Monetizing Your Minecraft Server

Fri Jul 16 2021

For a lot of Minecraft players there’s a very familiar pattern. You start off playing on your own, then with a few friends, then one of you works out how to set up a server, and you’re off. Sometimes that’s enough, and you can spend years just building crazy stuff (and rebuilding after one of your so called friends goes nuts) but for many there’s another phase that comes after that.

Once you’ve been running a server for a while, especially for more curious and technically inclined players, there’s a moment where you realise you can mod your game to make it more suited to your tastes. You can turn it into a war game, or make a capture the flag mode. You can even open it up to new players and let people discover and visit your server. It’s at that moment that a lot of server owners move from breaking even with donations to realising that it’s possible to make a living from your Minecraft habit.

Turning a hobby into business

Turning your Minecraft server into a money making business is a dream for a lot of players. Rather than working for a company you don’t care about or in a job that bores you to tears, you could instead live and breathe Minecraft, transforming your private server into a full time business venture. For a lot of server owners that transition changes a fun game that paid for itself into a working operation that starts off making a few hundred dollars a month, to one that easily turns over thousands. The biggest servers make millions of dollars every year.

The reason we set up PlayerLands was to help you make that transition from a bunch of mates having fun, to a cash generative business. For sure, we’re here to help servers that just want to keep it small and private, using the interface to have a virtual whip round each month to get enough donations to pay for hosting, but whenever you want to take it further, we’ll be there for you.

PlayerLands is here to help

As well as providing the platform to run shops for your Minecraft server, we’ve also got a huge range of guides, tutorials and instructional videos (we’re adding more of all of those every month) that help you do everything from getting a server set up in the first place, to using social media to build your business and find new players. We’ve deliberately kept them as short and easy to read as we can, and we’d love to hear your feedback once you’ve tried a few techniques for yourself.

We’ve built the PlayerLands platform to take up as little of your time as possible, because we know for most server owners, their first love is the game itself. That’s why the platform is pre-integrated with the world’s most popular payment partners, so you don’t have to spend time looking them up, negotiating deals and then messing about with a load of APIs.

You’ll also find it has shop front designs that work well on mobile. Although many players will want to shop on their PCs right where they play the game, it’s sometimes nice to browse stuff you might want to buy on your mobile or tablet. Wherever players make a purchase, they’ll be taken to the same payment interface and the command executes in the same way, dropping the items they buy into the game quickly and securely. We hope you and your players love it.