This game virtually never goes on sale, is 13 years old, and remains the best selling video game of all time. The development cycle for updates is painfully slow, frequently introduces “new” elements that serve no functional purpose, and the mob voting thing has been a disaster since round 1. For how much money they rake in these updates should be far more robust if anything. Mob votes should have been scrapped immediately in favor of releasing all 3 mobs that were to be voted on. It would have been far more interesting.

The sad thing is they probably could charge for these things and get away with it. However, there’s risk of dividing the player base, and a large part of the continued appeal lies in cross play support on basically every gaming platform in existence. Renting a server is probably a whole lot more profitable when little timmy can join on his ipad while older brother is on the playstation, his friends hop in on xbox, and maybe even dad joins on his overpowered computer. As soon as you charge for the updates all those people need to pay up to continue playing together.