In November 2022, Gamer Dorks went back online after about a year of inactivity, to bring its community Remnant Minecraft, a SMP-turned-MMORPG server. This was a huge hit, activity increased dramatically following the release of the Minecraft server. This server eventually morphed into a whole server network, with multiple gamemodes and more to come in the future.
Two years later, we decided to shut down Remnant Minecraft and the Gamer Dorks Minecraft Network, which baffled many people around us, both people in our own community and people outside our community who watched us grow. The server shut down on December 2, 2024, and we at Gamer Dorks have shifted our attention to other projects. And yet, people continue to ask, why did we shut it down?
We owe you all an explanation. These reasons haven’t been a secret, but many of them don’t make sense without proper context.
Server hosting is too expensive
Throughout the history of Remnant Minecraft, prices only went up. We needed better servers as player counts increased, as our number of gamemodes increased, and as the complexity of those gamemodes increased. In November 2022, this started at 18 United States Dollars every month, with Bloom.host’s 8gb Performance Plan. Around August 2023, this increased to $36 / mo, since we switched to the 16gb Performance Plan from Bloom.host. And finally, in October 2024, we eventually upgraded to a dedicated server host on ReliableSite, which cost $100 / mo.
But, hosting wasn’t the only cost we had to worry about. Web hosting cost $8 / mo. Purchasing plugins would cost us anywhere from $5 to $60 per plugin, depending on how complex it is. We also had to pay for our server to be on Minehut, which cost $5 per month, and to pay for advertising, which cost anywhere from $0 to $50, depending on how much we were willing to spend.
The costs of running the server quickly ramped up to hundreds of dollars per month, and this was just too much for us. We couldn’t keep up, since our playerbase and our store sales weren’t growing accordingly. We were unable to advertise, because we didn’t have enough paying players, and we were unable to get more players, because we couldn’t advertise.
The only time that server costs weren’t an issue was when the founder of Gamer Dorks, and our biggest investor, was working full-time in retail. But this was also the time that she had the least time to work on the server, and so development paused completely. It seemed to be a choice between being able to pay for the server, and being able to develop the server.
Server stores can't be ethical
This is a very controversial statement, and many people will hate it. But it has to be said. You can’t run a successful Minecraft server without giving children microtransaction or gambling addictions. Only a very lucky few manage to run a successful Minecraft server without unethical monetization.
Fair and ethical monetization is one of Gamer Dorks’ core values, so it was completely out of the question to make Remnant Minecraft and the other gamemodes pay-to-win. So we couldn’t sell anything that gives players advantage (yes, “pay to boost” is still pay to win, whatever the people profiting from it want to tell you). Unfortunately, that’s the only kind of monetization that works on Minecraft.
A pay-to-play model doesn’t work, and for good reason. People already have to pay $30 to buy Minecraft, so why should they have to pay for access to a server? They can just find one that’s free to play, and to them, it’ll be just as valuable. Nobody has incentive to buy access to a server, even if it is a good one. They can’t know that.
What about selling cosmetics or relying on donations? Well, that’s what we did. We sold cosmetic ranks, we sold cosmetic subscriptions, and we accepted donations. But this doesn’t work, for the same reason a pay-to-play model doesn’t work. Because Minecraft as a game already cost money, and they shouldn’t have to pay more on a server. Many people don’t have extra money to give, or don’t want to give it to strangers on the internet, providing them a service they could just as easily find elsewhere.
So, if pay-to-play doesn’t work, and selling cosmetics or relying on donations doesn’t work either, the only profitable option is to go pay-to-win, but that is against our values. In order to run a profitable Minecraft server, we would have needed to give up all we stood for. That wouldn’t happen.
Nobody takes a small server seriously
A majority of people judge a server’s merit based on its player count. Since advertising was prohibitively expensive for us, we couldn’t grow our server fast enough. And so, much of our potential playerbase who might find our server wouldn’t play it because there’s not anybody on it yet. It’s simply not possible to grow a server slowly.
Another issue, related to this, was that many bad actors would come into our server and intentionally cause trouble, because they thought it was of no consequence if they got banned. Why would they care about getting banned from a server that’s so small, anyway? Others thought that since we were a small server, they’d be able to take advantage of us by selling us “useful skripts” that would “make the server good and get you players.”
We believe that a major reason we weren’t able to grow as much as we liked toward the end, was because we didn’t grow fast enough in the beginning.
Minecraft players are the wrong audience
Gamer Dorks likes to make games with some degree of depth. We like to make engaging stories, and we like to make interesting gameplay. We like lore that players can dig deep to discover, we like to write characters that players will learn to care for, and we like gameplay to be complex. This is exactly what Minecraft players want to avoid. They want to skip dialogue, ignore lore, and have simple, mind-numbing gameplay. And we just couldn’t offer that.
Moreover, Minecraft players like to break things. They like to see how many lag machines they can make before the admins notice. They like to say racial slurs until they’re banned from the server. They like to pick fights with people who don’t want to fight. While this is something we’d have to deal with in hosting any social game, we’d never have to deal with this to the degree we do in Minecraft.
Minecraft players are a tiring group. And what’s worse, is that they don’t even appreciate the games we put so much effort into making detailed, engaging, and interesting.
Our work is better spent elsewhere
And now, for the final nail in the coffin: our work is better spent elsewhere. We worked hard for no reward, slaving away at building a game for an audience that wouldn’t appreciate it, and wouldn’t support us financially even if they did. Even the learning experience isn’t all that useful, because many of the skills we learned throughout making the Minecraft servers were non-transferrable.
So we decided that we’d be better off making our own games, built from the ground up, to release on Steam when they were finished. Advertising them to an audience that wanted what we were selling, possibly making a profit from the investment. And, if that didn’t work, at least we’d have learned valuable skills for working on our next project.
Conclusion
Running a Minecraft server isn’t for us. We loved doing it, but it never worked out the way we wanted it to. Whether you decide for yourself if it’s right to run a Minecraft server depends on your situation. We hope that by learning from our failure, you can make a more informed decision when you contemplate making your own server. And for those of you who miss Remnant Minecraft, we’re sorry it had to come to an end.
And yet, the story told in Remnant Minecraft is not over. The Remnant will return in video games that are yet to come, transformed by its separation from Minecraft. Escape from Rockfall will be the first, followed by Fragmented.
