Sorry, there will never be a Bernie Sanders (or Colonel Sanders) version of Minecraft
Microsoft and its Mojang subsidiary said Tuesday that they will begin blocking corporations and politicians from using Minecraft to promote their own agendas, including the sale of products, movies, or political views.
“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,” Mojang wrote in a blog post. The new additions are now part of Mojang’s Commercial Usage Guidelines.
Why this matters: The problem, according to Mojang, is that Minecraft has grown so large that it’s now a viable platform for promoting products and services, especially through shared servers that can be accessed by just about anyone. According to Mojang, the company has sold over 23.5 million copies of the Java version of Minecraft, with additional sales going toward Windows 10’s UWP version of the game. Many of those users are also watching Minecraft-themed videos on YouTube, which can also serve as vehicles to promote products.
The new rules apply mainly toward players developing mods or shared servers, where they can control what content players see. As of today, Mojang now says that usrs who build a Minecraft mod won’t be able to design a mod that promotes an “unrelated” third-party product, such as a Burger King.
Likewise, mods and mapmakers won’t be able to design a world specifically intended to market a movie or TV show, such as Lord of the Rings.
However, there’s one enormous loophole: Fans of a show or a product “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,” Mojang wrote. So if you really want to build the world’s largest Twinkie, you can—as long as the owners haven’t asked you to build it.