Today, Minecraft’s developer Mojang made some significant changes to their Commercial Usage Guidelines. Now, Mojang prohibits businesses from creating promotional projects in Minecraft, such as slogans or recreated places made out of blocks to advertise a brand or product.
That said, fans are free to continue working on their own projects that might include specific brands, so long as a company did not hire them to do so. There have been many extensive fan creations of pop culture in the recent time, such as this man’s attempt to recreate all of Destiny in Minecraft form.
The list of significant changes are as follows from Mojang’s post:
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.
Minecraft is a sandbox game where players interact with a randomly generated world and manipulate its contents (assortments of blocks) to create various structures and materials. It is out for a wide variety of platforms, including recently Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Wii U, and PC.
What do you think about this change? Do you approve of the limitations on advertising, or should companies be able to employ Minecraft fans for elaborate creations? Let us know in the comments below!
