Minefold (YC W12) launches mods with more games coming soon

http://blog.mutlicorp.com/post/37122249101

by chrislloyd • 14 years ago

95 39 14 years ago

blog.mutlicorp.com

kennystone• 14 years ago

Pretty awesome, seems Minefold is evolving from a Minecraft specific service to a heroku-like platform for games (and Heroku started with just Rails, of course).

martythemaniak• 14 years ago

Yeah, I can't wait to give CS a try.

alexeischiopu• 14 years ago

Love the new website

elisee• 14 years ago

Looks like a nice, lean service, kinda reminds me of iWantMyName's approach to domain names: clean & straightforward.

If you guys are interested in hosting CraftStudio servers (my Minecraft-inspired collaborative game-making platform for gamers), I'd be happy to provide some guidance. You can hit me up at elisee@craftstud.io - http://craftstud.io/

zrail• 14 years ago

Funpacks sound awesome, I'm looking forward to reading about them and the new backend services.

tptacek4• 14 years ago

Minefold is something you wouldn't assume would be hugely lucrative unless you are the parent of a 10-13 year old kid, in which case you are kicking yourself for not putting sane pricing on top of on-demand Minecraft servers that don't require you to tech support a colo machine.

I'd be a customer right now, except that the boy has learned more Unix and scripting in 2 months of running a Minecraft server than he did in 5 years of me pushing stuff on him. But for the problem that colo solves for him, it's hellaciously expensive.

danielweber• 14 years ago

except that the boy has learned more Unix and scripting in 2 months of running a Minecraft server than he did in 5 years of me pushing stuff on him

That should be obvious, since intrinsic motivation is always better than extrinsic motivation.

But if it were obvious, I, too, would have realized that I should have given my son a unix box to run his own minecraft server. I wonder if that would work for Christmas.

tptacek4• 14 years ago

Swear to god, what the boy wants for Xmas this year: MORE RAM FOR HIS COLO.

I'm not sure whether I'm thrilled or terrified.

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

If you wait another 3 months I'm sure he'll be running his own hosting business. The majority[1] of Minecraft hosting businesses are ran by teenagers, it's quite interesting how low the barriers to entry are. $50 for 1 month rental on a mediocre dedicated server, $10 for a domain and $20 for a billing system license and then a couple of hours to configure a website template to your liking and you're ready to go! All you need is a few customers and you're already making money. Problem is without volume the business(es) will never make much profit, but for a lot of teenagers $200/m profit and the joy from running a business is worth it. It's the shared hosting of 201x[2]

It can be pretty treacherous for consumers though (part of why Minefold is great, by investing in building a platform they've demonstrated they have commitment to the business) because inevitably most teenagers don't understand the commitment they're making to their customers and things frequently fall apart. I can't count the amount of problems hosts falling apart has caused me, I had to make a concious effort to exclude it from my life about 6 months ago after a kid threatened to drive to my apartment and beat me up.

[1] Most are relatively small but there are quite a few teenage run Minecraft hosts supporting thousands of customers. The biggest Minecraft hosts are "proper businesses" though, with companies like Multiplay hosting ~15k Minecraft servers.

[2] I assume everyone here had their fun times running a web host at some point in their internet career.

evoxed• 14 years ago

This was just the state of the web a little less than ten years ago as well. One of my first businesses as a 12-year-old was running a couple of shared servers and teaching others how to do it as well. The little-big-leagues was actually getting dedicated servers of your own, rented or colo. It taught me a hell of a lot about how to manage a brand at a small scale, as well as how to treat customers (some of whom were clients as well, but with slightly different needs). You're definitely right about some kids not knowing how to deal with the effort and responsibility of running a service business (no matter how small), but there were definitely a few who took it the other way– I would bend over backwards to keep people happy in fear of damaging my credibility.

Anyway, I think it's great that Minecraft can become an outlet for those kids today. Some customers will get a lesson on dealing with people they don't know or trust, and a few young providers will get more than a few valuable lessons on providing a service and keeping people happy.

dirkk03• 14 years ago

That's exactly why I wrote a script making it extremely easy to launch an EC2 instance with the last saved game for my 13 year old daughter. I am in the process of turning this into a web service, so if anybody wants to give it a try, let me know.

opendomain• 14 years ago

I was trying to do the same thing - please let me know how your worked. Contact me HackerNews @ OpenDomain dot Org

debacle2• 14 years ago

If you are the parent of 4-7 year old kids, it's just another server to support.

And the client's demands are ridiculous.

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

4/6 of my previous coworkers played Minecraft, as do both of my brothers. There is a huge unmet demand for reliable game servers that dont'cost a fortune.

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

on the settings page (https://minefold.com/settings) there's a curious display issue. Not sure if it's the fault of Chrome (on Windows 7) or a style setting, but I'm missing the bracket opening for my username and the coin amount for Facebook invites: http://i.imgur.com/lOJH5.png

chrislloyd2• 14 years ago

That is… weird. Investigating now.

swies• 14 years ago

Remove the text-rendering: optimizelegibility; line from your CSS and that text will render properly again.

We ran into this on Windows Chrome too. It was a pain to track down.

danteembermage• 14 years ago

It's not obvious from the page, is it 5 coins per minute (for a normal server) while someone is online or is it 5 coins per minute 24/7? If it's while online only this could be an incredible cost savings relative to a $5 a month server that a handful of friends sign on once in a while.

chrislloyd2• 14 years ago

For "normal" servers it's only 5 coins / min is only while the sever is running. If you only play for a few hours on Friday evenings it works out to be really good :)

rwhitman• 14 years ago

I was thinking of signing up for this for my nephew, maybe as an Xmas gift but the pricing scheme I find kind of confusing, especially as I'd be turning this over eventually to my brother (his dad) who isn't really familiar with web hosts and might be offput by the fact its rated in terms of minutes of playtime

Seeing as this is kind of geared towards kids wouldn't a much more simplified pricing scheme make more sense?

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

The pricing looks a bit confusing now (the straightforward $x/person before was much better imo), but I look forward to the CS:GO servers :)

yesimahuman• 14 years ago

Yea, I'm curious what's with the coin based pricing, it's incredibly complicated IMO.

tonetheman• 14 years ago

I like the idea but the coin pricing kills it for me.

I can't figure out what it really means exactly. Maybe put an example up of what it would look like to run a few hours on the weekends? Just a thought.

The idea is still a good one.

bookcasey• 14 years ago

Two things.

In the settings "Link your Minecraft account for 400 coins" is ambiguous. Am I spending coins or getting coins?

Also, look into Feed the Beast, it's a mod pack (like Tekkit) except built and supported by the developers of the mods. Many of whom feel Tekkit used their mods unfairly without their permission.

http://feed-the-beast.com

rdl4• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to learn what hoops you needed to jump through to be a BF3 host. I know there are only "partners" allowed to do it; I would have hosted my own at the colo otherwise. (having <5ms ping times and decent peering or transit to everyone in the Bay Area on comcast and sonic and webpass...)

devicenull2• 14 years ago

Can't say too much about the business side of it, but technically the servers are no more complicated to run then any other game server.

rdl4• 14 years ago

Yeah, it's all contractual/reseller stuff. I just wonder what is the minimum scale they'll allow. Although if a good YC company will make servers available, I'll just rent one or two.

Obviously you should host voice servers too (ventrilo or whatever)

culshaw• 14 years ago

I love the minimal design of this, reflects what you are offering so well.

Well done, I wish I played Minecraft :)

nateberkopec• 14 years ago

The coin based pricing is weird, but my god! It's Heroku for gaming servers! Why hasn't someone thought of this before?!

devicenull2• 14 years ago

I'm interested to see how this is going to work when you start throwing other games into the mix. With Minecraft, updates are fairly straightforward. With some other games (CSS, TF2, etc) the update process is pretty complicated. You've got to either roll your own updater, or have a unique steam account per server. Then you've got to run the updater, and hope it doesn't crash midway through or hang indefinitely. Once you update a server, you then need to check that all the plugins installed aren't breaking the server (or need updates themselves).

It's pretty straightforward to run thousands of stock servers, the difficulty comes in when you've got thousands of different combinations.

Edit: I'm also noticing DayZ on that page. They're perhaps the most commercial hosting unfriendly game I've ever encountered. Good luck getting instance IDs from them.

garrydanger• 14 years ago

Would love to hear Dave's experiences with moving the backend from ruby to golang, can you make sure he does actually publish those blog articles?

Minefold (YC W12) launches mods with more games coming soon

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