Minecraft's monthly subscription service, Minecraft Realms, is no longer alive. Taking its place is a new monthly subscription, entitled Realms Plus.
Minecraft's Realms Plus service is available now for all of those who have the Minecraft Marketplace. Everyone who is subscribed to Minecraft Realms with a ten-player realm will be upgraded to Realms Plus for free. Those who are not subscribed to Minecraft Realms can jump onto Realms Plus for $7.99 a month. If players are hesitant to subscribe right away, they can try out Realms Plus for free for a month.
Those who are a part of Realms Plus will have access to over fifty pieces of Marketplace content, including adventures, skin packs, worlds, mini-games, and more. New content will be added every month. Some included Marketplace content includes the Pet Pack, One Chunk Challenge, Ultimate Minigame Rush, Alien Worlds Texture Pack, and more. You can see the full list of available content here.
Those who subscribe to Realm Plus will receive their own server. They will be able to invite as many friends as they like to that server, and play with up to ten of them at a time. They can play locally, or in a private and safely stored cloud. Subscriber's friends can access all of the content that comes with Realms Plus for free when playing in their Realm.
The game's original subscription service, Minecraft Realms, originally released in 2014. The service had costed $13 a month, and allowed players to host private servers for groups of up to twenty players. The servers were available at all times, and allowed owners to roll back the server's world to earlier points in time for restoration if anything went wrong.
Minecraft first released in 2011, and is now one of the biggest games in the world. The IP was purchased by Microsoft in 2014. The game currently has over 112 million active players.
