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Individuals and groups who make a living from posting Minecraft videos on YouTube are safe, Mojang has asserted.
The company’s former owner and Minecraft creator Markus Persson found himself engaged in an online tussle in the summer following some changes to Mojang’s EULA that seemingly threatened the business of Minecraft video casting.
In fact, Persson even referenced the fiasco as a factor in his decision to sell Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5bn.
However, Mojang’s chief operating officer Vu Bui has told The Guardian that the company fully supports the Minecraft video scene.
We have a whole slew of people who are making their entire living just off making videos about Minecraft. Just the economics of that – how many people are making a living off this one IP – is pretty awesome,” Bui said.
We want to make most of our money from selling games. We’re not here to penny-pinch the creatives out there using our property to create cool content. We have this massive group of people creating amazing things. Why would we want to hinder that in any way?
That doesn’t take anything away from us, and I would say it actually adds value to Minecraft, to have people who are extremely talented and creative doing things. We’ve essentially outsourced YouTube videos to a community of millions of people, and what they come up with is more creative than anything we could make ourselves.
There’s no damage to us from YouTube. We might have some people who make content we might not agree with, but this is how the democratisation of media works. You put it out there and let the community decide. If someone’s putting out rubbish, the community is not going to watch it, and it won’t rise to the top.”
