If you ignore realistic details – cracks in the road, overgrown gardens, the natural wear and tear you see in the real world – your creation looks totally fake. We can create pretty much whatever a client can imagine but building natural shapes is one of the hardest parts of Minecraft. The price isn't based on the size of the map, though – it's all about the detail. For a big, detailed project that can take eight to ten months, the fee can rise to $80,000 or $90,000. For a custom map built exclusively for a client, we try to stay between $5,000 to $10,000 for a small project. We sell non-exclusive playable maps on our website, like Nomport, that anyone can buy for $29.99. The price range for our products is huge. Minecraft has sold more than 200 million copies so far and the market just keeps expanding. We work with the gaming, entertainment, and eSports industries, as you might expect, but we've also worked with governments, food and agriculture companies, and the aerospace industry. We create custom maps for clients, we sell playable maps, skins and mini-games through the Minecraft Marketplace, and we have a YouTube and social media side to the company. We've hired Minecraft architects, developers, city planners, and pixel artists in France, Germany, Spain, Columbia, Peru, Mexico, the US, South Korea, Belarus, and Australia. Varuna is an architecture firm, but instead of designing buildings in AutoCAD or other high-end software, we design them in Minecraft, one block at a time. Now we're a team of 44 people spread over 14 countries. I founded Varuna five years ago, when I was 15 and we were a team of four. Over time, I built up a backlog of commissions I didn't have time to complete, so I recruited a few like-minded, creative people to help me.
I'd just made money playing a video game, something my parents always told me was impossible. To my surprise, people contacted me to say, "hey, that's a beautiful house, I'll buy it from you for $5." I posted images of my builds to the Planet Minecraft community forum. I started playing in middle school and among other things, built a virtual version of my house and a replica of City Hall in Boston, my hometown. My generation grew up playing Minecraft, a sandbox game where you explore a virtual world and build things. The essay has been edited for length and clarity. This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Thomas Sulikowski, a 20-year-old Minecraft designer from Boston, Massachusetts, who founded Varuna, a Minecraft design studio and consultancy.
Sulikowski says he charges clients up to $90,000.
At 15 he employed four other designers and founded Varuna.
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