The Dark Side of Modern Minecraft Servers

– [Narrator] So I’ve been working on this video for about two or three weeks now, and I recently stumbled across another video that’s very similar to what I’m talking about. Of course, now that I’m almost done with this one. So the point is I’m not copying that one;

It’s a very good video, and mine is a bit different, so you can’t say I copied them or they copied me or whatever. Regardless, it’s still a very good video, so whenever you’re done watching this one, I would recommend checking that one out to learn more

About the things I talked about in mine. It’s rare to find a game that can stay relevant for over 10 years while still providing new content and keeping the community engaged. I mean, if you’ve been subscribed to this channel for a while,

You’ll know that it’s hard to keep a game alive in general, but Minecraft is one of the few games that has managed to do this, and they’ve done it on a scale that is unimaginable. I mean, the developer, Notch, made this little indie game

With a small team and sold it for over $2.5 billion to one of the largest tech companies in the world. I don’t think that you can get a better success story than that. And while, yes, the game is at an amazing point, there are some aspects of it that are going downhill.

First of all, of the server optimization, but we’re not even gonna get into that. The thing we are going to get into, however, is the death of the modern Minecraft server. When I say this, I’m not talking about player count. Minecraft servers in general are much more popular now than they’ve ever been.

I’m talking about something much deeper, a world full of sketchy business practices, the scamming of countless children, blackmailing, doxxing, and much, much more. This is something that needs to be fully addressed, so stick around until the end of this video to understand some of the things that are happening

And some of the things that ultimately need to be fixed. So let’s take off the rose-colored glasses for a bit and bring this situation to light. Let’s talk about the dark side of Minecraft servers. Now this is the original thing that I was planning on talking about in a video. However, as I began to research some of the shit that’s been going on, I figured why not make it into an entire researched and scripted video? So here we are. Basically, some of the more popular Minecraft servers

Are scamming their main audience, which is primarily children, out of ridiculous amounts of money for in game items that create a pay to win experience. What this means is that these servers offer extremely expensive in game perks, such as ranks, which gives you a special in game abilities, crates, which are like gambling,

And all sorts of other things. People pay their real money for these items, and those sales go directly into the pocket of the server owners or the parent company of these server owners. Now this, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’ve owned and operated my own server

For the last year or so, and even as a smaller server with 10 to 60 players on at a time, I’ve spent a shit ton of money keeping it going. It’s expensive. I mean, our hosting costs alone for this server are over $175 a month, and that’s not even counting development costs,

Custom plugins, the website, the graphics, advertising, or anything else. The issue, however, stems from the way in which these transactions are carried out, the perks that the player receives, and the way in which it impacts the server experience for other people who don’t pay real money to purchase things.

For example, we offer in game ranks as well, and these ranks do give people access to cool in game commands that make the experience smoother and easier. It sounds like it would be an issue for other players who haven’t purchased these items. However, we designed it to where that wasn’t the case.

We created a system that allows people to earn a form of virtual currency for playing on the server and participating in events. Players could then use this currency to purchase pretty much any of the perks that were given to people who bought the paid ranks. Not trying to stroke my own ego here,

But a lot of other servers don’t do this, and there are some major differences. The first example is a server known as “Cosmic PVP.” This is a semi competitive faction server where players compete to be the best by fighting, raiding, and all sorts of other things along those lines.

This server is the epitome of overcharging for in game items, creating a miserable experience for people who don’t buy these items, and promoting gambling like it’s the Missouri Bell in Ozark, and some serious money needs to be laundered for the Mexican cartel. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Taking a look at their very well designed website shows you that, well, they’re selling a lot of stuff. You feel like you’re walking into Costco and you get to pick from the shelves of what you wanna buy. You can walk over to the rank section

And pay upwards of $175 to $200 for an in game rank that load you up with between $50 and $100,000 in game, a bunch of XP, and all sorts of other items that take an insane amount of time to earn yourself if you play without buying one of these.

For a comparison, you start out with $1,000 when you join the server. So if you wanna skip the wait, simply pay money and get 100 times that amount in a matter of seconds. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Dive into the gambling and loot boxes section,

And people will be paying $75 for a virtual chest full of virtual items that you have a chance of winning. $75. The chances and the value of these items is set directly by server owners, and the price is absolutely not justified. This is insane enough at a very basic level,

But I want to clarify two things here. One, their audience are mainly people under the age of 16. Two, they know this. But my favorite thing of all is that they charge you $50 to get unbanned from their server if you got in trouble for something.

Meaning you can break any of the rules, except the ones that are listed here, and pay money to get unbanned unless they specifically told you that you can’t. So allegedly you have a racist, homophobic piece of garbage in the server, who, since he didn’t break any of the rules listed here,

Can pay money for an unban and get right back into the server. So charging a lot of money for items that aren’t worth much and promoting gambling, including virtual slot machines, to a bunch of kids is bad enough, but it gets worse, much worse. If you don’t feel like spending $75 to gamble,

You can go on their other server, “Cosmic Prisons,” and pay $130 for a single virtual crate of this kind. But, hey, it’s on sale, so it’s a steal of a deal. Crates are large portion of a server’s revenue, and I completely get that. I’m not innocent here because I had crates

On my server for a little bit. However, the crates on my server showed you the chances for each item that you could acquire, and I charged three to $4 for them. And not to mention that we decided about a month or two ago that we didn’t like the idea of crates

And that we were removing them. Again, I’m not an angel here, but I realized the issue, and I fixed it. Hey, did I mention that the $130 crate’s on sale? Be right back; I love sales. Some of the biggest and most prevalent servers are manipulating their audience, again, primarily kids, by making them feel like they have to donate money. The scummiest server of them all is my personal favorite, “Mine Superior.” This shit show of a server shows up everywhere on all of the server list websites, advertisements,

And all sorts of cool places around the Minecraft community. Hmm, I wonder why they show up so much. Well, we’ll have to get into that in a second. Mine Superior is a fairly generic server that tries to capitalize on anyone’s vague interest in the game of Minecraft.

If you can dream it, they have a freaking game mode for it. Oh, and of course they have a ton of purchasable options to make your experience 100 times better. On their bajillion different servers, there are a bajillion different purchasable options, all of which are priced in a way that manipulates people

Into thinking they’re getting a good deal. They have these seasonal gambling crates on pretty much all of their servers that appear to be on sale from the original price of $800. Oh, and those ranks, you’re not gonna get a better deal than that because you can save like $2,500 on some of them.

And this trend continues across pretty much all of their store packages. They pretend to make this stuff look as if it’s on sale where people will buy it right away. But it’s okay, according to their homepage, they’re allocating these funds directly into projects that work to improve Mine Superior.

Yes, you heard that right. So much of their money is going into making the server a better place. None of it is going to advertising. I swear, they’re not spending between 20 and $40,000 a month for the top advertising slot on this singular website.

They’re also not paying a few thousand on this site and every other serverless site on planet Earth. Yes, again, all of their money is going right into the server experience. Just to clarify here, I’m not denying that these servers have a lot of operating expenses.

I honestly really respect the hustle and the time and energy that these server owners have spent into developing these large communities. It’s actually impressive. However, just because you have large costs doesn’t mean it’s okay to do things like this. Imagine if Rockstar Games charged $400 for “GTA V”

Because of how expensive it was for them to make it. If your business can not sustain itself without having to manipulate your audience and charging a lot of money for virtual items that aren’t worth that much money, then you should probably look into changing your business model.

It’s possible because take a look at Hypixel. Hypixel is the biggest Minecraft server in existence, by far. The company that owns it is undoubtedly worth millions of dollars, and yet, even with this many players, they aren’t doing this. I realize how economies of scale work,

So it’s a bit easier for them to get by while charging less. However, it’s always possible to make it work if you put enough time and energy into it. Temporary servers are the lowest of the low, and they seem to be more and more popular with every passing day. Basically, these servers put a heavy focus on marketing and try to get people to join. They usually have a competitive theme, such as prison or factions,

And offer a payout of either store credit or real life money at the end of every season. So your goal with these servers is to try to become the best player on the server in order to win the sought after money reward, and what better way to become the top player

Than by spending your money to get in game perks that make the experience easier. I don’t see an issue in paying $150 to get extra benefits when I’m confident that I can make $250 as a reward for being the best. Let’s think of it as an investment. But it’s even worse than this.

These servers get hyped up, make a lot of money selling packages on the store, and then close down directly after. Meaning they pump a lot of energy into making this server seem legit and then close down once they’ve made money, usually due to staff issues or, quote-unquote, “Management changes.”

Then they either reopen and do it again or move on to another server and repeat the process. So I’ve covered everything related to the server owners, but now I wanna briefly touch on the topic of Songoda. I’m not gonna dive fully down this wormhole because there’s enough drama and controversy here to call Chris Hanson and make a full hour long documentary on it.

Plus, I don’t know which of these accusations are true and which are exaggerated, but I will dive into what I do know to be true as soon as I lay out the scenario. Songoda is a marketplace for plugins, a place where you can buy custom made plugins

To add specific features to your server. This company and this marketplace is owned by a girl named Brianna, and there is a lot of accusations of dark stuff surrounding the company and the owner. Again, I don’t wanna open up that can of worms, so I encourage you to do your own research.

Allegedly, they have been accused of threatening self harm if users didn’t delete their bad reviews. Allegedly, they’ve been accused of discussing sexually suggestive content with minors, creating contracts that screw over the developers and server owners, and much more. Again, I am not saying that they did these things

Because I’m sure if I did say that they would place legal action on me. I’m saying that they were accused of doing these things, and I honestly don’t have time to investigate this and get involved with all of this garbage. However, let me say what I know is true.

They have some very sketchy bullet points in their Terms of Service, and their plugins don’t seem to be very well developed. Let’s look at their Terms of Service. The first thing that got my attention was this part, claiming that you may not leave reviews talking about incompatibility with other plugins.

Meaning they are censoring the reviews of plugins on their own site to make them look like they’re better than they actually are. This part of the ToS isn’t bad in and of itself. However, most of their plugins claim to work with other plugins. How can you sell something that claims to work

With another plugin and then refuse to allow people to tell others that it doesn’t actually work with that other plugin? But there’s even more. If a plugin’s updated, and an issue that was mentioned in a previous review was fixed, they now have the right to remove that review. It makes sense, kind of,

Except that you don’t know how reliable the plugin actually is. If the company simply deletes every single review calling out an issue that was supposedly fixed and prevents people from mentioning them again if they pop back up, how are people going to know that there were ever issues

With the plugins in the first place? They restrict plugin developers from using excessive DRM, which is a way to protect your own plugins from people stealing them. And best of all, when you, as a developer, submit your plugin to Songoda Marketplace, they now own it. You give them an irrevocable right

To display, distribute, store, broadcast, blah blah blah blah your plugin indefinitely. So if you wanna leave the platform and sell it somewhere else, you can do that, but they still have the right to sell it as well. These are extremely sketchy business practices and, combined with the badly coded plugins

And allegations of all these other things going on with the owner, would make anyone want to avoid using their services. Again, I would read into this a bit more and try to figure out what’s going on because I’m too lazy to, and I don’t feel like getting involved

In the more personal side of this drama, and I feel as if it’s something that members of the Minecraft community should try to understand. Combined, you guys can figure out a lot more than I can. All the things I mentioned in this video are just the tip of the iceberg.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface on some of the things that are happening in the Minecraft server community, but it’s definitely a good way to understand the foundation of these practices. We, as a community, need to do something to stop stuff like this from happening

And find a way to prevent these large servers from manipulating and scamming children. Minecraft is a great place, and I would hate for some of these dark things that are going on to make people uninterested in playing the game to its fullest potential. I sometimes miss the simpler times of Minecraft

When everyone was just there to have a good time, and there weren’t a ton of greedy people trying to make a few extra bucks. Maybe this video can help to do something about these problems. We’ll have to wait and see. Anyways, now that I’ve made enemies with most

Of the sketchiest people in the Minecraft community, let’s mention today’s sponsor, “Raid Sh…” Just kidding. I hope you all enjoyed. I will see you guys next time, and peace.