MCMetrics

Analytics platform for Minecraft servers

"Google Analytics for Minecraft servers"

Minecraft is a massive industry of hundreds of businesses operating Minecraft servers (essentially creating games on top of Minecraft) with revenue ranging from a few thousand dollars to tens of millions of dollars.

But business intelligence tools in this industry are about 20 years behind. I know this because I used to run my own server.

MCMetrics offers a business intelligence dashboard to give Minecraft servers access to the same level of analytics that a large tech company would have:

• Player Activity Metrics, Retention Curve, etc.
• A/B Testing Suite
• Marketing campaign attribution & measuring
• AI natural language queries

Technical Details

MCMetrics's tech stack is modern, simple, cheap, and fast. Everything is self-hosted on Ubuntu machines to avoid ridiculously high cloud costs (except for Vercel's free plan for the dashboard frontend). All data is constantly backed up incrementally and every service has 1-click deployment with Github Actions.

Java Gradle Plugin: This plugin is installed on the Minecraft server by my customers. It constantly sends data to the ingest API so it can be queried for the dashboard.

Express Ingest Server: Authenticates requests from the plugin and stores it in the Clickhouse database. It also queues machine learning inference (Atlas) for some data points and converts IP addresses to latitude/longitude coordinates. Handles 10s of thousands of requests per second.

Atlas ML: Some data points need additional features to be calculated. For example, chat messages need to have sentiment analysis, toxicity levels, and topics extracted. This runs on a separate server which uses public HF models and custom models.

Clickhouse Analytical DB: Self-hosted Clickhouse is the perfect choice for this use case because it's cheap, unbelievably fast even with hundreds of QPS, has storage detached from compute, and has great backup solutions.

Supabase Transactional DB: Supabase handles customer data, business logic, authentication, storage, and other transactional data.

Next.js Dashboard The customer-facing dashboard uses Next.js because it's fast and speeds up development. The UI uses Shadcn and Tailwind for a minimalistic feel. Pages are server rendered but fetch data from client components using server actions.

History of MCMetrics

• Late 2022: Started working on the first prototype
• April 2023: Launched the first beta test of MCMetrics V1
• June 2023: Launched MCMetrics V1
• August 2024: Started working on a complete recode (V2)
• January 2025: Launched MCMetrics V2