Why Minecraft Matters

http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/01/15/a-brief-explanation-of-why-minecraft-matters/

by solipsist • 16 years ago

191 80 16 years ago

This is a great article on techcrunch on why the gaming industry needs to wake up and try new things and not keep on going for IP that has already been done before again and again. Sometimes gamers actually want new and fresh games not the next FPS.

tl• 16 years ago

It's not "sometimes" - it's some gamers most of the time. Look anything from Mario to Madden. The majority like the status quo, and the likes of Braid and Minecraft still aren't making EA money. Additionally, the creative thinking required to make these games don't scale to the masses of average knowledge workers employed by the big companies.

angrycoder• 16 years ago

Really? So each developer that worked on Mario and madden are now multi-millionaires?

stesch• 16 years ago

"not the next FPS" is funny. I have 3D sickness and can't play FPS anymore. And I got sick watching the YouTube videos about Minecraft.

mambodog2• 16 years ago

Are you sure your sickness isn't being caused by an unnaturally small or high Field of View (FOV)? This is a common cause of motion sickness-like symptoms in gamers. Usually adjusting to a FOV of 90-100 degrees fixes this (depending on your screen's aspect ratio).

Shorel2• 16 years ago

Then it is a good thing that we don't know each other in real life.

People would get motion sickness watching me playing Descent.

I would turn around when moving forward just for the sake of it.

ugh3• 16 years ago

Minecraft’s story is even more impressive than the article makes it seem. The game was not developed by a few people, it was developed by one guy (“Notch”). He hired six people only recently and they started working together around Winter 2010/2011.

He now gets help with the business and support side of running a company but only one of the developers he hired is working on the game with him together. The other developer is getting their next game up and running.

What’s also interesting is that Notch does not want to run the business, at least not at the scale at which it is now. He hired people to do that for him.

palish2• 16 years ago

What’s also interesting is that Notch does not want to run the business, at least not at the scale at which it is now. He hired people to do that for him.

Do you think that might be a concern? I would very much love to see Notch continue to be successful, and it would be a shame to see him lose his multi-million dollar company due to silly legal reasons.

ramidarigaz• 16 years ago

What's really interesting is that it's not Mojang that has the following, it's Notch. If Notch gets screwed, he has tons of loyal fans who will jump to his defense. Unless he does something stupid himself (and he doesn't seem the type), he'll have a strong following for a long time.

ugh3• 16 years ago

I don’t know the internal structure of the company but I would assume that Notch legally has all the control. Whoever runs the business can presumably be vetoed by Notch at any time.

I don’t see any problems with that, at least if Notch hired the right people. If you think that running a business (that’s not just one guy selling a game on the Internet but a real business with an office and employees and all the rest) is not your strength and if you much rather want to spend most of your time coding it should be possible to let someone else run the business for you.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

If you think Minecraft is an impressive one-man project, have you ever played Cave Story? (Doukutsu Monogatari)

zyfo• 16 years ago

Or Love (Eskil Steenberg) http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/

jonshea• 16 years ago

Agreed. Doukutsu Monogatari is, rivaled only by Braid, the most beautiful, fun, and moving video game I have ever played. It is astonishingly creative and innovative. The gameplay is challenging, but fun. And there’s not even a hint of repetition.

It is a masterpiece. I wish that I could play it again for the first time.

wallflower• 16 years ago

Notch is amazing. In case you missed it the first time:

"Time-lapse screencap video of a games programmer"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629810

Go Java!!

Goladus6• 16 years ago

The reason you should care is because a team of four or five people using free libraries and cross-platform tools have just made a mockery of the last five years of franchise-oriented, $50 million budget, yearly-release, AAA game development.

Eh, I would not say that. Minecraft is not seriously competing with AAA big-budget titles like God of War. They have completely different audiences. Yes, GoW is extraordinarily expensive to create, but it offers a gameplay experience that Minecraft doesn't and never will. Or at least, by the time minecraft can procedurally generate an experience like GoW, the big-budget AAA franchises will have moved on to something flashier.

And certain franchise titles are attractive because of the licensing, eg the NFL. That is unfortunate but not something the gaming industry can do much about immediately.

solipsist7• 16 years ago

But the idea is that it doesn't matter if the game genres are completely different. What matters is that indie developers like notch have shown that they can make games that will become immensely successful in new genres, such as sandbox games. Perhaps the audiences are different, although I'm sure there is still quite an overlap. However, even if the audiences are different, this just goes to show that indie developers are beating top notch companies (no pun intended) to taking advantage of these audiences.

Goladus6• 16 years ago

The audiences are different, it's possible for people to like Minecraft and God of War, but for different reasons. That's what I mean by different audiences. I like classical Opera and NFL Football, but they have different audiences.

I picked GoW to contast with Minecraft because its a big-budget title with exactly the strengths that Minecraft lacks. It's narrowly focused on the theme of a god-slayer who engages in brutal close-combat. It's loaded with detailed, hand-crafted content that all fits together coherently, supporting that theme. The story, the art, the scenario/level design, the cinematic design, which is seamlessly integrated into the actual gameplay and superb performance on its target hardware (at least, for the length of time I've played it) all make a difference.

A cow in Minecraft looks like a Gateway computer box: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD6qUTQDvU4

A cow in God of War is a 35-foot tall minotaur whose armor spews some sort of steam as Kratos rends it asunder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_xbbD7RgCg

I'm not taking anything away from Minecraft here. It is a fantastic game-- the point of Minecraft is entirely different from the point of GoW. Anyone playing Minecraft cares more about what the cow represents than what it looks like. But people playing GoW care a great deal what that Minotaur looks like. They care how he looks, how he moves, how the camera tracks him during the encounter, whether there is a brief fps hit when the garbage collector kicks in, etc. Currently, to get a game full of scenes like the one linked in that GoW youtube video, you need a team of designers, artists, and developers working with excellent directors and leaders.

Keyframe• 16 years ago

developers like notch have shown that they can make games that will become immensely successful in new genres, such as sandbox games

I would be the first one to want that to be true (since I'm trying to break into indie gamedev). However, only notch with minecraft showed that so far, and while it is an immense success for an indie game - sales figures are modest in contrast to AAA games.

gnaritas• 16 years ago

> Or at least, by the time minecraft can procedurally generate an experience like GoW, the big-budget AAA franchises will have moved on to something flashier.

Sure, but there's a large audience who doesn't care about flashy, they care about fun. Minecraft is fun; flashy doesn't make a game fun.

Goladus6• 16 years ago

Absolutely, and I am not taking anything away from Minecraft except the article's assertion that it "makes a mockery" of big-budget games.

scotty79• 16 years ago

At leas one person ditched Starcraft II he waited for for years an plays minecraft instead. Minecraft is in competition against AAA games and it seems that it sometimes wins.

ohashi• 16 years ago

Seems like a silly argument. Sometimes, people choose something different than they expected they would have enjoyed more.

Shorel2• 16 years ago

I think that the big paradigm change is not for game consumers, of course GoW is both more expensive and has a very rewarding gameplay for almost every player.

The big paradigm change here, is for people who want to create videogames.

If I want to create games, I probably will send resumes to all big videogame companies and call it a day. But minecraft has shown me that doing indie game development is a much more rewarding path, both in terms of money and in the feeling of accomplishment.

So lots of brilliant programmers that could have ended making money for the big-budget AAA franchises will probably start making money for themselves.

Joakal3• 16 years ago

FPS + Farmville = Profit?

solipsist7• 16 years ago

Minecraft is not an FPS, neither does it have elements to it that are similar to Farmville's. Go try out Minecraft and come back when you're more informed on the subject.

baby• 16 years ago

well. It's an FP RPG then ?

Joakal3• 16 years ago

FPS = First Person Shooter, there's melee and range weapons. What is your definition of a FPS?

For Farmville part. Isn't there not much to do after the 'survival mode' at night?

DrStalker4• 16 years ago

It's more than that; you also get to build scructures with as much flexability as lego, explore a randomly generated world that sometimes produces amazingly beutiful scenery, figure out how to build complicated systems from small trivial components and top it all off with the random-interval reward system of mining.

Minecraft hits so many of my "god I love this game!" features it's easily my favorite game of 2010, even though it was an alpha release.

Joakal3• 16 years ago

FPS + Procedural generating soapbox then?

It doesn't sound like Farmville (also seems to have negative connotations here for some reason).

solipsist7• 16 years ago

Excerpt:

   "Braid and Minecraft are both examples of how a few good
   ideas, executed in an accessible and affordable way, will
   outsell franchises by orders of magnitude."

This just about sums it up. Many indie developers are harnessing potential new game genres. They're finding low-budget ways to create addictive games with a high chance of becoming viral. They're finding classic ideas to expand on and platforms to build off of. Big game publishers are failing to do this. They'll spend tons of money, yet lack the innovation to break through in these new areas of the market.

tedunangst• 16 years ago

Except that quote's not accurate at all. Minecraft has sold 1 million copies lifetime. CoD Black Ops sold 7 times that amount in 24 hours. The franchise outsold Minecraft by an order of magnitude.

DrStalker4• 16 years ago

To get some useful figures to compare:

How much profit has CoD made after all costs are accounted for? (including advertising, which minecraft skipped by going viral)

How much money did CoD make per developer?

DrStalker4• 16 years ago

Does anyone know the development cost for Minecraft? Presumably this would be measured in hours of time, as Notch did all the work himself (except for the music)

SirWart• 16 years ago

To me, the more interesting part about minecraft's success is that it gets a lot of people doing things that look like work to me for fun. Also, it does this with a high learning curve and without using any kind of reward schedule mechanics that are in vogue now. As far as I can tell (and I've only watched others play), the appeal is based on the joy of creation and sharing your creations, and the difficulty of it actually enhances the experience. It just seems so fresh compared to what everyone else is doing.

johnswamps• 16 years ago

> Also, it does this with a high learning curve and without using any kind of reward schedule mechanics that are in vogue now.

The game has a reward schedule in the form of hard to find materials (diamond). It's not uncommon to spend half an hour strip mining underground looking for materials. 19/20 times you just find more stone, but every once in a while you find coal, iron, diamond, etc.

intended2• 16 years ago

Its worth noting that the audience/gamer who plays this game is pretty unique as well.

I heard of the game from the dwarf fortress forums, penny-arcade, and then later on Techcrunch and other blogs. The people talking about the games, who made the most out of it, tended to be the type with gaming experience, willingness to turn a blind eye to its current graphic set, and an imagination large enough to see the potential of the game world.

Basically, outside of the core audience of the game, there will be a sudden drop in the number of people who would be willing to give it a shot.

thorax• 16 years ago

Except that many who get into it, gets their friends into it and their families into it (since it's such a great family game). I think you underestimate the appeal of a sandbox game like this. It's got all the casual gaming characteristics and enough depth for hard-core gamers. It's really quite impressive that way.

Someone• 16 years ago

As opposed to, for example, God of War mentioned above?

I'm sure that will first sell to teenage boys, then by word of mouth to their sisters, and from there to their mothers and grandmothers.

Not even all boys like noisy games that require fast reactions and a zillion different key combinations (which I guess applies to GoW)

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

But it also doesn’t have ... a scruffy 30-ish white protagonist, ... or any of the other hundred things that plague gamers in practically every major release.

I find myself thinking only of Half Life and Portal. Half Life, in which people were crazy about Gordon Freeman (and he fit the part) and Portal, which did not do this in the slightest.

Has it become conspicuously common? I've fallen a bit out of touch with modern games.

corysama• 16 years ago

http://www.eatliver.com/i.php?n=5925

Roritharr• 16 years ago

This fits right into the pattern we've seen in the game development scene for the last two years. It's getting cheaper and easier for indie gamers to go from zero to hero every day. If you look at tools like Unity3D then its easy to imagine that the dream of so many people to be able to get a sustainable income from gamedevelopment AND gamedesign(people working as a coding monkey at EA aren't really living the dream, are they?) is closer than ever.

In a while i'll show HN my project relating to this. :)

klbarry• 16 years ago

An interesting note here for those of who who like Minecraft: There has been another sandbox game called Dwarf Fortress out for a while now, which Notch said he used as a big inspiration for Minecraft. Dwarf Fortress lets you build out your world in millions of unique ways, liquid flow mechanics are accurate, gravity, civilization actions, pretty much everything.

However, one huge warning: The learning curve is 100 times harder than Minecrafts, and the base art for he game is asci!(although you can upgrade it with user made graphic packs) It will also take all of your processing power.

malnourish2• 16 years ago

I recently tried to get into DF. I downloaded the lazynewb pack and tried for hours to get it to run at a proper resolution. The window would never size to what I had set it in the config editor as included with the pack or with manual editing.

I really wish I could have played that game.

spacemanaki2• 16 years ago

I had a similar experience the first time I tried it. It was unplayably slow, but now I can get a solid framerate. Check back in a few months, the DF guys seem to be making some progress in performance, etc and the next build might fix your issue.

kd0amg• 16 years ago

Looking at the list of what's included with lazynewb, I really don't see much in there that I'd expect to reduce the difficulty for a new player. Plenty of utilities and such for making the interface easier to understand, but the gameplay mechanics are untouched. I'd say you're far better off with a good tutorial (even better, someone who can help you in person).

intended2• 16 years ago

Dwarf Fortress definitely deserves a plug - its run by a two brother team and the game is... hard. They currently earn through donations and are able to keep themselves plugging along.

The games ambition is to simulate an entire fantasy world, literally. His recent update was on the lines of:

" Now you can take rock nuts, for instance, mill them into a nut paste, then put them in a screw press to get oil (into a jug) and a press cake. Both of these can be cooked and the oil can also be made into soap. The press cake shouldn't be as yummy, probably, or maybe it should be restricted as animal feed, but currently it is just food. Jugs are currently anything but clay pretty much, and clay is the next step." - (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html)

The game procedurally generates a world, identifies different types of biomes, soil layers, weathers the terrain, flows rivers, amongst other pre-start activities. After that it populates the world with civilizations, and simulates interactions, wars, kidnappings, interactions/fights with monsters/demons, for about a 1050 years before presenting you the world to do what you will.

The game creates a LOT of emergent scenarios and stories, one of the more recent ones was this: http://www.nzfortress.co.nz/forum/showthread.php?t=20768

Its immense fun, but the learning curve is brutal; the starting screens without any graphics pack look like the matrix. Really - http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/screens/dwf5.html

The game is mind-bogglingly complex, and immense fun. Worth taking a look into.

Some other interesting stories which derived from the game- Boatmurdered - http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/ Tholtig- http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=42702.msg7905... Curated thread with links - http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=41896.0

phaedrus• 16 years ago

Sorry meant to up-vote you but my finger slipped. Thanks for plugging DF it really is an awesome game.

solipsist7• 16 years ago

Notch seems to be adopting Google's 10% time (to some extent), but rather with 50% time.

   "Because I want to avoid us just focusing on reaching release,
   I suggested that we should dedicate 50% of the development time
   in Minecraft towards adding fun new stuff. Basically, any developer
   working on the game (two people at the moment) can just come up with
   something they’d want to add on a day-to-day basis, as long as the
   rest of the team thinks it’s a decent idea. If it ends up being fun,
   it gets added." [1]

Sure, that 50% time will still be spent working on Minecraft. But it won't be the same as the other 50% time when the developers are trying to reach deadlines and so forth. I think that Notch is now taking control of how the company functions, which is a good thing. Before, it was just him and there was nothing but meeting deadlines. Now that he has more people to help him, he can focus on fun things like this.

[1] http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2687176736/information-dump-inc...

mmb• 16 years ago

I like that Minecraft is proof you can write something cool in Java, a language considered by many to be corporate and boring.

All Java haters should watch the video of Notch coding away in Eclipse.

spacemanaki2• 16 years ago

I'm one of those haters who thinks Java IS kind of corporate and boring. On the other hand, it's just a programming language, and it's what you do with it that counts. You could write enterprise CRUD apps in Lisp if you wanted to.

I think it's more interesting that Minecraft is a Java APPLET. (at least the free version I played was)

teraflop• 16 years ago

Once you click that "allow permissions" button, an applet is pretty much exactly like any other Java application. It has all the permissions it wants, up to and including running native code.

The paid version gives you the option to run it either as an applet or a downloadable auto-updating jar.

kayoone• 16 years ago

Notch is a really refreshing person. Instead of all the wannabe-entrepreneurs that want to build apps/games for money (mostly), he just seems to really enjoy what hes doing. I also think all the money doesnt mean too much to him, other than he now has the freedom to only do "fun stuff". The fact that he doesnt want to run the business and just keep coding underlines that even more.

Tycho• 16 years ago

Jeez, someone cut APB some slack. It may have been a flop but it was hardly your run-of-the-mill linear action game.

chc• 16 years ago

I do think its massive budget was its undoing. I thought APB sounded pretty fun, but the pricing structure just sounded usurious and I wound up not even trying it out. I don't recall the specifics, but as somebody who has paid for lots of subscription services and games in the past, APB just sounded singularly like they were nickel and diming you.

JeanPierre• 16 years ago

Something interesting to note is that this would've been extremely much harder to do in 2000. Small companies and one-man teams would have a hard time publishing games and gain enough ground to stand a chance against the giants at that time.

And when we look at the quality from that time period - A little over a decade ago - games like Diablo, Starcraft, Quake (2) and Unreal were the ones with the best quality. With a bit of effort, indie developers and startups these days can easily beat the quality they had.

If this continues, what will we see in 2020? As the quality a game can achieve converges towards some limit (At least I'm assuming so), will indie games be more and more common and actually manage to make games that will challenge big-budget franchises?

mkramlich• 16 years ago

Minecraft is awesome. But nothing about it's business or distribution model is new. I was playing computer games I got from "The Net" (well, back then, it was BBS's-over-modems) that were (a) made by a single guy and/or small team, and (b) sold directly (or mostly so) and/or pirated. Now, this thing is awesome and he did a hell of a job at overall game design and coding. But this meme I've seen going around how the fact that it's the work of basically one guy is some new new thing: it's not.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

I've long thought that new tools (especially procedurally generated content) will pave the way for a new era of game design that allows much, much smaller teams to create top tier games. It's a lot more difficult to express an artistic vision through a large and complex bureaucratically controlled organization than it is to express it through a small group or an individual (compare the artistic quality of books written by a single author vs. by committees, etc.)

Moreover, the incredibly high cost of production of many modern games limits the sorts of games that get made. Minecraft level sales are barely enough to cover the costs of making a game at a company like EA or Activision.

Hopefully Notch's success will lead to the development of Minecraft as a highly modable platform for roughly similar games and also to the development of new low-cost game systems that produce no less enthralling experiences.

kmfrk• 16 years ago

I think it's ridiculous to use one game like Minecraft to announce a new era for videogame developers. Who's to say Minecraft wasn't an anomaly, a result of a ridiculously talented person like Notch and a perfect storm of hype and word-of-mouth PR?

> Why it matters

> Sounds interesting, you say, but why should I care that a few guys have put together a cool little indie game? The reason you should care is because a team of four or five people using free libraries and cross-platform tools have just made a mockery of the last five years of franchise-oriented, $50 million budget, yearly-release, AAA game development. And it’s not just a fluke. The Humble Indie Bundle, World of Goo, Braid, and a number of other extremely low-budget titles have electrified the gaming community, while games with millions in marketing budget like APB and Kane & Lynch fall flat on their face critically and commercially. Gamer discontent with these barren blockbusters is palpable, and Minecraft is the new poster boy for it.

Oh, they've "electrified the gaming community", have they? But how well are they doing financially?

Apple's App Store has enough successful apps to give developers hope, but the PC videogame scene needs more data points, before I'll start considering going "indie", as the kids call it.

How well does Minecraft do in terms of protection against piracy? I haven't heard a lot about it, and considering games like the aforementioned World of Goo's problems with it[1].

This is like saying that the success of Audiosurf on Steam ushered in a new era that developers would now be able to repeat. Steam has definitely made a big different, but everyone, calm down and take a deep breath for a second.

Notch is a friggin' wizard, and as much as people will try to reverse engineer its success, don't try to create a trend graph with one data point. I think it'd be devastating to give aspiring developers the impression that the road to success has been paved. Notch has found a way, but he hasn't paved it for the rest of us.

[1] http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/14/world-of-goo-vs-p...

hugh3• 16 years ago

A point that seems to be missed is that Minecraft is a niche game. That niche is geeks. Now, that may be quite a profitable niche to exploit, but a game which is essentially about building things out of blocks will never have the mainstream appeal of a God Of War or an Angry Birds.

Why Minecraft Matters

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