Minecraft is a
sandbox computer game created and designed by Swedish programmer Marcus “Notch”
Persson in 2009 and fully and published by Mojang.
A sandbox game is
one with an open structure where the player is free to plat without specific
objectives – the allusion is to a child’s sandbox. Players in sandbox games are
free to explore an environment, to choose which takes they do, and often they have
the ability to express themselves creatively within the game.
In Minecraft
players build structures out of textured in a 3D world. They key activities are
mining and crafting. Other activities in the game include exploration and
combat.
When Notch started
Minecraft, in summer 2009, he was on his own. He wrote a basic game, which
mashed up others such as Dwarf Fortness and Infinimer into something entirely
its own and mentioned it on the TIGSource forum – a site for independent games
players and creators. A month later, he charged people €10 (£8) to download the
game, Minecraft sold 40 copies that first weekend. Every Friday, Persson would
update it, adding features. He had always been an active member of the
TIGSource discussions and now he engaged with Minecraft’s early players, on the
forums, on Twitter Notch has 660,000 followers and on his Tumblr page.
In summer 2010,
Persson set up Mojang, along with Poser, with whom he had worked at Flash-games
developer King.com, and Manneh, his former CEO at jAlbum, a photosharing site.
Since the release of Minecraft in 2009, it
has been a commercial success. It is estimated that 55 million people play
Minecraft every month, and is therefore the second best-selling game ever made,
coming after Tetris. The company is worth around £1.09 billion, as it was
brought out by Mojang in 2014.
Minecraft surpassed over a million purchases less
than a month after entering its beta phase in early 2011. At the same time, the
game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except
through word of mouth, and various unpaid references in popular media such as
the Penny Arcade web comic. By April 2011, Persson estimated
that Minecraft had made €23 million in revenue, with
800,000 sales of the alpha version of the game, and over 1 million sales of the
beta version. In 2014, Mojang sold
Minecraft to Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5 billion (£1.9 billion). Since this
deal, Minecraft has been spread onto many different platforms. In 2019, a
Minecraft movie is set to appear in cinemas.
There are many reasons as to why it has
become such a commercial success, including its popularity; Minecraft is played
all around the world, in around 8 different countries including the US, Norway
and Australia. This means high volume sales, which could be due to its
availability and easy accessibility. Continuing from this, another reason that
Minecraft is so commercially successful is due to its spread onto different
platforms. These include, Xbox, Windows 10, Windows phones, Nintendo Wii U,
PlayStation and Android phone. This makes it more easily accessible for a wider
audience meaning more people are able to play, therefore resulting in more
sales and then higher revenue from sales. Finally, another reason that is
credible for commercial success, is the spin off games and merchandise created
since the release of Minecraft. Spin off games include “Minecraft, story mode”
and “Minecraft, Education Edition”. Both of these games will appeal to a
specific demographic, which will commercially benefit the business as they are
targeting a wider audience, rather than just focusing on the original
demographic targeted by the original Minecraft game. The merchandise that is
created and sold across the world, will catch the eye of gamers, and also
promotes and advertises that game when people wear the merchandise, which will
increase profit which makes it commercially successful.
The popularity of
Minecraft has later been showed through spin-off games such as Minecraft: story
mode and Minecraft: education mode. This brings a fun way of learning to
children and influences them to want to expand their knowledge. Popular forms
of social media such as Facebook and YouTube have also played a significant
role in helping to popularize it and advertising to others to play.
On top of this
the game has received millions of dollars in merchandise revenue from T-shirts
to toys, and spawned its own convention, Minecon, which began just 2 years
after the game was created. The convention has taken place in Las Vegas,
Disneyland Paris, California, London and Orlando which expands their global
marketing and attracts even more customers to get involved.
In think the reason Minecraft is so successful is that
a video game with no story line sells very well because you can do whatever
your hearth desires.
