft gameplay, leagues, or competitions in theaters where gameplay is projected onto the movie screen;
• create or commission others to create promotional or marketing videos or movie trailers through Minecraft gameplay; for example, you are NOT allowed to create or produce movie trailers through Minecraft gameplay for promoting or marketing a movie;
• to promote your (or your client’s) corporate brands, products, or services.

However YOU MAY:

• Pay to advertise your business in an advertisement window within a Minecraft video; for example, by displaying a banner ad or by selling your ads on YouTube where they may be shown in connection with Minecraft videos uploaded independently by players;
• Pay for advertisements of your business to be served on websites or servers related to Minecraft, so long as you are not hiring the server operator to design or host a Minecraft mod/map/server that builds an in-world representation of your brand, products, or services.
• Build products or movie environments that you are a fan of into a Minecraft mod/map/server so long as you have not been asked to do so by the entity who makes the product or by someone they have hired to promote their brand or products; likewise, you can express your support for a political candidate in a map/mod/server, but not if you have been hired to promote them.

Many of my friends do commercial work with Minecraft (like videos and maps), so these changes will seriously affect their work. While the Mojang blog post frames this as targeting large corporations and agencies, these affect any commercial work.

My opinion: For as much as Minecraft is a sandbox, anything that unilaterally decides "you can't make x/y/z with this" feels stifling, especially when a vital deciding factor is a transaction outside of Mojang. If you have two identical maps, one commissioned by a brand and one fan-made, it feels overreaching to say one is wrong and the other isn't because one was commissioned.

I don't think any major movie or brand would look to rely on Minecraft in marketing materials, but some of the outcry I've heard is that some really good work that had sponsorships technically isn't "allowed" anymore. It will effectively only target the highly creative elements of the community and that really rubs me the wrong way.

What do you think? Were commercial works in Minecraft a problem for you?

 

[In Service]

If you have two identical maps, one commissioned by a brand and one fan-made, it feels overreaching to say one is wrong and the other isn't because one was commissioned.

Unfortunately, there are many areas of law that recognise the difference between those entities that do things to make a profit and those that do them for the love.

I'm interested to hear from people closer to this news than I am. To me it seems sensible and brand protection.

 

[Karak]

Absolutely about time.

 

[Pandy]

It's kind of an odd thing. What is Minecraft?

In many cases, Minecraft is being used as nothing more than a 3D construction kit, as graphic software essentially, and it seems very strange to preclude this activity altogether rather than have a 'Pro' licence, or something.

 

[bomblord1]

How does this affect public or not for profit entities? There's a local library that hosts a minecraft edu server for children to use within the library as an indirect way to promote the library.

 

[DrKelpo]

stopped playing minecraft years ago... what exactly are they referring to? what's the problem?

 

[Quadraphonic]

I was getting sick of seeing it in everything. At the same time, Minecraft doesn't own a trademark on voxels, so I'm sure these companies can just slightly alter what they're doing.

A licensing program should exist to swap over to, though. Not just a flat-out ban.

 

[neshcom]

How does this affect public or not for profit entities? There's a local library that hosts a minecraft edu server for children to use within the library as an indirect way to promote the library.

The guidelines puts limits on publically displaying/projecting Minecraft gameplay, so individual use should still be fine, especially given Minecraft: Education Edition exists.

 

[playXray]

Unfortunately, there are many areas of law that recognise the difference between those entities that do things to make a profit and those that do them for the love.

This is interesting. Can you expand upon this? If I make something for fun it's OK, but if someone pays me to do this it could be illegal?

Sounds a bit like prostitution law lol.

 

[udivision]

But is Mighty No. 9 still coming with the Retro skin?

 

[M3d10n]

Doesn't Lego have similar limitations?

 

[In Service]

This is interesting. Can you expand upon this? If I make something for fun it's OK, but if someone pays me to do this it could be illegal?

Sounds a bit like prostitution law lol.

It's complex as it's a cross-border issue with many different laws but Youtube (!) has a fair summary here:

YouTube Fair Use Explanation

Courts will look carefully at the purpose of your use in evaluating whether it is fair, but the three remaining factors also need to be considered. Declaring your upload to be “for entertainment purposes only”, for example, is unlikely to tip the scales in the fair use balancing test. Similarly, “non-profit” uses are favoured in the fair use analysis, but it’s not an automatic defence by itself.

 

[potatohead]

How does this affect YT streamers then?

They are all basically using Minecraft to profit from their YT channels, the super popular ones I mean.

 

[KingBroly]

How does this affect YT streamers then?

They are all basically using Minecraft to profit from their YT channels, the super popular ones I mean.

It probably doesn't. It probably has more to do with YT channels making their own Minecraft merch and selling it (which is/has been a thing)

 

[iFirez]

As someone who's worked with Mojang for 6 years and also was involved in Minecraft content creation for 5 years, I had a lot of people coming to me to explain this over the last couple of days.

So in short, this is a way to restrict large corporations using Minecraft without permission to advertise or gain revenue through it's services. For example Disney has approached build teams in the past to build playable worlds and maps for numerous movies - Disney then paid this build team large sums of money to build it in Minecraft and then pass the final map on as a purchasable or free product for marketing a movie. This is one of the things this restricts, all the companies I've worked with over the years have been in collaboration with Mojang directly so I imagine Mojang are still open to direct brand deals that involve them and get permission to do that from them.

Another example of how this would restrict people would be mod makers creating mods that relate to other games, movies or tv shows - if they're being paid for it. A build team or modders can still make these things for fan purposes (such as the Westeros Server) as long as they don't make money off of things that aren't their intellectual property.

These restrictions don't really apply to 99.9% of content creators or YouTubers anyway, you can still do partnership advertising on specific series or shows that include Minecraft content as long as it isn't showing something ingame that links to it.

Like I said, I imagine Mojang would make exceptions for brands and companies who go through them directly and make deals to use Minecraft, all my work similar to this in the past has gone through Mojang and then they [Mojang] would put me in touch with them as Mojang enjoyed my work and working with me.

tldr: this is stopping large brands from exploiting the brand awareness of Minecraft to increase marketing awareness and to avoid direct communication with Mojang to create deals for these large companies to use Minecraft in a way that falls into their brand guidelines.

 

[neshcom]

For example Disney has approached build teams in the past to build playable worlds and maps for numerous movies - Disney then paid this build team large sums of money to build it in Minecraft and then pass the final map on as a purchasable or free product for marketing a movie. This is one of the things this restricts

Right, but how does this affect the user experience in any way? I'd prefer if Mojang didn't couch this in "its for your own good and it makes it more fun" when they just want a cut. And like I mentioned in the OP: because of this change, only the map makers and players are getting the short end of the stick (losing work and less maps respectively).