Download the server revenue tracking script (and all the data in this video) here - www.patreon.com/TheMisterEpic This video took a lot of time and effort, so please subscribe! Join my minecraft server: og-network.net (bedrock port: 19132) Server discord - discord.gg/G7zq6NPZnM

seeing how much some people spend on a server makes me feel better about my own financial decisions

As a polish guy I'm pretty sure they're doing so good cuz barely anyone pays for actual Minecraft and spend money once or twice on a server then never log back into it

These financial choices make me feel like a genuis

Hey there! Great work on this video, and thanks for the shoutout. You weren't far off with your average calculation for MassiveCraft, your prediction was 1170.54, and our monthly average right now is 1193.97, which comes to about a monthly profit of 100 USD. Keep up the good work!

Shame modders can't get this type of money

To be honest i believe most of the servers fake their recent donations to some degree, i mean its a good business strategy to get people to see that someone is spending money so they would be more likely to spend

Hey thats me @ 7:26 !! As the owner of Vanilla Europa, you did portray this somewhat accurately, but it's worth noting that the majority of players get ranks and special items from voting and events, but yes you can also get those in the store.

It must have been fun trying to read the Polish text while copying it into that notepad From what I know, CraftMC became this popular by a sheer coincidence, as at one point, a couple of once massive polish servers either disappeared, like CraftApple, because the owner just suddenly went dark or mcsurvi pl that was once the largest server in Poland, or YTbers that were admining their servers - such as JasMC w/ JDabrowski or vertez-pl w/ Vertez (I believe that's what they were called) have stopped making minecraft content and/or their channels started dying out, resulting in their massive servers too going under. As such, a gap in the market was created that CraftMC very neatly fitted and consequently gathered a large number of players. Those players, mind you, are usually 9-15 year oldsd with cracked launchers that are the most likely to pay for in-game items. In Poland, majority of players use apps like Crystal Launcher or Shiginima Launcher (or at least used to when I played minecraft daily) and CraftMC being a cracked server makes it even more accessible.

Hypixel feels justified as its a large server with a large development team. They've got costs and people to pay.

A more accurate way to calculate the total would be to find the revenue per average player count for each server and then average those. By doing the calculations the way you're currently doing, some of the smaller servers have almost no impact on the resulting value.

Hey, head manager of Fire Vanilla here, Interesting to see how revenue can take a spike and a fall so regularly. Last summer we were doing $900 a week and now it’s more like that a month. Hopefully new season will bring it back to life lol

Back when I owned a server, servers would pay 5k-10k for a month of advertising(like server list can’t think of the names now) and to hire KZfaqrs like vik and prestonplays, costed us 20k to get them to make a video on the server(13k for vik and 7k for Preston) generally you’d push your server population up to 100+ and hope to make your return in 3 months.

Thanks for taking the time to do this. As a staff member on a large server, this was very interesting for me to see!

Bro's got a promising future with the IRS

5:16 It might be a little strange, but it is possible to buy unbans using netherite ingots or whatever currency that server uses. It's hard to explain but because of minecraft's eula, it technically is allowed to buy a rank on a server by being payed with netherite ingots, due to the all the items being obtained in survival minecraft. I'll bet that is what is happening with the unbans there.

MisterEpic is so badass for goin on a server,tells the money that the server makes,tells everyone that they spend almost 100 USD for a useless rank and then doesn't care if he is gonna get muted from the moderators is so crazy. Awesome video MisterEpic

As a polish user I think I know the reason behind such a high amount of money being get by servers. Main reason polish servers are getting so much money is because most of the cracked server's player base are kids in age 9-13, and they most of the time buy things with no awareness. (or with parent's money which is sad)

I love how a staff on that melon server tried to tell TheMisterEpic out of all people to learn what p2w means

Damn you were almost spot on with massivecraft. Nice to see support thrown over!

Great video I still remember when u had 30k subs been here since the beginning All love man!❤💯

As a data scientist, I very much appreciate your transparency about your methodology and the giant grain of salt you have us take with your final projection. I think you're missing something big, though: you're assuming that the purchases you're recording are all legitimate, when some could be bot-generated, designed to make products appear more popular than they are, or *some may be outright money laundering* Would you be willing to make your dataset publicly available? I'm really curious what other insights we can glean from it.

Another good video from you :D I don’t think anyone touched that topic before, was really interesting to watch!

Amazing video! Appreciate you taking the time to get us this info!

It's quite mind boggling how a Minecraft server can even make that much money.

This is actually a wild video, I've always been interested on how much some of these servers made.

This was a really interesting and well-put-together video. I will say, though, the background music made it a bit hard to hear what was being said. But thank you for putting this together! It's fascinating stuff to think about.

You have probably not converted the currenecies (1$ is ~4.17 PLN) for craftmc item prices, therefore the correct amounts are ~5791$ monthly and ~78134$ yearly. Other than that the player retention is rather weak with people buying commodities and later leaving within a few weeks of playtime. 11:44

Honestly this is sad, baffling and kinda impressive at the same time, you could also exploit tebex itself (which is most minecraft server webstores use for purchaces) to calculate the money,,,

Hypixel has so many players that don' t play skyblock, it is a very loose estimate to assume that every player is spending upwards of $50 per month in the server alone. With that said, this video is still very educational on minecraft server profits and I hope the good content continues.

Guys don't forget: Running a server costs a ton. Big channels have staff: Staff doesn't only cost the wages but also associated employer outlays. This adds up. Yeah they make money, but way less then similar buisnesses both in and outside gaming. It sounds like so much, but it really isn't.

I think it's thanks to you ( and some personal research on some p2w servers) that I have decided to play on non p2w or servers that don't reinforce the p2w so hard. along with Sal1C, Horizon, and many others. Good stuff man.

It's important to note that this is revenue and not profit. Revenue is not the full picture as there are lots of costs that drain away at that revenue. Edit: I know mr epic mentioned this eventually but that was at the end of the video, far too late imo

This video made me sub good video nice job!:)

6:07 I used to play on MineBerry after I saw it in a banner ad in tlauncher (forgive me for this sin) back in late 2019/20(?) It was extremely p2w, especially in the survival server. The Immortal rank literally allows /op and there are many who sells their stacked shulkers of stacked 32k gear and items. The economy is inflated as hell, and I quitted after spending like 2 or 3 months grinding naturally with my little brother only for it to reset.

i'd love a video of some insight on the backend and how you run your server!

A quick note on hypixel skyblock While yes it is pay to win, it's still very f2p friendly as booster cookies are on the bazaar meaning everyone on regular and ironman profiles can access them. On top of this, most endgame players got their coins without paying because it's just that easy to make money f2p on hypixel. Overall, I'd say hypixel is the most f2p friendly p2w server out there, especislly since its only skyblock which is p2w

great vid bro, love the content

This was really interesting, thanks for collecting and sharing all this data. Is there a video planned for how much money it takes to run a Minecraft server? I'm glad Hypixel has been able to pay their mods.

Very interesting experiment! Would be interesting to see this tracked over a longer period, especially the summer months when more kids aren’t in school. I ran a server for 3 years between 2019 and 2022 during the second boom of Minecraft and averaged 10-20 players, so very small, yet still averaged £250 a month! Crazy to see how much things have changed

I'm Polish, used to play on that server and have a few theories why it makes that much money. No inside data but like 7 years of playing on that or simmilar Polish servers.

GREAT VIDEO DAMN THIS WAS REALLY GOOD CAN'T WAIT UR NEXT UPLOAD!

Was waiting for you to expose my server. THANK GOD!!

I am Polish and from my experience in Poland, not many people buy Minecraft. Instead, they tend to spend their money on servers. This is because almost all Polish servers are cracked (referred to as "non-premium" by Polish people). Even those who do buy Minecraft tend to play on these servers because of language. In these "cracked" (non-premium) servers, there is surely a group of people who play with paid Minecraft accounts, and they are more likely to buy items from shops. The major part of the Polish Minecraft community consists of 7-11-year-old kids. Paysafecards are popular in Poland (as far as I know they are also popular in Romania, Greece and the Czech Republic). Paysafecards are prepaid cards that can be bought in almost every shop (primarily in every Żabka - a very popular, widespread Polish shop, that is literally on every street corner) and then used to buy stuff from the internet anonymously and in cash. Kids don't need to steal their parents' credit card, but they can use their own. They tend not to understand the value of money and end up spending it. Usually, they buy things that are priced low, such as $1 to $2, up to maybe $5 for VIPs. Higher sums are too much in one go, and when they buy in smaller sums, they don't realize the accumulating costs over time. Besides, almost every server is P2W (pay-to-win) or has a lot of microtransactions, which might seem acceptable to kids, and they do not see anything wrong with it. Being anonymous means they can buy stuff online without their parents' knowledge, and this lack of parental control leads to kids spending a ridiculous amount of money.

In these stores you are allowed to give out vouchers to players. Many servers do this, and these purchases appear in the 'recent donators' tab. This is why some servers (Like purple) have weird ratios.

This video doubles as an expose against the servers that lie against player counts, surprised you didn’t advertise doing that as well. Good job on the video!

I will say that Hypixel Skyblock making so much makes sense to me, and with how much they innovate in their Skyblock game mode makes me feel like it's reasonable. After all, it's Minecraft's biggest MMORPG. Btw I have a biased towards Hypixel Skyblock, I'm not a max skills/gear/pets/dungeon lvl guy, but I do happen to be a person who joined post original End update, around August - November 2019. And I loved the Dante vs Technoblade event in 2021. Made that year of highs actually have a highlight lol

Minecraft servers make a lot more than I thought they do

I used to be staff on Manacube. They claim to offer items that aren't pay to win but obviously are, its like the whole server is gaslighting one another to believe that tremendous lie. Also the pressure to buy items on there is insane, reinforcing a culture of alienating the people who have not paid meanwhile there is an almost cultish like surrounding of the owner. Scary stuff especially when children are the prime targets of this manipulation.

This is insanely accurate, I'm the owner of HYLEXMC, 5:25, it only few euros off, and thank you for providing this data :)

I remember watching a video where the speaker pretty much said that one way to get people's money in a game is to deliberately give the individual a lot of choices as to what to buy and make the relation of said purchases to each other vague, by doing so someone is actually more likely to buy if they feel as if they have tons of choice as opposed to fewer.

You gotta use the median if your including purple prison and other high pop server stats since they skew the data causing misrepresentations, apart from calculating the hypixel revenue nice job.

Honestly i wouldn't say that vanilla europa is a semi p2w server. I play there a lot (in fact, i was there when you recorded the video) and you can get all the rewards from special crate without paying just fine due to the presence of a vote party that gives you a special key most of the time and the ability to buy special crates items with diamonds. Other than that i think that this is a well done video. Good job!

I'm from Poland but my explanations can be more general. Not all players in cracked servers are people who haven't bought minecraft. Minecraft is often played with friends. In poorer countries, many people cannot afford to buy Minecraft. So people with money wanting to play with friends play on cracked servers. They spend money maybe bc they want to show and ofc its p2w but still they want to be able to play with friends who didn't buy minecraft.

I have actually been looking to start an mc network as a business for a while and wanted to know the revenue potential of a Minecraft server. While I didnt go as in depth in my math as you, I got about the same numbers for a server like Hypixel. I think we are pretty close. So needless to say, there is profitability in this if you can find a cheap enough cloud hosting platform. Services like AWS likely cant cut it because of costs.

out of curiosity what is stopping these servers from just pretending that people are buying ranks and displaying it on the shop in order to encourage others to buy stuff? same way that servers spoof players to pretend people are playing on them. that might explain why some servers have people spending an absurd amount of money per month. good video overall ofc

I’m sorry, but this must have taken forever to make this. GG MisterEpic, now leak your own servers stats xD

I used to play on purityvanilla! It was a really cool minecraft server. I really love how the queue is a gamemode of itself with mostly fishing based economy!

Hypixel also has a full staff of admins, for which hypixel is their actual job. Hypixels high amount of money HAS to be high to support the salaries of the admin team, and to pay for the servers. The servers, which, are supporting over 50 THOUSAND players around the clock with relatively low lag.

Should have looked into pixelmon servers, they are typically very p2w and offer a ton of different ways to spend

As a pole, I think the reason so many people buy stuff on cracked servers is because the people in our country find a minecraft account useless, since almost every single polish server is cracked. So basically a polish cracked server works like a normal server. We have no reasons to buy minecraft but spending on servers is pretty popular.

could you do a video analysing the most popular server from each country (or general region). seing for exemples what kind of servers work best were .I thought of this because of the most popular french server :Paladium and i wanted to know if other region add others type of servers (mini game,anarchy,...) as the best server created there.

great vid really insightful but i did want to make a note as a hypixel skyblock player it is a large misconseption that skyblock is ptw while yes you can buy coins with real money which is technically ptw it dosent make a diffrence, no one within the top like 5k players (rough estimate) spend real life money on the game for an advantage (unless you count irl trading but that is another topic on its own)

It’s a shocker how much money a Minecraft server can make, it really shows us something about the servers themselves!

8:33 Why be a LonelyTrooper when you can upgrade to DuperTrooper?

I wonder how the stats for hypixel would look like if you took the average cost of the store vs the avg player count, and see how that compares to profits. Do it for all the servers and put it on a graph. Then see what hypixel should be looking like. It's basically seeing how much money the average player spends. I think if you just do money per month/average player count, you could see some similarities between servers, but also if you do average cost of an item/profits, there could be a trend there. You could use these to extrapolate different estimates. I am curious how this would affect the estimated hypixel profits.

It's so bizarre seeing how different of a world this is from what I think of minecraft servers as being, which is just like 10 people max building in a survival world

As a Hypixel player I think the number must be in the $50 m a year. The reason I can comfortably come to this price is bcs unlike most servers a lot of people gift a lot of money in ranks to others. I have probably spent $700-900 on gems, ranks for others and ranks for me and my alr I am definitely an outlier but like still

It goes to show that running a Minecraft server will not be a good full-time job unless you are hired by the top servers or have the server pay2win

Another Polish guy to speak from experience: Polish servers typically had a model of locking the really fun stuff behind ranks. For example, there was (maybe still is, not sure) a gamemode called "Fighters vs Monsters", where you'd have different classes with abilities to play. All well and good, but 90% of the actually fun classes were locked behind ranks or paywalls that would unlock it for you. Buying a perma rank would also cost so much, it would probably be more worth it to spend enough cash for months of it. Ontop of that, Polish servers make it *very easy* to buy stuff from them. For instance I remember some servers even accepting paying by sending a text message and having it bill through your phone company. Which also tricked kids into spending alot of cash. A friend of mine had an unlimited data plan on his phone when we were in primary school (like 8 or so years ago?), so he thought he could cheat the system and blew a couple thousands of his parents' money on stuff on the server. Though I'm not sure how the situation looks nowadays, since I haven't played on any Polish servers in actual years.

Cool vid!

As a Polish myself, I can pretty much say that craftmc is one of the biggest non-premium servers in all of Poland. That's why they might do so well. The second thing is that Polish people like paying for in-game goods more than a premium account. The third thing that I saw while playing is that there is a lot of premium players too but they just want to play with their non-premium friends. Last thing that I see is that they try to get the most polish popular trends, as some mid-age guys in Poland love lifesteal smp's and other things like that

As long as you got FartyMcFartson on your server it's profitable

Keep in mind that this is just straight revenue, not gross profit. It obviously costs money per month to run the Minecraft servers, whether you host it yourself on dedicated servers or buy a subscription service. I am not entirely sure if Hypixel staff get paid at all or if it is strictly volunteer, but that also plays into it a lot if they do. The actual profits after expenses will be significantly lower depending on how high the expenses are.

11:05 Tbh I've never heard 'bout this server, but the case may be or partly is that polish community have their own cracked launcher called "Crystal Launcher" which is well known. In this launcher servers can buy ads of their servers that displays on launcher. The other thing is - it's not a secret that most of players of this server and similar servers are just kids. They don't really care about game which is "free" or not - they just want to be somehow best on this one server and are buying these silly ranks just to show others that they are better.

The thing about a server like Hypixel is that they require a lot of capital in order to even maintain their servers. Things like hardware, licensing and salaries will cost the company a lot. So, even though they're making a lot of money, their net profit is probably only a few thousand dollars. I know that the point of the video was to give an estimate of how much Minecraft servers make in a month but it seems to accuse some servers (Hypixel) of making millions even though that is their net profit is much lower than the millions they were making. Great vid though. Nice to see someone bringing good content to the internet.

Honestly Vanilla Europa Is a great server to play on

Back in the day when Timeless ran some months the server made over 1 million dollars a month when SSundee and Vikkstar123 did there faction battles. The reason the EULA with was pushed so hard.

As a spanish speaking person and a casual universo player, I can confidently say that the problem here is that in many countries like Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, etc. a Minecraft account is worth too much, so they get a cracked account and buy those ranks, that are probably cheaper. Neptuno may be the rank thats comparable in price to a mc account but, if you play long enough, its like spending MVP+ on hypixel when you play a lot of pvp / skyblock, it becomes worth it.

it feels like running a discord but you actually earn money

Just because a server is cracked, doesn't mean the playerbase is 100% of cracked Minecraft players, I used to play on cracked servers despite me having purchased the game. Why? You ask. Because my friends couldn't afford the game.

you could calculate the money made with hypixel skyblock way more accurate if you track cookie sales on the bazaar and the special sales in the community center

I have a 3 year old server, modded but vanilla feel, centered in the Create mod and focused in technical minecraft. No pay to win at all, the server currently pays itself since some months ago, but it makes no more than 60/month, which all is wasted in server costs.

i would say its kinda a waste of money to spend money on ranks... although i still have og++ -i refuse to spend money on hypixel

Wondering, if some servers fake their playercounts, wouldn't some fake their sales so other people see them and go ''Oh, this guy bought it, I should too''?

Polish people tend to not want to spend a lot of money at a time (and usually can't) so a lot of them tend to spend about 10 dollars max on a server they like, play for like a month or two then never touch it again. Minecraft is considered expensive here but ranks on a server not so much

While Skyblock may make it easy to get lots of money, they do add crazy high requirements (I would know) that often require a lot of other tasks and challenges which cant be purcahsed to complete. Most of those benefits are small qol things like afk immunity which dosn't really do anything and mabey remote acces to a anvil/enchanting table which again arent very useful.

Purity Vanilla for the win👌🏼🔥🙌🏼

I am polish and. So CraftMC has a lot of different servers ips that bring you to their main server. Another thing is that people that native polish speakers that play games are not really good in english so they want to, instead of learning, speak with people from poland. The another thing is that most people that play on their server are kids that beg their parents to buy them ranks etc. There was A LOT of drama involving them back in the day but they just "tanked" thru it. Thats why theyre doing really well.

As a person who runs a non pay to win server I can in fact confirm your final statement there to be true. To get our server back up and running (after we suffered a fatal data loss just before I took the server over) cost me personally a total of about $800 of debt, which took the server about 10 months in total to pay off. With today's economy it's much harder to generate income, often our server donations just about cover our costs, then we bank any spare money to make sure if we get a low income month, we have money there to fall back on if we need it. The only way to make some money in the Minecraft server space is if you've either been well established for a long time, or if you're pay to win which is a road I never want us to go down. Just for same baseline figures, our servers total costs these days is around $350 monthly, we host our own backup server which is used daily, our own website, databases, panel, we pay for DDOS protection which is around $100 due to the bandwidth requirements. We try to do everything in house to cut down on costs but it doesn't help much... More than happy to go into more detail if you're ever interested 👍

i assure you, just skyblock makeshypixel over 3m a month, you can calculate how many booster cookies are in the bazaar every week (which is a much lower number than how many cookies are being bought mind you), and how many skins people buy from fire sales

Another MisterEpic W, actual based activity Honestly though, I've never seen anyone do or cover anything like MisterEpic, it's great to know that any upload from him will be something of quality no matter what it's covering.

I still feel sorry for Pewdiepie for spending a few minutes on Purple Prison 4 years ago.

In Poland we basically started playing minecraft on cracked, due to explosion of the popularity back in 2012. A lot of kids wanted to play like their "big youtubers". So they mostly downloaded cracked clients. Because of that pretty much every server in Poland is on cracked.

When you were on Universo Craft the capture the wool game you were playing was literally a map from hypixel

A comment on the statement that hypixel skyblock being P2W. While you can buy gems to get booster cookies and sell them on the bazzar, the majority of the playerbase do not do this. actually it is becoming a problem that not many people do this (The economey is in shambles RN). so yes some players are doing P2W, Skyblock has nothing that can nessasarilly make you better then other players.

As far as i understand, the P2W feature on skyblock is extremely inefficient so i don't really know how many people are using it.

I’d like to suggest that many of the servers, especially the botted ones fake purchases. Make sure to cross reference online players with purchases and such

You have to add the regular purchases and subtract the losses that they get from dupers anddddd the decline in active players andddd the prices.

You should test how much money they make before and after duping shenanigans