Minecraft clamps down on using the game to promote products

Minecraft will no longer be a viable platform on which to promote products, with Mojang announcing it is clamping down on such practices.

“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,” reads the blog.

The blog continues: “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.”

Essentially, if you are an ad agency, corporation, non-profit, or politician, you can no longer do the following or hire people to do it for you.

• 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.

Basically, you won’t see stuff like this any more.

Don’t let the new rules stifle your creativity, however. The blog notes 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”.

Source: Mojang