Minecraft is a video gaming and social phenomenon that has made deep waves across the industry. As a game it has inspired gamers and educators alike; but it’s still primarily a single player game with multiplayer attached by allowing an instance of Minecraft to act as a server–this has given rise to a number of services that provide servers so that players can gather and collaborate.

Mojang has seen the proliferation and brilliance of servers and is aware that by-and-large the entire hardcore gamer scene is well infatuated with Minecraft; but there’s an entire segment of family gamers who may be holding back. To reach out to this untapped market, the Minecraft maker wishes to provide a subscription service known as Realms that will give those players they control they need.

“Our customers [for Realms] are parents who are tired of trying to act as server administrators on behalf of their kids,” said Mojang CEO Carl Manneh (as translated by GI.biz). “Minecraft Realms will be a simpler kind of service, aimed at families and kids. In the future we aim to offer certain profiles with mods that are certified to work without crashing, but this will still be a safe and easy way for kids and families to play Minecraft online.”

Subscribers to Realms will be able to keep and administrate their own private Minecraft worlds. As a result, one person will have full control over what happens, who can join (via a whitelist), and what plugins can be run. All others need is their own copy of Minecraft and an Internet connection to join in on the fun.

“In the end I think this will get Minecraft new players, since there is a viral aspect of Realms. Kids will probably invite friends who don’t have Minecraft yet to play with them,” Manneh said.

“All we know is that there has been a great demand for this service. We have never tried to sell anything to our gamers except the game itself and a little merchandise, so it’ll be very interesting to see if the community will be prepared to pay for a service like this.

“But since we have about 10 million paying PC gamers and, soon, as many mobile gamers, there’s definitely potential. And yes, if we look ahead, I do think [Realms will] be the biggest source of income in the future, and to bring in more money in total than the game itself.”

Right now, Minecraft Realms is in private alpha testing but has a “hopeful” beta launch planned for May. There is both a version of Realms being developed for PC as well as mobile (to work with Minecraft Pocket Edition). Realms for PC will be hosted by Multiplay and the mobile version will reside on Amazon’s servers.

No subscription cost is set yet, but Mojang expects it to fall into the range of $10 or $15 a month. This puts it into the common range for most MMO subscriptions. No news on how many players can be in a particular Realm at once–most Minecraft servers on the open market prorate their pricing on how much memory and CPU is needed to support a population of players, which can range from as few as 8 to exceeding 256 (the software can support over a million players…but most servers certainly couldn’t.)

Portals between worlds to connect up different creative gardens

As an interesting aside, Manneh also mentioned that if Realms becomes as popular as Mojang hopes the company will consider adding “portals.”

These portals would enable admins to link together their personal worlds with one another yet further expanding the total network and creative power of Minecraft. As different subscribers to Realms open up their realms to one another, it would generate new ideas and a whole new market for gamers to approach gaming.