Why
We recommend reading the Introduction if you haven't already.
Let's start with where we come from, the problem definition, different parties involved and the solution space.
Table of Contents
Connect is for everyone!
It doesn't matter if you are a small server owner or a large network operator or even a developer who wants to integrate Connect into their projects or a player who only wants to play on servers. Connect is for you!
Vision: We connect player and creator communities world-wide.
Mission: Our mission is to organize and connect Minecraft communities and make them universally accessible for all participants.
There are two core audiences that we want to connect and support...
Creators
Connect is for Creators, they are the heart of the Minecraft community. They are the ones who make the game fun for players. They can be builders creating worlds, designers creating art, developers creating plugins, server admins hosting servers, content creators creating videos, managers creating communities, leaders creating teams and organizations, people like you reading this documentation or a creator can be all-in-one.
As a creator, you want to:
- Get more players to discover and play your game servers
- Build a community around your game servers
- Possibly make money with it
Sometimes creators have to manage...
infrastructure, software, plugins, larger community, finances, security, performance, updates, backups, downtime, scaling, monitoring, documentation, support, billing, marketing, advertising, analytics, legal, privacy, compliance, regulations, taxes, reputation, ...
Players
Connect is for Players, they are the soul of the Minecraft community. They are the ones who play the game, explore the worlds, join servers, play with friends, and make creators feel fulfilled.
As a Player, you want to
- Discover new Minecraft servers
- Play with your friends on your favorite servers
- Make friends with other players
- Get rewarded for doing certain tasks
Problems of Creators
First Steps are the hardest
No matter how good your game server is players tend to not play on empty Minecraft servers: "If there are no players, the server is irrelevant" they think. Even worse if your game concept relies on a certain amount of players to be fun and enjoyable.
You could advertise on social media, forums, websites, etc. and hope that players will find it. You can also pay for advertising, but that's expensive, and you don't know if it's worth it.
Lack of Server Discovery
Servers don't get votes without players, servers don't get players without votes. Voting server-list websites are not enough to launch your amazing projects.
The first players are the most difficult to convince coming back to your server. You need to have a stable daily recurring player base in order to compete for more players and votes.
Problems of Players
There is no gamification of the server discovery process. They have to search through server-list websites and other sources and copy-paste server addresses. Players don't get rewarded for playing and reviewing new servers.
That's why players tend to play on the same servers over and over again and miss out on new and exciting servers.
Solutions - brought to you by Connect
Organic Traffic
One of the most powerful features of the Connect platform is the ability to serve organic traffic to your Minecraft servers. This means that players can discover your server from the in-game server browser and join without additional effort. This is a huge advantage over traditional voting websites where players have to copy and paste server addressed into their Minecraft client.
Both parties involved
Thanks to side effects the Connect Network grows exponentially as the following two factors increase:
- Creators are incentivized to link their server to Connect because they can passively advertise their server to get more player traffic.
- Players are attracted to the Connect Network because it's the place where they discover increasingly more new servers and content more easily with their friends.
- The loop continues...
This is the same effect as we see with the TikTok platform.
Equal Opportunity
The traditional Minecraft server listings are outdated and have a number of drawbacks. Connect is a fair and equal opportunity platform that favours new and smaller creators too by giving them chances to get discovered by players.
Why Minecraft?
Read along to learn more about the Minecraft multiplayer space or continue to the Downloads page.
Today more and more games in the industry are being designed such that players can express their creativity and become content creators of the game platform itself leading the community to have access to an endless resource pool of new game content helping to reduce the effort needed of the platform maker trying to keep the player interest and engagement high.
One of the largest such game platforms is Minecraft where many communities of players and creators can build and program highly customizable game experiences where only the imagination is your limit.
It is no secret that Minecraft is one of the most popular games out there with millions of players every day and steadily rising. With Minecraft's $2.5 billion dollar acquisition by Microsoft in 2014 the game numbers and communities around it are blowing up even more due to younger generations loving the game.
Some people of the community are no longer only players, but love creating game servers for players to join every day. Those people needed a higher skill set to configure, launch and maintain such a game server until more and more hosting companies reduced the entry barrier, the price and improved the customer experience for becoming a server owner. The number of managed Minecraft server providers grew and near to anyone can now create a server within minutes with little to no money needed.
This results into a fleet of new game servers created every week. Owning a good game server is only step one, you still need to have a traffic source for new players finding out about your server in order for you as the admin to establish a recurring daily player base and grow, which is very hard.
Introducing Connect!