Minecraft Marketplace breaks $1million sales

The Minecraft Marketplace, opened by Microsoft in June 2017, has now exceeded $1million revenue from sales, Microsoft has announced in a news post.

The marketplace allows content creators to sell content created for Minecraft, including character skins, maps and customised game modes. Players can buy this using the new ‘Minecraft Coins’ currency, which is purchased with real money. It is a curated marketplace with twelve content creators at present allowed to sell on it and it is only available on Windows 10 and Android.

“Minecraft has some amazing Marketplace partners, and we’re continually bringing new folks onboard,” Microsoft said in the news post. “We started the program with nine folks back in June, and since then have expanded our partner roster to 12, with plans to keep adding more partners.

“The program offers our players a wide variety of community-created content that they can safely and easily access, while also allowing the community to support one another’s work and allow creators the chance to turn their creativity into a way to make a living.”

The marketplace launched in June 2017 with an aim to provide and monetise add-on content for Minecraft players and reward content creators. While additional content has mostly been free on Minecraft‘s original PC version for many years, thanks to a large modding and content creation community, console versions have had paid add-on content through the console’s own digital stores. Many PC content creators for Minecraft were compensated for their work via donations from the public.

"We are going to work with creators to bring new ones in via an online portal, where they can apply to join," said executive producer for Minecraft Realms, John Thornton, back when the service launched. "We think it’s important from a quality perspective to have a curated marketplace where we are reviewing the items and working with creators to make sure the content is appropriate and exciting for players.”