[duskwuff]

Incidentally, I find it deeply weird that the only protocols supported by Cloudflare Spectrum below the enterprise level are SSH, RDP, and... Minecraft?!

I mean, I guess it's a compelling use case for some customers. Still, it's a weird outlier.

[jrockway]

Minecraft is incredibly popular and it's normal to run your own server. (It's the 5th most-watched game on Twitch; at 81,000,000 hours per month!) I don't play, so I can't authoritatively say there is no company that provides "default" servers that new clients log into, but I've never heard of such a thing.

(If you look at the other popular games on Twitch, they all provide servers and can't self host. GTA V, Fortnite, LoL, CoD, Valorant, etc. So there is no market for anything but Minecraft-related services.)

[meowface]

And perhaps more significantly, DDoS attacks against Minecraft servers are extremely common. There's a massive market dedicated purely to DDoSing Minecraft servers.

In addition to its popularity, I would guess that this is probably related to the fact that the average age of Minecraft players is probably lower than the average age for most other popular online games. A disgruntled person between the age of 12 - 18 who knows they can completely shut down the fun-having ability of everyone they're pissed off at for a few dollars per hour will often feel pretty tempted.

[tialaramex]

If you do the development work to support hot protocol of the moment X, chances are in 18 months nobody cares because either (a) now X is old news and nobody uses that any more or (b) X+1 came out, it's incompatible and you'd have to do the work again for it to be useful.

If an enterprise customer will pay $$$ to support X this can still make financial sense, but Cloudflare's non-enterprise customers aren't paying $$$.

Minecraft is apparently not going anywhere, it's still very popular a decade after release. And my understanding is that the protocol is fundamentally the same as ever. So, you do that work once, and then you've got a free proof of concept apparently forever.

[Macha]

There's a reasonable amount of servers with the traffic to need to worry about ddos attacks, and have revenue models from selling ingame perks (often in ways forbidden by the minecraft ToS, but that's relatively toothless for these servers) that would allow them to pay for this service.