Minecraft's EULA gets less hazy

The latest ruckus involving Minecraft modders was resolved yesterday when Mojang developer Grum had a dialog on reddit with EnDeLe, who posts on MCF under the name EnzerDeLeo. In the course of this exchange it was discovered that Mojang's Marc Watson responded incorrectly to a question that EnDeLe asked him last month via Twitter.

The question that EnDeLe asked was whether the section of the EULA titled 'Content' referred to mods. Marc answered incorrectly that it did.

As we found out from Grum, to Mojang content means what players create while in-game moving blocks around. The EULA says "…you must also let us permit other people to use, copy, modify and adapt your content" because anything a player builds gets downloaded by the server onto other player's computers, and of course anyone playing on that server can modify anything.

The 'Content' section of Minecraft's EULA is four paragraphs and does not cover mods.

In contrast, mods only get a couple of mentions:

First in the section Using Our Game:

If you've bought the Game, you may play around with it and modify it. We'd appreciate it if you didn't use this for griefing, though, and remember not to distribute the changed versions of our software. Basically, mods (or plugins, or tools) are cool (you can distribute those), hacked versions of the Game client or server are not (you can't distribute those).

And then in the section Ownership Of Our Game And Other Things:

Any tools you write for the Game from scratch belong to you. Modifications to the Game ("Mods") (including pre-run Mods and in-memory Mods) and plugins for the Game also belong to you and you can do whatever you want with them, as long as you don't sell them for money / try to make money from them. We have the final say on what constitutes a tool/mod/plugin and what doesn't.

There are still unresolved questions about how the EULA pertains to mods, but yesterday's conversation cleared up Mojang's earlier miscommunication.

EnDeLe has played a major role in clarifying questions regarding Mojang's EULA; the Marc Watson tweet I wrote about last month was in response to a question from him.

[Some material in the first paragraph was moved from the first update to yesterday's story at the request of EnDeLe.]

A purge of Minecraft modders

I am not making this up.

The friction between modders and players has escalated into war. From a post on the Minecraft Forums:

The community seems to be losing sight of what I have started our path on. We are getting caught on petty things like open source or closed source, weather sub programs count as a mod, and EULA being unclear. These are not the issue we are facing.

The main issue is the toxicity of the modded community. It needs to be purged. Some modders are feeling over privileged due to their mod(s) taking off, leaving others of equal if not greater quality in their wake. They feel too entitled and have to be knocked from their high horse. For some of them, if they don't get their ego stroked regularly they throw a fit, and the scenario Neko outlined could become a real event. If that happened what would Mojang do? Go on, speculate.

We are going to lose some of our best mods. I am sure of this. Which ones is difficult to say, but their will be a loss. These loses should not be mourned like RedPower was, they should be celebrated! Every mod that steps down is a mod we don't have to fear. Same goes for the mods that leave us forever.

Our modded community has been labeled as one of the worst game community's out there. That is not because of a ton of bad modders, but because of a few. These rotten apples need to be expelled or cured before something happens that all of minecraft feels the repercussions.

And in another post:

We are going to lose mods, and in the short term this is going to hurt the modded community but in the long run, it will be better as new mods come out to replace the lost. We are losing some of the creative minds, but their ideas will always linger and eventually be replaced. It's going to take time, but make no mistake, the community will recover and be better off. [Emphasis in original]

A purge? Seriously? Modders quitting should be celebrated? This person comes off as a two-bit tyrant. Have they been going to dictator school? Who put them in charge?

The above was posted today by the user lukeb28 in the topic To Mod Creators: Copyrights and Malicious code which was started a few days ago by the same person. This is the topic that helped set into motion what has become the latest Minecraft modding ruckus as played out on the Feed the Beast forums, Reddit, and Twitter.

Unfortunately the purge has had some success as a number of modders have announced their departure from modding in the last couple of days.

The answer to fixing a toxic community is to lobby Mojang to address it, not to engage in a power struggle to purge the people you don't like.

Update [2]:

In Minecraft's EULA gets less hazy I describe the miscommunication from Mojang's Marc Watson that misled people on the EULA's terms for modding.

Thus it's much more understandable how lukeb28 could wander so far off into fantasyland regarding Mojang's mod policy. He was misinformed.

This doesn't excuse anyone who supported the idea of purging modders from the community, however.

Minecraft has sold 13 million copies on PC

Minecraft recently achieved another sales milestone:

Woho! Minecraft (PC) has now sold over 13,000,000 copies! \o/
— Jens Bergensten (@jeb_) December 13, 2013

This puts Minecraft in 4th place of Wikipedia's list of best-selling PC games, just behind World of Warcraft's 14 million. Note that the number for WoW is for box sales. It won't be long before Minecraft passes WoW to take 3rd place in PC sales.

To put Minecraft's and WoW's sales numbers in perspective let's look at what has taken place since October, 2010, when three things happened:

• WoW subscriptions peaked at 12 million
• Mojang AB was founded
• Minecraft Alpha 1.2.0 "Halloween Update" was released

Minecraft sales didn't hit 1 million sold until January, 2011, after December's beta release.

In July, 2013 Blizzard revealed that the number of WoW subscribers had subsided to 7 million.

Since October, 2010, WoW has lost 5 million subscribers while Minecraft has sold 12 million copies.