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

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.

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)

Meanwhile in related links

• Between this and that stupid Putt-Putt suit, Mojang can’t catch a break
• But that’s okay, because Minecraft‘s a pretty great educational tool
• One in which we can have all the quantum physics that we want now

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Victoria McNally

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