Nether Pixel Studios Is Officially a Business
So as the sun rose on this date, Nether Pixel Studios became a bonified business registered with her Majesty. This long road began with a crazy idea, a few party chats, and an impulsive 'Let's do it' that led to an idea that went viral within the Xbox Minecraft community. The idea to unify under one application and get membership with Microsoft.
The dream most Minecrafters have is just to be noticed and recognised as a decent builder. To feel that pat on the back from the community for blocks well laid.
I and many of my friends on Xbox were fortunate to achieve that. Our worlds were featured on the Gamehub, or even by Minecraft.net, leaving us to wonder.. What next? Well then we heard about the fabled 'Market Place' being developed by Microsoft for the Xbox; a place to sell Minecraft content, content that with the better together update, could be shared from USB or even email, tools to allow us to copy, paste, and export entire worlds. A new dream was born, the dream to be paid for laying pixelated blocks.
But there was one little obstacle.. You had to be a partner with Microsoft to be able to sell your wares on the market place, and competition is not just tight, it flooded the Microsoft application page with over 16 THOUSAND applications. Amazing builders one after the other applied, some got to the second round but none made it further. It appeared that PC builders with years old businesses were just too organised and established to be contended with by us lowly individuals with one or two mega builds.
So I had an idea. Join forces, do one collaborative application that was serious, organised, and had a real chance of success. Within a week word spread and our discord channel created by Naoko Behr was filled with the greatest builders to be found on the Xbox. They all wanted in.
We would run the business with five partners, backed up by the Minecraft Servers club and the 31 epic builders who had joined our cause. Huge Youtubers like PHO3N1X even joined our ranks, and Helen the Microsoft community manager joined our discord.
We just had to setup a business, figure out all the tax requirements for paying people from all over the world, figure out a fair way to ensure the business covered it's costs and paid the builders who passed the "to be established" quality assurance and vetting process for their submissions, work through all the internal politics, build a website, setup a business account and then submit our application to Microsoft. Easy huh!
Well we have done everything except for the final submission. This website serving as our CV for the application. Will we be accepted? Fingers crossed..