ibxtoycat – How Minecraft DLC Went From Joke To Reality

In April of 2011 Mojang joked about adding microtransactions to the game via a Minecraft store while in 2021 they bragged about making over a billion sales from the actual Minecraft Marketplace how did the game change so drastically in those 10 years and more importantly how did a skin pack go from

Costing 79 to over $6 the game that used to have just one price now has 32,000 of them and I calculated the mindboggling price you’d have to pay if you wanted to actually own everything the game has for sale also more broadly how did Minecraft

Go from an indie game with a fixed low price to being one where Marketplace Marketplace Marketplace and you can spend hundreds of dollars and people regularly do this isn’t an unjustified hate piece I do think DLC has its place but instead a retrospective of The Good

The Bad and the Ugly of content created for players by players and eventually even by the Minecraft Studio themselves this is all of the eras of the history of DLC and I hope you enjoy one of the deepest Dives we’ve done yet because it starts with Minecraft DLC for free

In the very earliest days of Minecraft the whole point of building was so that you could share your work with others this might be in screenshots or videos or it might be by sharing those very World files in fact the nature of Minecraft leads to a lot of sharing not

Just of maps but also the skin system leads to sharing of skins so you can pretend you’re Mario or sonic or any other licensed character and the whole beauty of the game was that anyone could pick any of these things or they could start from scratch and build one

Themselves the creativity didn’t just stop at building in your own survival world but instead extended to what you might choose to build for others many people built Maps as the explosion of Minecraft during Alpha and beta happened and many of these maps are lost to the

World today including some that you or I might have built but there are some which became so successful that even now they are instantly recognizable I remember one of the very first Maps I ever heard of that I heard of time and time again and anyone from this era of

Minecraft can relate is this temple of notch map you throw a single gold ingot in a well and then by taking advantage of an insane amount of redstone something very fun happens and let me show you what that is you might be thinking you don’t recognize it until right now

Where it’s so weird how do they he’s blinking at you as he’s giving you stuff it is one of the weirdest Minecraft maps that’s just so simply appealing because it shows how you can manicure the terrain in your Minecraft world to make it look like the literal man who built

It I think if I was Notch I would be very weirded out by this personally but I absolutely love this as a creation and in fact this was made by FB disco who later made many great things uh but there is also the example you know this

This was a very goofy map that many people remember and this just shows that Minecraft maps can be anything but they can also be opportunities for other people to experience challenges everyone knows what it’s like to survive in a Minecraft world that looks like this it’s very old terrain but imagine if you

Could mix that up by having no terrain at all one of the earliest adventure maps to catch everyone’s attention was this Sky Block it is such a simple premise you have one tree you have one chest with lava and ice and you must work out what you’re going to do from

Scratch on this there have been so many countless revisions of this but the idea was just put out by someone who was figuring what if you try to survive in a Minecraft World with the bare minimum possible and as you can see there is nothing around here uh compared to

Modern Minecraft but this is an idea that compels so many people what if you could survive long and do more interesting things despite having less interestingly enough if you wanted to you could build your own temple of notch out here in the middle of nowhere and I think the idea of having absolutely

Nothing a fall to the void in your death is something that really added to people’s Minecraft experiences however falling to your death isn’t the only interesting thing although it is very fun um but instead you could fool not to your death and that could be interesting

Too if there were things to avoid and so for the third classic Minecraft map I’d like to show you today how about the dropper oh that was fake it was blue stained glass that’s very clever for the F oh wait I’m going to full on it again

No okay that is actually real this time for the third uh you know Fun Classic map The Dropper is one of those Concepts that just immediately appeals to people this is of course a moday remake all of these are of course being played on the bedro Edition and so have some amount of

Changes being made but the fun idea of trying to fool not to so you can speciically avoid death but what if instead the goal was to move around in the Y AIS so that you avoided hitting blocks on the way down that would be incredibly fun wouldn’t it this is

Something which has existed for as long as Minecraft has had full damage reduced by water because people love the idea of changing up Minecraft entirely usually you move along the x and z axis but this moves you around the Y AIS asking you to do challenging things like dodging

Clouds or planes and why is half of the gimmick hereit trying to avoid blue stain glass but um you the the simple idea of moving Minecraft to a different plane is so fun and shows how even in this remake of the Timeless classic uh it indeed people are making remakes of

All of these even in this remake you can see that people are loving the idea so much that it works quite well Minecrafts mechanics are so enjoyable that people will play them year after year and there are Minecraft maps being made of each of these free ideas even now to this day

Which I think is absolutely beautiful however these Minecraft maps are just a small subsection of the many which existed most of which were terrible but many of which spawned entire jras and inspired people to play Minecraft in entirely different ways and such as the beauty of the mapmaking community

Something which was kind of taking a hit when it came to the console edition this is an interesting tale because Notch the man himself not the weird Temple specifically didn’t want to bring Minecraft to consoles this is because he was quite insistent on developing Minecraft himself rather than

Hiring a porting studio and when you look at the Minecraft community on the Java Edition it’s specifically thed from making their own content in the form of servers yes but also spefic specifically in making their own maps and skins the console specifically would not be able to do this because console manufacturers

Have very strict rules on how you can use their hardware and the internet together you can’t download any games from the wideopen internet no you must use their store or use their discs but more importantly you cannot modify that game in any way and this includes in

Setting up your own servers or even playing on others and specifically this means you cannot download other people’s safe files uh for all sorts of reasons but basically console manufacturers don’t like to deal with all of the things which PC Gamers take for granted this presented very big difficulties

When Minecraft was officially confirmed to be coming to the Xbox 360 uh ported by renowned Porters 4J Studios they were going to make Minecraft work on one of these but with all of those restrictions in place how is Minecraft going to work in the slightest I mean uh even just the

Issue of skins is everyone going to have to play as Steve well they had an interesting solution to that and being honest they specifically needed one because they build Minecraft on the Xbox 360 not just as a way to play Minecraft but on a Home console but also

Specifically as a way to play Minecraft split screen with your friends on a couch this fun trailer shows them doing this at the Mojang Studios but it is of course something which they did want people to do and it wouldn’t work at all when there was just one Minecraft skin

Later they were going to add Alex but even two Minecraft skins wouldn’t fit the whole four players that you could do in a normal split screen game and so what was the 4J Studio solution to not being able to upload custom skins but also not being able to have every player

Have the same skin well I think it was quite creative because I present to you tennis Steve also known as two-player Steve because if you joined a game that someone was already playing you could be Steve as well but to differentiate you from him you had this lovely white

Outfit also there was Tuxedo Steve for third player athlete Steve for fourth player and then so on and so forth for Scottish Steve prisoner Steve cyclist Steve and Boxer Steve interestingly this last one was the rarest originally however however after a while people started to develop a preference for

Joining a game at a certain point in time I mean who wouldn’t want to be a tuxedo Steve after all and so 4J Studios introduced something which is surprisingly a first in Minecraft to this day which was the ability to pick your skin in the game itself no going to

Minecraft.net or making an account somewhere else instead you could pick any of these eight Steves directly in the game itself which meant that now two people could pick the same skin again this was perhaps a problem to some and it was a problem that 4J Studios were

Ready to s the solution for because Skin Pack 1 launched on July 16th of 2012 costing 160 Microsoft points it was to to be fair a very controversial DLC at the time with people saying having to pay for skins is the stupidest thing in the world uh that being a very common

Verdict and also a lot of people saying they’re going to stick with the default tuxedo skins uh player three is the best player Etc there were many people who were offended at the idea of having to pay for skins in a game where previously this was free however to add value to

This 4J Studios decided to to speak to game studios and efficiently license their characters so you could actually play as the for instance the Gears of War person or you could play as the master chief or banjo from banjo kazui and unlike all of the free Java equivalents these skins were officially

Licensed and so could exist on a console market and so that’s exactly what happened and in fact not only did people buy these but they bought them in their Millions making it so successful that 4G Studios immediately shifted gear from not just making skin packs but also

Working on a brand new mashup pack so as game developers 4J happened to have a decent connection with BioWare and so they pitched to them the idea of making a mass effect not just skin pack or texture pack as they later started doing but instead making an entire world

Specifically for the texture pack that they were making and the skin pack they were going with so that you could play in Minecraft but feel like you were in the Mass Effect world and this was the start of something quite revolutionary in the DLC world because instead of just

Releasing it and saying you have to pay to take it out they instead had one of the most friendly trial systems around by saying anyone could download the map and look around it and see what they’d made but instead if you wanted to save it that is when you’d have to pay them

It also launched at an incredibly low price point of £269 or $3.99 and you would be able to use each of these elements individually from each other which in my opinion is a massive deal and is one of the reasons why the Masher pack really caught on was because you

Got to experience this world as you can see in this trailer it’s looking pretty good but you also got to experience the skins and the texture T Pack although if we were being totally honest experience the texture pack is about the most positive thing anyone has ever said

About the mass effect meh pack it is very much a texture pack designed to be used on this world and this world only the idea is solid but the execution not so much however this is something that 4J Studios massively improved upon when it came to the natural texture pack the

Plastic texture pack and the fantasy texture pack among many others which they did start release again kind of breaking the wall on this form of DLC it might have made sense for skin packs given the scarcity of skins and the inability to upload it might have made sense for the mashup packs because

Obviously there was no way to share world so easily but texture packs felt like a little bit they were just going to do what people had done for free forever and just charge for it because they were 4J Studios something they could do however to kind of balance this

Fear was every one of these dextra packs could have updates the moment a Minecraft update came out which was something they committed to at the time and are still doing to this day you can play one of these texture packs that you bought in 2012 and it’s still getting

Updates now which is something that is very consumer friendly indeed I think the mashup packs are the most consumer friendly of these entire bundles because they are not just a world you can look at and is pretty and comes with skins and texture packs but actually are

Fullon worlds you can explore and do quests in and although that sounds hyperbolic and like it comes from an audience that maybe aren’t used to seeing Maps the truth is 4J Studios did hire a lot of art graduates specifically to work on these and it made maps that

Weren’t just beautiful but we’re very functional and rather than just trying to you know explain it to you why don’t I show you precisely what I mean with this mashup pack because the Mass Effect mashup pack or N7 mashup if you’re playing on Bedrock might have been the

First of all of them and honestly kind of the trial for the whole concept but it shows just how fun this idea can be to experience a fully immersive version of another world in Minecraft it does have some severe pits in terms of how much of the world it covers and they did

More than fix it for this next mashup pack because these mashup pack or dragon born if you’re playing on the Bedrock Edition there is a really dumb reason we’ll get into as to why these packs have different names if you playing Bedrock um you know you want it to be a

Good explanation but sadly it just makes you more disappointed but the reason that this came about was because funly enough 4J Studios had a decent connection with Bethesda and Todd Howard and Todd Howard the studio lead of Bethesda at the time of Skyrim the massive phenomenon had worked on a giant

Game that obviously he had children that weren’t of the legal age to play and so the idea of having this in Minecraft was a pretty good idea for them and so this was a license they gave to allow the Minecraft team to make one of these

Inside of it and indeed this isn’t just making one small part of the scym world although it’s a nice little part riverrun is everyone’s first town but also it made a lot of the other key Quest components this is one of the first major dungeons you go into look at

That they built it right here including the lock on the door and then even better do you know white run the big town where someone took an arrow to the knee once you can take an arrow to the knee in Minecraft in this exact same replica I love this I think it’s crazy

To see because again looking around this map you don’t just realize the cool things they’ve done but also what you can do in Minecraft if you set your mind to it admittedly I always felt like it’s weird to have a force texture pack for these worlds because they kind of take

Away some of the creativity if you make your textures from scratch you can build anything in Minecraft sure but looking around this it’s a reminder that you can build basically any video game in Minecraft and honestly it’s not just you know like implicitly allowed it’s actively encouraged because 4G Studios

The people who would sell you the game would do this themselves and let you look around at the Masterpiece I have bought the Skyrim mashup pack but even if I hadn’t I can still look around this world this whole cross-section of Skyrim and appreciate what they have to offer

By the way this is a so again this is uh you know limited to a console edition siiz world that is 864 by 864 but they really do cover as much of this as they can and although this pack has a few rough edges after this pack onwards they

Made sure they cover every single edge of it not just with rough terrain like you can see here but actually with real legit builds which I think is a really wild thing but yeah if you never seen the console edition World B then here you go there’s no Skyrim out there sadly

What you will find at least a little bit interesting though is Minecraft Halo edition the Halo mashup pack or if you’re playing Bedrock the master chief mashup pack I believe it’s called again really silly change names for all of these but something that is interesting about this map is they did release this

World way back it’s the third mashup pack uh it’s over 10 years old now but despite that as the console edition and indeed Bedrock G updates they have not just updated the textures like I mentioned they’ve done before so you’ll find that there is concrete powder and concrete despite the fact that these

Came out years after this but also there were other Halo games that released between the launch of this mashup pack and the you know the current day but they’ve updated the world to include little bits from each of those they made the world extra cool and they didn’t

Even publicize it they just kind of do it in the background and that to me is what I think is a key component in why these mashup packs are so fondly remembered it wasn’t just a basic commercial relationship of they’re going to sell you some world and say haa we

Got your money but instead they treated it as a delicate thing that they would update for a decent amount of foreseeable time giving you actual updates and giving you things that weren’t possible when it first released something I absolutely love this map is really really fun in my opinion because

It does include not just an Overworld which is updated but also they go through the never and they make that specifically interesting as well something I loved and was a first for a mashup pack and so yeah if you wanted to do the disc hunt which is to find every

Single music disc this world actually had that in a very interesting way also look at this it’s a never Fortress but they blur in into this Halo mess and they also make it more interesting in many parts I love this as a concept just making Minecraft a more interesting

World to explore combining elements of something else you really enjoy is a really great way to pay homage to all of these you know Studios that they’re really borrowing the concept art from and uh yeah absolutely love this in so many ways look at this this looks

Exactly like magma I assumed it was I jumped in I made a mistake but it’s so cool you know what else is cool though the festive mashup pack also known on Bedrock as the oh it’s the festive mashup pack oh they didn’t change the name for once that’s incredible but the

Festive mashup pack was released as you can imagine specifically for the festive season I I feel like if any of them are not going to be renamed something about the festive season like that’s you know some something about holidays is like controversial in United States politics

Which is what Mojang seems to draw their current biases from so I’m surprised that this is allowed but apparently this is the first one that hasn’t had its name changed and as you can see it’s a cutesy little village uh that actually isn’t just a normal village but instead

Functions as Santa’s Workshop so over here is where they build the no this is this is where they distribute them or something like that and over here on the other side of the Christmas tree is where they actually manufacture all of those presents every single child in the

World gets their presents from this place I can’t believe I’m us to the uh the battle map more than this this is weird this isn’t a factory at all this is a place where they build some stuff what is fun about this to me is they use

This world again as you as you might know to make the battle map so you could play against each other in a hunger game style uh but what I really love about this regardless all here we go this is uh what is to the left bit in the battle

Map this is the workshop and so yeah you kind of get this look around a festive world where they have conveyor about lines making all the presents I think it’s a really cute idea personally but also you can look around the map and try specific spefically to find yourself um

All of the music discs and again it just it just adds a cuty little thing to it when you find any music disc the game tells you that you found them and uh it gives you a little reward when you get all of them something that is extra fun

For any world to have looking around this is already great looking around and seeing how this texture pack Works extra fun but also getting inspiration for Christmas theme or festive them builds at this time of year is something a lot of people appreciated but then to have

Actual games and fun you could have on top of that before even considering that you could fight each other later in battle is something that gave this a fun spot in my heart despite it probably being one of the worst smash-ups if I was being totally honest like what what

Else are you going to use this for also don’t ask why I’m a cat girl none of my DLC works so I have to use the free stuff and this is a this is a free skin that you have on Minecraft console edition by the way I should point out

That I’m focusing on the wel here but every one of these mashup packs does have skins including by the way look at this there’s versions of those versions of Steve specifically for Christmas so athlete Steve has a Christmas sweater and Tuxedo Steve has this thing on and

You know it’s it’s a cutesy little addition also some of these skins weren’t skins in any traditional Minecraft Java sense because they were building both the engine and the Skins they could do ridiculous things like a stocking where as you can look that’s how the stocking moves how does that

Make any sense don’t ask me but you could get ridiculous skins that got crazier and crazier as things go on which is something we might have to return to later but you could also just be green Sandra if you wanted with a hat that would go outside the normal skin

Geometry something which wasn’t allowed on any other version until fairly recently I’ve become the ginger cat by the way this is this is the best I can do for now so this next mashup pack required going and turning on my PlayStation 4 as well as finding Minecraft PlayStation 4 edition because

I only own it physically here then loading up the Bedrock version where there’s a secret little switch if you bought the game before a certain time then we can go into play game we can play offline and I can find the PlayStation exclusive Masher pack which

Is this the Little Big Planet world this is something interesting each of the console edition branches has their own exclusive mashup pack and in the case of PlayStation it’s Little Big Planet and the only reason I went through all of that work is to show you something fun

On this Edition where by the way I’m also not an osot because they never released the oselot skin here so this is a fun little spawn area that you have but if you go into this chest they not only give oh why can’t I open the chest

Actually ah there we go you get yourself a cake and you get eight apples I don’t know what that’s meant to be actually but let’s go on patient are virtue maybe Boom Town uh in fact there’s a bunch of different levels that they have right

Here and this is one of the more fun mashup packs because they tried to take out the gameplay of the original as literally as they could into Minecraft and it results in something very strange and I’m going to go down this Minecart Track to show you exactly what I mean by

That so as you can see this is fun Enough by itself I think the 4J team got better and better of working with Minecart and the results are very fun not only in terms of the uh transition screens they built this is effectively a loading screen that they’ve piled into

To a mine cart they didn’t use teleport blocks even though they had access to command blocks because they wanted to make something as close to a player experience as they could is my game crashed oh no oh that was weird huh but because they wanted to make something as close to a player

Experience as they could this is what they did instead and so now if we go all the way up we’ll eventually hit a Little Big Planet level which we can now play from the Minecraft perspective so this is kind of fun to me like having a platformer be built inside of Minecraft

It’s not one of the easiest games to transition but yeah I think they did a solid job this is oh yeah look at this there’s a whole jungle worth of level around here and it’s so cool the first time you experienced that yeah one of my favorite game franchises can be played

Right here on the console edition without having to do too much extra work I thought that was so clever personally and that’s before we mention the music from this pack by the [Applause] Way I hate to sh too much for this thing but for real this was such an interesting meshup pack that it encouraged me to buy Little Big Planet on my otherwise gamess PlayStation 4 and it has to be said that that counts for something right also as

Always music disc hunt which I think is fun anyway this was the PlayStation 4 exclusive map and it was the next one to release uh there was another exclusive we’ll get into later but for now there was a all editions Masher pack which launched because this crossplatform

Release was the first time 4J Studios had made unique IP to add to Minecraft this is the Greek mythology mashup pack and you can already tell just from looking around the spawn how epic This truly was because a lot of their students seem to have a interest in uh

You know like a mythology of different forms uh 4J Studios worked on adding not just a Greek mythology pack which was fun by itself but also later an Egyptian mythology pack which includes everything you’d expect the Sphinx and the pyramids and everything in between as well as of

Course a whole batch of Egyptian skins and even a texture pack which learned from a lot of these mistakes being fairly useful in Survival Minecraft as well as to build pyramids inside of these Maps something which is very fun oh look at that by the way that’s a Mesa

Biome that’s a that’s a cutesy Edition they also released the Chinese mythology mashup pack which maybe didn’t hit the same numbers as the previous two packs but definitely found its Niche and was very appreciated by people who had this very focused hit part of history as their favorite part and could enjoy it

Inside of Minecraft and then following on from the festive mashup pack there is a Halloween mashup as well I really find this to be a compelling horror experience and it’s not just me one of my most few live streams ever with something like 700,000 views is just me

Playing through this map trying to find all the discs it is like a horror house where you genuinely do have to go through a lot of very spooky things Minecart rides and challenges included and it makes it one of the most interesting maps to the community to the

Day it has to be worth mentioning though that unlike all of the other mashups where they built everything from scratch there already was a Halloween texture pack and there already was a Halloween skin pack they just kind of added the world on top of it and so maybe that’s

Why it was so great in the minds of YouTube viewers it seems but yeah this was the extent of their own personal packs they did also at the same time as working on these things try to get the licenses for much bigger packs which is why we saw one of the most incredible

Collaborations we’ve seen Minecraft do to this day is when they convinced Nintendo that they could use the Super Mario name to build a full mashup pack which they released for free when they released Minecraft Wii U Edition this is the Nintendo exclusive and my God I love

Every part of this world they pay homage to the 2D Marios they pay homage to super Super Mario 64 and the castle and even Super Mario Sunshine one of my personal favorites I love that they built this world and that’s on top of being able to play as Waluigi or peach

Or Luigi or Mario or whoever you want to this was one of the most incredible pieces of DLC ever and it would be hard to follow that up however I it seems as though 4J were reading into my brain because the next mashup pack they released went absolutely apocalyptically

Because this is Minecraft Fallout Edition oh my God look at this they’ve got the pit boy menu I love the Fallout series Fallout New Vegas is a personal favorite of mine genuinely is part of why I love the city of Las Vegas and lived there for as long as I did um I

Love the Fallout franchise and to see it come to Minecraft was incredible maybe it was inevitable after you know obviously the previous connection they had with Todd Howard from beesa but it’s still insane to me to see how they paid homage not just to Fallout 4 which was

The newest game at the time it had just come out so here’s the settlement and Fallout 4 and all of that stuff but also they managed to pay homage to other games in the franchise and not just Fallout 3 and New Vegas like you might expect but also to look at this here

Diamond City by the way but also lots of tiny little pieces of the earlier Fallout games too I love this Mash Pack and honestly it doesn’t even have much of a v like it it doesn’t fit the Minecraft theme at all in my opinion like going around an apocalyptic world

Just doesn’t really fit Minecraft even though you could argue that Minecraft is an apocalypse but I still found this to be so interesting and so amazingly compelling and maybe that’s just me but that is a big part of what I see and so yeah this is this is just something I

Love to look at and how could Minecraft top this well I’d argue they didn’t necessarily but they did release more mashup packs anyway the Pirates of the Caribbean map certainly was a first because instead of being based on a video game or just the generic concept of Mythology as we’d seen four times

Before this was based on a movie franchise or you know maybe based on some books you could argue but it was done with a deal with Disney which meant that wow you could play in the Pirates of the Caribbean world except it’s here in Minecraft I thought this was pretty

Cool even though if it wasn’t my jam being able to experience any world inside of Minecraft always was compelling maybe not as compelling as The Nightmare Before Christmas I remember I used to love this movie as a child I’d want to watch it over and over again again I can’t tell you anything

That happens in there besides the big spooky skeleton man but as you can see being able to look around this world is something that is just so cool and follows this exact same trend of following movies something they did break for the next mashup even if only because Steven Universe is technically a

TV show but yeah this is one of those shows that has a cult following online it’s one I tried to watch a few episodes of just to understand exactly what was going on but it’s a very very very strange show and maybe I’m not the

Demographic for it you tell me in the in the comments down below I guess uh but the interesting thing about this mashup pack was how they were willing to make mashups of basically anything it seemed if there was a community who wanted to see in Minecraft they would do so and

Sadly this was towards the end of the console edition era and so there was just one more mashup pack although I think Toy Story is a pretty good one to go out on I love this because it has that same perspective I’m always saying I enjoy of having you be tiny in a

Massive environment and indeed it’s like I’m a toy in Toy Story you could say they had lots of different Toy Story movies represented here so you have Toy Story 1 and the house and all that noise you have Toy Story 3 with the daycare but you also have Toy Story 2 in Al’s

Barn and it’s you know it’s all a giant Street where you can walk and fly around if you really want to I feel like walking would be very tedious for the size of some of these things the scale of these builds were incredible and personally I thought it was a great send

Off to the idea oh look it’s not just the first three toy stories there’s more in here as well I thought it’s the antique story oh no watch out for that for the for the creepy thing in there my my point of all of this is to say that

The mashup packs definitely had a really seriously good progression right here till the end however it’s worth mentioning by the time that this Toy Story meshup came out bear in mind that they raised the price to $5.99 after Fallout um you you know there was a potential over $100 just in mashup packs

You could spend alone and that’s before considering that when you go to the skin pack menu you can see that oh dear God they added so many in here too that we’re talking about dozens of skin packs each having a own price alongside texture packs resulting in over2 200 I

Think it was about $300 of DLC that Minecraft console editions had by the time they were discontinued this sounds like an insane amount this makes it sound like this is where the dark part in the video comes because wow I can’t believe Minecraft the game famous for

Being $20 wanted you to spend $300 if you wanted all of the content but believe me when I say this was uh you know this was the inspiration for Mojang to say wait so the console edition makes sometimes up to $300 in additional sales from people why aren’t we getting in on

That and so first of all they started by releasing these very same maps and mashups on the Bedrock Edition which I guess we should mention at least briefly why is it that these mashups have different names so these are the 16 mashup packs released by 4J Studios and

Then later re-released by Minecraft for the Bedrock Edition and you’ll notice how four of them have changed names the N7 mashup pack the master chief mashup pack the Dragon born mashup pack and the voltech mashup pack what did these four packs have in common that required them

To have their names change is the mystery that I couldn’t work out but I spoke to some at 4G Studios and apparently the answer is fairly simple it is that when these were released they released using titles that have a higher age rating than Minecraft and again kind

Of just trying to be politically sensitive they’re like what if people argue that we’re letting them play 16 games but inside of Minecraft and so just to avoid that controversy before it hit they deliberately changed the names as kind of like a legal avoidance mechanism this isn’t a Fallout mashup

Pack it’s a vault tech mashup and they just I guess hope that the sorts of parents who get mad at that stuff wouldn’t know that the master chief is the Halo thing or that dragon born is scarum and indeed N7 is the least recognizable of all of these uh is this

A good thing is this a smart thing does this make any sense or is it legally required probably no to all of those questions however it is something that has happened anyway but yeah this is something you can find as part of the Minecraft Marketplace which was first announced in

This trailer as a Minecraft Pocket Edition exclusive the players have made with it so with the discovery update for pocket and Windows 10 editions we’ve created a super safe and simple way for players to browse buy and play amazing Community Creations from within the game itself this was a reasonably

Controversial change at the time with people saying this is officially marked the beginning of the end for Minecraft or it will completely destroy the community of the game because although you could do all of these things for free on a computer it was clearly Microsoft’s attempt to have a bunch of

Content which you would buy in the game itself rather than supporting people via the usual means this was a controversial opinion shared by many and honestly represented an ongoing part of Microsoft strategy to monetize the game more broadly before the acquisition Minecraft had a realm Subscription Service on the

Java edition of the game which was basically the only ongoing Revenue that Mojang collected from Minecraft players but after it this was expanded to include the Windows 10 Edition as well as the pock Edition and then this Marketplace was the ongoing expansion off that but not only did they expand

Into selling basically DLC microtransactions uh an an ongoing amount of it forever but also they expanded where they would be selling this it was originally just for Windows 10 and Pocket Edition but with the announcement of the Better Together update they expanded this to be every single Minecraft platform besides PC Mac

And Linux and even PC if you’re playing with Windows 10 or above you can actually play the Bedrock version there basically everyone besides Mac and Linux players who are confusingly excluded from Bedrock uh were now going to be able to buy all of this microtransaction

Stuff all of the DLC all of the realm subscriptions which are becoming increasingly important in a world of broken Minecraft saves and all of these ongoing Revenue sources are always being expanded sometimes this is in subtle ways so take for example this very trailer of The Marketplace you can see

That it was just a tiny little corner saying store right below achievements and next to settings however compare that to modern day Minecraft and you’ll notice that the button has not only become a full menu option replacing the achievements option alog together but also it is now every single week

Changing to be as engaging as possible they want you to click the marketplace much more than they want you to look at your settings or play the game because one of these free options makes them more money and this is just kind of the beginning of the modern era of M

Minecraft monetization because you know they used to be able to spend about $300 on one edition of the game how much can you spend on all of the additions of the game right now well that brings us nicely into the modern era and how many maps have been released during it it

Might just shock you between 2017 and now Mojang’s relationship with DLC and microtransactions has changed drastically this is of course due to the marketplace but it means that the scope the scale and the spectrum of quality that a piece of downloadable content has to meet has drastically a wider in scale

And this does mean that we have some of the best things available but it also means that there are so many pieces of DLC that you physically can’t count them from inside the game itself even Mojang doesn’t release the figures which is why there are third-party websites which

Will allow us to track exactly how many pieces of DLC there are which is what we’ll be referencing today but before we show the absolutely astronomical amount that you can spend on Minecraft I think it’s important to reference how Minecraft kind of uses the marketplace as a clever way to monetize their game

This is a way that creates hater keep that in mind people who make Minecraft maps can make money from Minecraft this is something I will admit that I am biased on because I am one of these creators I have my maps for sale via the marketplace and I make a cut that I’m

Not allowed to officially disclose by the way because it’s confidential and covered by NDA uh but there is a certain amount of each sale which goes to the person who made the map or the texture pack or the skin pack this allows it to be a form of DLC which actually supports

The community in the days of DLC p that money would go straight to the developer and nowadays when you buy loot boxes or skins in any other game it is also a way to support the ongoing running of the game but in the case of Minecraft that

Money goes to the people who crafted the content allowing people to make them living doing what they love in Minecraft that is obviously the tagline and that’s why Minecraft puts out so many press releases about selling a million dollars worth of stuff or selling a billion pieces of DLC and that’s because they

Can say this is their way of supporting the community however it’s worth noting not only does Microsoft take a fairly decent chunk of each of these sales not just via the platforms which they own a large percentage of but even the net sale after the platform holder takes

Their feet has another chunk taken by Microsoft again that am amount is not allowed to be officially revealed which is an interesting thing to say the least that they won’t be transparent about it but I think it is fair to say that Microsoft are very happy when lots of

Sales are made in their store they’re not doing this as a purely uh you know like a philanthropical uh you know Endeavor but that is the way that it works works for Creator Le stuff and that is how the categories of skins as well as texture packs and worlds and

Then they combined together mashup Packs work however these are just four categories of DLC because there is also the Realms which is really a subscription so we won’t count it which 100% goes to Mojang and then the final two categories have been sneakily introduced since then because although

The marketplace might only have four categories of content officially when you go to the other parts of Minecraft they’ve added more things you can do of those mine coins and these have an interesting side effect effect of not supporting creators whatsoever so for example when you go to customize your

Character you can buy say uh you know you can you can have facial hair which is free but you could also have arms or legs or a hat and these will cost you money that money could be as low as 120 mine coins or a dollar or it could be as

High as 400 mine coins or closer to three or $4 this means that you can spend genuinely this this is my most expensive Minecraft skin you can spend $10 or more buying Skin creator pieces which will not go in any part to actually you know the people who made

Them but instead go straight to Microsoft or in the case of these weird Ben 10 items will go in part to those license holders as well but the other thing that Minecraft has specifically on the Bedrock version are these emotes there are emotes that you can get for

Free there are emotes that you can get as parts of a DLC so look at this this is the Sonic finger wagging but then there are also emotes that you can pay for and again these are 100% Going to Microsoft and it’s worth mentioning that these are not trackable via any outside

Of game means so keep in mind that when we do the uh you know the full breakdown of how much DLC there is it’s uh you know this is going to exclude the large amounts that you could spend buying emotes which is obviously what Minecraft would love you to do and which they

Spend a lot of effort on trying to find look at this for example you’ve got juggling in here for $4 £329 it is wild what you could spend getting a full batch of emotes and then maybe even more something which of course Mojang would

Love to do and then finally it ALS Al be mentioned that this is harder to quantify because we don’t know but because Minecraft uses mine coins as a currency by the way this is uh you know this this is the single best trick that any business will ever convince you to

Do part with your real world money which can be spent on anything and give it to them and then use it for mine coins which can only be spent on one place and because they specifically give you not enough mine coins to buy things that you want there will always be orphan

Balances left over in some cases these are 20 mine coins are negligible but in the cases of people who buy thousands and never spend them all and stop playing Minecraft Microsoft can pocket the 100% difference and this is one of the major ways that Airline rewards or credit card rewards or even Starbucks

Makes their money relying on people buying gift cards and then not spending them but in the case of Minecraft you physically cannot do anything in the game without doing precisely that and so keep that in mind as we talk about just the parts of the game where Microsoft is

Giving a cut to creators because there are all sorts of other ways they are making money on an ongoing BAS B this which can’t be included here and it would be unfair not to mention them so anyway yeah from the skin when you look into the game and you try to look

Through skin packs it’s near impossible to work out how many there actually are I mean we can dive into skin packs overall and we can say there’s 2,950 plus but what does the plus mean is that 2,957 or is that 35,000 they could be you know like genuinely it’s very hard

To be sure exactly how many pieces of content there are so what we have is this website from Misty uh it’s called Market MC Market stats. MFR and it’s got a breakdown of how many pieces of content have released so bear in mind across the entire 4J years which have

Been about the same now as the marketplace years they released about 10 mashup packs uh for a total of about 50 pieces of DLC which to some is excessive that is uh you know we’re talking about 10 pieces of DLC a year however it’s worth mentioning that Minecraft doesn’t

Release 10 pieces of DLC a year or a 100 pieces of DLC a year but actually close to 1,000 pieces of DLC every single month in fact the partner with the largest number of pieces of content um you know just the the number of pieces of content released uh which is by the

Way uh it is the company gigle block Studios have released 1,064 things themselves one of the many partnered content recreators have released 1,000 pieces of DLC that you could buy meaning even if they’re priced at the bare minimum of just a single dollar each that is $11,000 you can

Spend on just their stuff so keep that in mind as we move to these next figures because here it is the total number of Minecraft wall templates that have released is 9,381 the total number of skin packs that have released is 2,646 which to me means that this is

Actually under counting so keep in mind that every figure we’ve released add a little bit if you want it to be perfectly accurate there have been 255 resource packs or Texture Packs and finally just 73 mashup packs I’m actually really surprised by just how few of them there are so that is

Something to that’s keep worth keeping in mind but yeah as you can see there are a large number of pieces of content but if we actually look through them and we sort by price that is going to be the easiest way to work out how much we’d

Spend if we were buying all of them so I will be tracking this in minecoins and then converting later to real world dollars and also keep in mind that when I last did this calculation just after the release of the Wii U Edition uh the total was in the low hundreds of dollars

So keep that in mind as I say that even at just the lowest price of DLC 160 mine coins there are free 892 pieces of content which means that you can spend 622,000 mine coins buying each and every one of them but the 160 minecoins here

Is much less popular than the 310 where there are 13,99 pieces of content available for a total of 4.3 million total mine coins that you can spend on them which is really really Wild by itself you can spend a very similar amount even though there’s fewer pieces of content because

The next tier up is 490 with just 7,960 you can spend 3.9 million mine coins then at 2,867 piece of content at 660 you can spend 1.89 2,220 and then at 1,562 pieces at 830 you can spend 1, 296,429 and then finally $247,900 00 there is technically a piece

Of content that costs a million but that is no doubt a bug and there is a few other pieces of content that fit outside of this criteria but this covers 99.9% of content available in the marketplace as of the end of September 2023 if you’re watching this later keep

In mind that the number of mine coins has gone up but right now as we throw that into a gross calculator together there is 13, 22,900 coins that are required if you want to buy every piece of content on the marketplace what does it cost to buy

Content well I’m going to try and use US dollars for this example because even if you don’t use the US dollar yourself you probably know your currency’s conversion rate into it which you might not necessarily know for the pound and so if you want to buy mine coins the cheapest

Deal is $1.99 for 320 but the best value deal of the one that Microsoft would most like you to buy is $449.99 and apparently 21,000 of a scent which I’m sure is a floating Point error that happened somewhere in the marketplace we’ll trust that this is a

One time error and we say that it costs you $50 to buy $8,800 minecoins so you have to buy them in the $50 bundles there is no easier way to get more of these and so 8,800 mine coins how many bundles do you have to buy to get the

Full 13 million that you’re going to need the way we work this out of course is dividing that 13 m229 mine coins by 8,800 which is the amount you get in the biggest pack which means we need 1, 14798 75 bundles we’ll round that up to

A nice 1480 which means you need to spend 1,480 * 50 or in other words $74,000 thank God you got that bonus 10% because you’d be spending closer to $80,000 ofs it but if you spend 74k you will officially be able to say that you have bought everything on the

Marketplace and that is therefore the price for all of the DLC in Minecraft it has gone up not just tfold since the last time we mentioned not just it’s actually more than 100 uh increase in price since the Minecraft conso edition days which itself was already considered outrageous that you

Could spend hundreds of Minecraft a game that cost $15 for everything when it first released now costs $74,000 also you got to keep in mind the extra 20 to buy Minecraft and a $9.99 ra subscription you are paying the better part of $75,000 United stat dollars and so I’m

Going to be heading to my local bank I really hope they don’t ask why I need this personal loan I’m just going to have to keep restating that I really need it and I’ll totally pay them back and you know more seriously this is the deposit for a house that you could spend

On Minecraft and that’s why most people will not be spending this not just because of the price but also because the marketplace basically is a bunch of choices you will not be able to play 3,000 maps and you certainly can’t use 26,000 skin packs which then contain within them over 100,000 skins because

You realistically need just one skin and you realistically can only play so many maps in a given day or month or year uh even if you were stranded on an island for the rest of your life you couldn’t play through the full catalog of Minecraft maps as it exists right now to

Their fullest extent in the same way that no one purchases every game on the Xbox 360 Library Microsoft and Mojang have seen this as a shift not from being uh you know them as a content provider they’re making updates for their game but instead turning Minecraft into a

Platform that is the actual modern era of the game it’s not trying to convince people to spend $75,000 although I’m sure some people multiple people have $10,000 plus doll bill I think that Minecraft are instead trying to make Minecraft a platform because this is the way that you become a profitable company

Now if you haven’t seen basically every high-end tech company is trying to get in on this business getting in between buyers and sellers this is the genius that does allowed Amazon to be one of the largest companies on the planet they simply exist as a middleman and an easy

Platform for buyers while allowing sellers an easy way to logistically ship all of their stuff and the same is exactly true for Apple you might think they are one of the most valuable companies in the world because of the fact that they sell iPhones every year but how many of those do they

Realistically sell is that worth their multiple trillion dollar valuation no the way that you make a lot of money is they have an App Store where people make things for other people and apple takes a 30% cut on every one of these transactions the same is true for

Microsoft with its Xbox uh you know system and the same is true for PlayStation and Sony you make a big cut anytime someone buys something on your device and when you make it impossible for Developers not to give you that cut in the case of apple or console manufacturers and functionally

Impossible in the case of other people you make a lot of money with no risk whatsoever to your bottom line This is how you make money you don’t have to create new ideas you can just take a cut on the ones that are already out there

This is why there are so many agents in Hollywood this is why there are so many YouTube networks that will send you emails and ultimately if you think about it on an even broader level this is why governments are some of the most rich Enterprises in the world it’s because no

Matter what happens in the economy no matter if things go slow or fast this year they are getting their cut no matter what and that is effectively what Microsoft has done they have made a storplace where people can buy other people’s maps in a very sanctioned way

With a large you player base of buyers and so now they are selling billions of copies of all of these various things and uh every single time even if they were taking these small margins which they claim you know just 5 or 10% here or there 10% of a billion sales is still

A damn lot and bear in mind the average cup from other platforms like the Xbox or like apple is much closer to 30% and if you wanted to you could go even higher than 30% and consider that Minecraft have worked out their strategy pretty darn well instead of relying on

Their Minecraft updates to succeed to make their money now they can do so just when other people make things inside of the game which seems like therefore the DLC has been a massive success with just one small caveat a lot of people see the modern-day system of Minecraft releasing Just One

Update a year as severely lacking and this is true from a certain perspective they used to release many more major updates in a given year and it used to stimulate the sales of Minecraft so much and it was a great thing to do as a company however now they spend a lot of

Their resources there are hundreds of people who work on Mojang and only a small few doesn’t make up the core gameplay team because lots of people are out there working on deals with tell or Nerf Dungeons and Dragons Sonic every single franchise on the planet to bring these platforms inside of Minecraft or

Minecraft to these Platforms in other words they are now doing a much better job on a business front and that is something that seems like it is the correct move however if you’ve ever studied business you know there are four separate phases to any major business there are businesses with high market

Share and low market share and businesses with high growth rates and low growth rates and Minecraft is starting to treat Minecraft as a cash cow this giant source of Reven that will be profitable for nearly forever because you know it’s just going to naturally grow so much anyway and so they don’t

Need to put as much effort into expansion as they did in the past but this is something I think is a failure I think that although DLC is a massive success for creators I think DLC is a massive success for Minecraft I think this shouldn’t be an opportunity for

Them to slow down on the May game and the reason I think that’s true is because they are coming under Major Market pressure there are multiple entrance from multiple other companies that are looking to be in the Minecraft space hiel is the most famous but there are other ones out there and although

Minecraft can say they want to be a 50-year or 100-year game as much as they like ultimately it is important that they continue to engage people across that time Minecraft could stay the same way it is and people would be interested for a very long time uh but using

Updates and using new content and using refinements on the game to keep people excited and hyped is something that is important not everything needs to be a piece of new DLC and although growing the marketplace is incredibly important for Mojang I think it also should be

Very important to them to grow the game as a whole it is important that every new update bring in new players as they have in the past and that maybe they do an even better job at that because ultimately right now from the outside perspective it looks like Mojang is

Doing a great job as a business of cashing that cow or milking that cash cow uh but there is always the possibility that at some point they get outcompeted unless they stay on The Cutting Edge we’ve seen this with companies in the past and I would hate

For it to happen with Minecraft but that is just my conclusion from seeing the history of DLC play out i’ love to know if yours is on the same level or if you think that actually Minecraft should be a game that is touched less and DLC is a

Way to remain experimental and do brand new things inside of the game and effectively you know Park their tanks on the Roblox Lawns and to have all of these other games which have user generated content to be you know very closely followed by Minecraft I do think

Uh that have you’re working out how to deal with one of the biggest inter ual properties of all time is a very big struggle and that struggle is why many things that Minecraft have said in the past are so directly in contradiction with what they are doing now this is not

In itself a bad thing if there is one message I can leave with this video it’s that even though Mojang has gone through a huge turmoil and honestly has you know gone from a point where they are the thing they used to mock it is also important to note that if you showed

Some of the early people at Mojang where the company would be today they would be amazed in lots of positive ways as as well there are lots of massive improvements but I think some people get Jaded by those and I also think it’s important to note that there are if

There is one thing you take away from this video it is not that if you do something that for of you wouldn’t have liked then you are a bad person consistency as a person is as important as it can be having Integrity is very valuable but also you shouldn’t assume

That growth is bad just because you change your opinion or your mind on something this is not a bad thing and actively should be encouraged if you have new information if you are Pres with a new set of circumstances and you don’t change your mind that is just

Called being stubborn and that is not something we should applaud and I do think that it’s something I do struggle with my own life sometimes like oh I have changed my mind on this thing and rather than seeing it as a point of growth it’s almost a point of shame but

It is allow to have difference in opinions which is why maybe if at the start of this video you weren’t considering subscribing maybe you’d like to do so now it is something that helps to support the channel and these super big deep Dives it takes a long time to

Research and edit these ones together but if you like these super long videos maybe you’d appreciate diving into the history of mini games or indeed the history of any of the other things we’ve done here on this channel I’ll leave some links to those videos down below

But for now thank you so much for watching this video thank you to Harrison for doing the video editing for it and uh yeah I hope that he had as much of a fun blast through the past editing it as I had recording because for now I look forward to seeing you in

The next one Goodbye