The
Minecraft blog discusses a change in policy that will reduce the ability for
companies to promote themselves through
Minecraft, though Mojang stresses that
this does not impact non-commercial fan-created projects. Here's a bit:
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.
If you are an ad agency, corporation, non-profit, or politician, you can’t do
these kinds of things or hire someone to do them:
- Build a Minecraft mod or server that promotes
unrelated products in playable form; e.g., if you are a restaurant chain,
you can’t market your restaurant by releasing a mod that includes your
restaurant built out of Minecraft blocks.
- Build a Minecraft map or mod that markets a movie
or TV show; e.g., if you’re a movie studio, you can’t make a map that uses
Minecraft blocks to build out the fictional world of the movie or its
characters, and you can’t make an official movie trailer out of gameplay
footage from that map or mod.
- It’s worth mentioning that fans of a particular
restaurant, movie, or some other thing are still free to build things in
Minecraft that represent or celebrate it so long as the goal or focus is not
to promote or sell that stuff. The new rules only apply to companies or
organisations that are using Minecraft to sell their products or promote
their causes.
And that’s it! Hope that all makes sense.