The beauty of Minecraft is that you can create pretty much whatever you want – but developer Mojang has decided it’s time to get tough with some kinds of creations.
Namely, it’s now considered taboo to specifically promote any unrelated (non Minecraft) products in-game. That shit goes against the user guidelines, baby.
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Mojang’s director of creative communications, Owen Hill explained in a blog post:
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.
As it stood, corporations could market their own products by creating promotional materials in Minecraft. Restaurants, bands, films, even political parties could use the game for their own purposes.
Since the new guidelines have a put a stop to any of that nonsense, I’ll guess we’ll never get to see Donald Trump virtually demonstrate how he was gonna build that wall. Pity.
That said, fans are still completely okay to pay tribute to their own favourite media. My mission to perfectly replicate every KFC between London and Nottingham continues.
Hill clarified:
It’s worth mentioning 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. The new rules only apply to companies or organisations that are using Minecraft to sell their products or promote their causes.
Great news then, since Minecraft fans really do come up with some astounding stuff. Take this guy, who made an actual working version of Pokemon Red.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.