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Minecraft expands its subscription drive with the Marketplace Pass150 Minecraft content packs a month, Bedrock only
150 Minecraft content packs a month, Bedrock only
Image credit:Microsoft
Image credit:Microsoft
Mojang have announced a newMinecraftsubscription service, the Marketplace Pass, which grants access to a catalogue of “150+” community-created Minecraft thingy-ma-bobs. Skins, adventure worlds, survival spawns, mashups, bizarretextures- with a Marketplace Pass, the wider monetisable universe of Minecraft is your (rented) oyster, except that this being Minecraft, theoysterlooks like a weird underwater trapdoor. Here’s a trailer.
Minecraft x Marketplace PassWatch on YouTube
Minecraft x Marketplace Pass
The new Pass is only available for Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, however, not the Java game, as per Minecraft’s usual church-and-state division between the older versions beloved of modders and the multiplatform editions devised under Microsoft’s reign. If you prefer to play Minecraft with friends, you can take out one of Minecraft’s existing Realms Plus subscriptions, which nets you everything in the Marketplace Pass plus a personal multiplayerserverwith space for 10 users.
As with subscriptions at large, you’re only procuring temporary access to all these things - once the catalog refreshes, and once your subscription ends, you’ll need to buy any removed worlds, texture packs, skin packs, or mash-up packs individually if you want to keep playing with them, though the packs themselves won’t be automatically deleted from local storage. Each monthly catalogue refresh does, however, include some time-limited character creator items, which are yours to keep forever once redeemed - this month’s options include a swanky pair of boots, a leotard and a crown. If you end your Marketplace Pass subscription, you’ll have 18 months to download any world templates you’ve saved to cloud storage.
The news comes at a precarious time for the subscription biz in general. An Ubisoft executive recently observed that playersdon’t feel “comfortable” with game subscription services, while Larian’s CEO is of the opinion thata wholly subscription-driven games industry would be “savage”, because it would give platform holders far too much control over what gets made. Microsoft’s Game Pass is perhaps the best-known and most popular subscription service, but there are signs that itsgrowth is slowing, partly because there are only so many Xbox consoles in the wild.
