Wednesday 6 March 2019

Minecraft Essay

Explain what it is, give an outline of the game’s history and explain why it has been a commercial and critical success 

Minecraft is a sandbox game that was released in May 17th 2009 and was released on the PC for £10 which later in the games development would be raised to £18 however at this stage of the game it would only have the basics like 1 or 2 game modes max compared to the 2018 version which has around 5 so drastically increasing the life time of the game, it is an infinite sandbox meaning that people can built forever without having to run out of space and this was the first game to attempt this concept so that it appealed to a lot of people because realistically they could play it forever if they wanted to. The game is also a game that relies heavily on building where you can build famous places from popular movies like Game of Thrones and later on in the games life cycle people could share these worlds with the community by posting to the Minecraft forums and then the creators would list it so that other people could access it. Minecraft became so popular because imagination being a major factor in it so that it could interest more people how don't like the games that restrict the player to a certain boundary, as well as this Minecraft doesn't really have a set objective for them to complete meaning that the player could do what ever they wanted when they first started playing them game and in this point in time this was the only game that tried this concept and was a massive success which obviously made other companies later on try and attempt this concept with their games so that fans of games like Minecraft would be interested in their game however no game which have used this concept have been as successful as Minecraft.

A test video of Minecraft was released on the 13th of May 2009 to see how people would react to a game that is as ambitious as this and obviously the response of this video was very positive because as mentioned before no other game had tried something like this before, when the game was released instead of releasing the game with everything that it has to offer and rushing it, Notch made it so that he would regularly update the game with new game modes so that the players of the game would not get bored of the game, this was also a massive success because it meant people would constantly come back to the game to investigate the new features that have been placed in the game. Another way that Notch and later on Microsoft would make more money for Minecraft they would have the optional cosmetic skins and texture packs that would make the players character look different and also the background of the game so the objects in the game would look very different, as mentioned they are cosmetic meaning that they give the player no advantage in the game apart from that the world looks different so that it is fair for the players who don't want to spend anymore money on the game. Especially when the game was released on consoles like Xbox One and PS4 in 2011 the game was marketed and advertised very frequently so that it could convince new players to buy it or people who bought it on the PC to buy again because they might have friends who play on Xbox instead of PC and obviously the graphics upgrade so that people could experience it with better graphics.

Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2011 for £2.5 billion so that they could get the rights to anymore money that Mojang had made which to us seems like a lot of money but to Microsoft it was a very good investment because releasing it again on a different console would still sell a lot of copies because it would mean that people who couldn't access the Java Edition on PC would now be able to play it so this would increase the total community. Also in late 2017 when the Nintendo Switch was released another version of the game was released so that people would have a second option for playing Minecraft portably which they would obviously have it on the switch as mentioned and the Pocket edition that was on tablets that could be bought for £4.99 and then could be played portably offline so that the user would not need internet connection to be able to play it.

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