Minecraft expands its subscription drive with the Marketplace Pass

rockpapershotgun.com:

Mojang have announced a new Minecraft subscription service, the Marketplace Pass, which grants access to a catalogue of "150+" community-created Minecraft thingy-ma-bobs. Skins, adventure worlds, survival spawns, mashups, bizarre textures - with a Marketplace Pass, the wider monetisable universe of Minecraft is your (rented) oyster, except that this being Minecraft, the oyster looks like a weird underwater trapdoor. Here's a trailer.

The new Pass is only available for Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, however, not the Java game, as per Minecraft's usual church-and-state division between the older versions beloved of modders and the multiplatform editions devised under Microsoft's reign. If you prefer to play Minecraft with friends, you can take out one of Minecraft's existing Realms Plus subscriptions, which nets you everything in the Marketplace Pass plus a personal multiplayer server with space for 10 users.

Going by the announcement post, current Marketplace Pass offerings include Spark Universe's Furniture: Modern 2, which harbours more flashy armchairs than I ever dreamed possible, and 4KS Studios' Hacker Tools, a secret base full of overpowered weapons.

As with subscriptions at large, you're only procuring temporary access to all these things - once the catalog refreshes, and once your subscription ends, you'll need to buy any removed worlds, texture packs, skin packs, or mash-up packs individually if you want to keep playing with them, though the packs themselves won't be automatically deleted from local storage. Each monthly catalogue refresh does, however, include some time-limited character creator items, which are yours to keep forever once redeemed - this month's options include a swanky pair of boots, a leotard and a crown. If you end your Marketplace Pass subscription, you'll have 18 months to download any world templates you've saved to cloud storage.

A Marketplace Pass costs $3.99 a month. Given that Minecraft is a game in which you can more or