Is PCMag Seriously Trying To Charge Game Developers To Display Their Award Logos?

Well, this is upsetting.
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Markus Persson of Minecraft fame just tweeted out an interesting e-mail he got. In it, Ziff Davis, the company that runs PC Magazine, is informing Persson that they’ve named Minecraft the winner of a dozen or so various awards, including Game of the Year. The catch? Now PCMag wants money. Like, a lot of money.

Here’s the tweet in question — you probably won’t be able to make out the text of the e-mail in that little picture, though, so click here to embiggen.

Basically, what they want is for the developers at Mojang to pay PCMag for the right to use a image of their award logo on their website or packaging, which they call “The ultimate seal of approval and often the only seal consumers trust when making a purchase decision.” All it would cost Mojang is a paltry $500 dollars per logo, or $6,000 for all 13 at once. A brgain!

Clearly no one at Mojang is interested in paying, of course. Why would they? It’s not like they really need the publicity — Minecraft is pretty inescapable in the gaming world nowadays. They don’t need to throw the average cost of a 1998 Subaru Forrester out the window to get more people to pay attention to them.

“Maybe if they were a small organization, and the trophy was physical and expensive, but cool and custom?” Persson said in a follow-up tweet. “Maybe. But a .png?”

Which, to be fair, is not what PCMag sent Persson. No, they send .jpgs.

Screen Shot 2013-10-29 at 2.38.16 PM

Come on, guys, really? .jpgs? For 500 dollars each? That is criminal. For that kind of money, you’d expect something made out marble.

(via Twitter, image via PCMag)

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