Mineraft Essay

11/01/2019

create an essay discussing the evolution of Minecraft as part of the essay you will discuss

• how ownership of Minecraft has affected the games evolution
• How Minecraft is marketed to a variety of audiences
• The development of the game through technological change

Minecraft is a sandbox game, created and developed by Swedish based Mojang Studios.  The game was originally released on the 17 May 2009 after being created by Swedish game developer Markus Persson.  This version was very basic and was developed as a multiplayer game using JAVA code. In the first month, Minecraft had sand, water, lava and dynamic lighting. Within two months, the earliest multiplayer tests were underway, and the speed of development picked up even further. Overtime, Gamers were able to contribute to the development of the program eliminating bugs and facilitating multiplayer capability. The game has been described as a virtual world of Lego that involves following simple instructions in order to play it: explore, mine and build. Users only have to log in and proceed to create a world full of textured 3D cubes. There are primarily two game modes: Creative or Survival, although more recent additions include Adventure, Spectator and also Multi-Player mode. The majority of players are between 15 and 21 years of age meaning the game as a whole is a wide range targeted audience.

The ‘official’ released of Minecraft happened in 2011. Then on 15 September 2014, Microsoft announced a $2.5 billion deal to buy Mojang, along with the ownership of Minecraft. The deal was suggested by Persson when he posted a tweet asking a corporation to buy his share of the game after receiving criticism for "trying to do the right thing". It was completed on 6 November 2014, and this led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires".

Minecraft cost Microsoft a lot due to the wide, loyal fan base already created. The buying of Minecraft gave both the game and Microsoft a multi-platform. This is because Microsoft owns Xbox which led to the creation of Physical copies of the game. When the Xbox and PlayStation versions were created there was often a chance to offer digital versions of the same game across the Windows 10 operating system. Then Microsoft used the fear of viruses to convince people to buy Physical disks of the game. To date, well over 121 million copies have been sold across all platforms, including over 27 million PC copies, making it the biggest selling PC game of all time. One reason why Minecraft had a great success under Microsoft is because it could reach a wide audience. This is due to it originally being created using Java- this gave it the advantage of being cross-platform: it will run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Minecraft was marketed to an audience through a variety of ways. For example, Minecraft- who was originally described as a virtual world of Lego, teamed up with Lego to create a Minecraft set. The game was carefully marketed to audiences, featuring classic and modern play sets and popular mini-figures, where you can physically build the settings you see in the game. This shows how both Lego and Minecraft work together to reach a wide range of target audiences by promoting each other’s content.