"We Don't Sell Blocks" Exploring Minecraft's Commissioning Market

In recent years, we have experienced the proliferation of videogames that feature, as their primary game mode creating in-game content. Even though existing literature has looked into the various aspects of these games, one of the aspects that merits further study is the practices of monetisation that can emerge in their context. 83hh.com Through our ongoing ethnographic study we discovered the market for commissions that is thriving within the Minecraft creative community. Our findings reveal three principal players in this market: the customers, who are the owners of Minecraft servers and the contractors who manage the clients' orders for Minecraft maps and the builders who are responsible for the development of the maps. Our research has shown that the primary product at stake is not the in-game content as one might expect, but rather the service of creating it. These results suggest that commissioning within Minecraft is a well-organized process, initiated and sustained solely by the players of the community - plays an important part in the game's current structure. Moreover they challenge the notion that content generation in gaming environments is free labor that is exploited by developers of those games.