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

There has been a significant increase in videogames using in-game content creation as their main mode. Although there is a literature that has explored various characteristics of these games, one of the aspects that requires further investigation is the practices of monetisation that are possible to observe in their environment. Our ethnographic research revealed an active market for commissioning in Minecraft's creative community. Our findings point out the 3 main actors that constitute this market: the customers, who are the owners of Minecraft servers as well as the contractors who manage the clients' orders of Minecraft maps; and the builders, who are responsible for the creation of the maps. Minecraft server list has shown that the primary product at stake is not in-game content, as one would expect however, it is the process of creating it. These findings suggest that commissioning in Minecraft - a well-organised process, driven and sustained solely by the players in the game's community - plays an important role in the game's current structure. Furthermore, they challenge the belief that the creation of content in gaming settings is free-labour that is exploited by the game's creators.