The Minecraft Marketplace is a Great Idea

The Minecraft Marketplace is a really great idea to help build upon Minecraft in a simple way that benefits everyone involved with the game. The obvious question for Microsoft when buying Minecraft was in looking for new ways to monetize the title as eventually the game will run out of people to sell it to. The Minecraft Marketplace will be an in-game store that will have revenue split between Microsoft, Creators and the App Store. This will not only generate quality additional content for fans of the game, but also assist with creating a new revenue stream for the game.

It's great for Microsoft as little to no work is involved in the process for them and it's mentioned in the press release that creators will receive most of the profits from sales. This is truly interesting as builders can now legitimately make money from their creations similar to those that do so on Steam. Players will benefit from seeing a steady stream of fresh add-ons, Microsoft will gain easy profits and creators will be able to spend more time doing what they love. This will also leave the existing add-ons where players can get these sort of things for free alone and the marketplace just provides a simplified premium option.



I don't particularly see an issue with the concept of this store and I'm really looking forward to seeing what it does bring. Players will finally have access to a large range of content that many are not aware of or are unable to find for themselves. This should boost the range of common content and as with the regular Minecraft sales of DLC these will certainly do well. Currently it's only available for Minecraft Pocket Edition and Minecraft Windows 10, but with Realms supporting consoles eventually I would assume this might also to some degree. They really need to work on unifying the platforms as the potential to grow this platform even further on consoles would be amazing. The current platforms that would get left out as they're created by 4J Studios include; Xbox One, Xbox 360, Playstation 4, Playstation 3, Nintendo Switch and WiiU. This is a large market that is potentially left out and I assume Microsoft won't miss out for long there.

The store will be run based on in-app purchased coins and this content will then be made available on all your Minecraft devices through Xbox Live. It's actually a very smart way for Xbox to increase its player count as I'm sure they've been enjoying the boost from players using Xbox Live accounts on Minecraft for mobile devices.

The prices are also similar to what players are used to spending on previous content. This includes initial DLC costs at 960 coins for community worlds, texture packs at 480 and skin packs at 320. The prices will range according to region and at launch the best pack will cost $9.99 USD for 1720 coins. I feel this system is very fair and with some great creators already on board it should be interesting to see how the marketplace does.

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