Marketplace Creator Blueprint

What the Marketplace Actually Is

If you've ever played Minecraft Bedrock Edition — on your phone, console, or Windows 10/11 — you've probably seen the Marketplace. It's the in-game storefront where players browse and buy content created by the community: skin packs, texture packs, worlds, maps, add-ons, and mashup packs. Think of it like an app store, but built directly into Minecraft.

Players shop using Minecoins, an in-game currency they purchase with real money. They tap, they buy, they download. The content shows up in their game instantly. No external websites, no sideloading, no technical setup. It's frictionless — and that frictionless experience is why the Marketplace generates serious revenue.

There are currently over 97,000 paid items on the Marketplace, created by a mix of Mojang's in-house team and community partners. The Marketplace is available everywhere Bedrock runs — Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and Windows 10/11. That's a distribution footprint most indie creators can only dream of. Your skin pack sitting next to Mojang's official content, accessible to 200 million monthly players.

One important distinction: The Marketplace is a Bedrock-only ecosystem. If you're familiar with the Java Edition modding scene — Spigot plugins, Forge mods, CurseForge — that's a completely different world with completely different monetization mechanics. This path is specifically about creating and selling content through the official Bedrock Marketplace.

The Money — Revenue, Splits, and Payouts

Let's talk about how the money actually works, because there are some important details that most people get wrong or gloss over.

The Revenue Split

When a player buys your content on the Marketplace, the revenue splits 70/30 in your favor. You keep 70%, Microsoft takes 30%. That's a better deal than most digital storefronts — Apple and Google's app stores both take 30%, and many game marketplaces take more.

But there's a significant caveat. If you're working through a publisher (more on this shortly), they take a cut of your 70%. Publisher shares vary, but typically range from 30% to 50% of the creator's portion. That means your actual take-home can look more like 35–50% of total sales rather than 70%.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

As a direct partner selling a skin pack for 490 Minecoins (roughly $3.00), your take is about $2.10 per sale. Through a publisher with a 40% cut of your share, that drops to about $1.26 per sale. That difference matters at scale, but the publisher route gets you to market faster — which often matters more early on.

What Creators Actually Earn

The top Marketplace partners — studios with large catalogs and established brands — earn $15,000 to $40,000 per month. These are teams that have been publishing for years, often with dozens of employees and hundreds of items in their catalog.

For a new creator in their first year, a more realistic range is $500 to $2,000 per month, and it takes several months to get there. You need to build a catalog, establish quality, earn reviews, and let the algorithm work in your favor.

The average item on the Marketplace sells for about 407 Minecoins, roughly $2.50. At a 70% cut, that's $1.75 per sale to you. If one of your items sells 100 times in a month, that's $175 from a single item. Twenty items selling at that rate? $3,500 per month. That's the catalog effect — and it's the core engine of this business model.

Payouts

Revenue is paid quarterly through the Microsoft Partner Center. There's a minimum payout threshold of $200 per quarter. If you don't hit the threshold, your earnings roll over to the next quarter.

The good news: once your items are published, they generate revenue passively. You're not trading time for money on each sale. You build the content once, publish it, and it continues earning as long as it's on the store. Updates and new releases keep your catalog visible, but older items still sell.