Introduction
When you think of a video game in the modern age, one of the first things you probably think of is Minecraft. Ever since its official release in 2011, the game has continued to retain an audience of millions for over 10 years straight, leaving it as the most popular video game of all time. Not to mention that the game itself has even surpassed 1 trillion total views on YouTube. Even something as little as hosting a Minecraft server can make you hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, I’m going to go through the story of Minecraft in an attempt to find out what makes it such a long-term success.
The Visionary Creator: Markus “Notch” Persson
To know the game, we must first know the creator behind it, and that would be Markus Persson, more well-known online as Notch. Notch grew up in Edsbyn, then later Stockholm, Sweden, and he started programming on his father’s Commodore PC at the age of seven. In 2004, Notch found a position working at King, a company that was later well-known for its 2012 smash hit Candy Crush. Notch worked there as a game developer for over four years but also spent time working on his projects like his recreation of Mega Man called Meg 4K Man. Notch would end up leaving King in 2009 to focus on his endeavors, and that endeavor was a game known as RubyDung.
RubyDung was a top-down base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but it never really became anything. That was until Notch found a tiny indie game by the name of Infiniminer. It was a class-based shooter where you could build bases and battle opponents. Something to take note of is the unique visual design: the voxel-based art style wasn’t very well-known at that point, so the simplistic yet detailed style made the game stand out. Notch played the game and had fun with it, but he also saw a lot of room for improvement.
He wanted to make a similar game, one that had a bit more variation in its mechanics. He took the source code of RubyDung and transformed it into the first version of his next game, a project with the working title of “Cave Game.” He made the world generation random, then added some characters taken from another one of his old games, Zombie Town, and he used that model as a base to create all the other mobs. The first public version of Minecraft was released on May 17, 2009, version 0.010a. Then, over the following months, various features were added, like water, more blocks, trees, clouds, and even multiplayer.
The design philosophy of Minecraft is that it’s a sandbox game similar to Gary’s Mod, and the player is encouraged to make the game whatever they want. As this was before there was an actual end goal to the game, 2010 was the earliest time when Minecraft Let’s Plays and other gameplay videos would be created, with Captain Sparkles, Syndicate, PewDiePie, and The Yogscast having been the first people to have covered it. They also went on to become very successful in their rights. Just to make things more accessible, on May 5, 2011, Minecraft Pocket Edition was released. So now, even I can play Minecraft on my old iPad. In November of that year, during the very first Minecon, Notch would finally flip the switch and release the very first full version of Minecraft. The game was already considered a success before that, though, with over 600,000 sales before the end of 2010.
The Rise of Minecraft
Over the next few years, YouTuber after YouTuber would pick up and start playing the game, leading to immense success for a lucky handful of people. A lot of the early Minecraft content was either Let’s Plays or tutorials, without much variety. The fan base of the game would get into a perpetual loop of people who watched YouTubers, got inspired to play the game, and then either started making videos on it themselves or continued to watch the YouTubers to get more ideas on what to do in the game. It’s a system that benefited both Mojang and the creators, as Minecraft would become a bigger and bigger game, and the same would happen to the most popular Minecraft channels. But not all the content at the time solely relied on the base game; mods and minigames were rampant on YouTube.
Fast forward to 2014, and Notch would get into some serious burnout. While he took a back seat in terms of development, people would still complain to him about various aspects of the game. Exhausted, he posted a tweet that reads, “Anyone wants to buy my share of Mojang so I could move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.” While it was originally just a venting post, it would end up turning into something, as several companies rushed into Notch’s DMs to give him an offer. Those companies would be Activision, EA, and Microsoft, and it turns out that Microsoft gave him the best deal.
71 of Mojang’s shares, and by extension, Minecraft, were bought out by Microsoft for two and a half billion dollars. This was enough for Notch to be set for the rest of his life, and Microsoft would allow Mojang to work as they already did, but with Microsoft’s technology and money at their disposal. Some people attribute the later focus on Minecraft Bedrock and microtransactions to Microsoft, but I couldn’t confirm that nor deny it. Not like that mattered anyway because things are only going up from here.
Challenges and Decline: The 2016 Low Point
Unfortunately, things couldn’t keep going straight up forever. 2016 was the first year of the game being notably less popular than it once was. But why is that? Well, by 2016, a lot of the hype around Minecraft seems to have run out. It’s almost as if everyone had collectively gotten tired of the game after doing everything they could do. And that’s without even mentioning the oversaturation that was rampant in the genre on YouTube.
For every successful Minecraft YouTuber, there were about 10,000 more that you’ll never get to see. People could only watch so much of the same Minecraft content before getting sick of it. As the year went by, all the most popular YouTubers would go down with Minecraft. They were too intertwined with the game, and shifting their content to any other game was futile at that point. It was too late.
It doesn’t help that a lot of these popular Minecraft YouTubers would end up getting involved with YouTube drama. Remember Team Crafted? They ended up disbanding in 2014 due to a falling out between Sky and the rest of the group. Then he had a lot of drama on his own. What about Popular MMOs? He and Jen got divorced, ruining what made their videos so special in the first place. Stampy?
Well, he was clean drama-wise, but I can’t say the same about some of his helpers. So the only real reason for his drop-off was the result of Minecraft’s general decline. But there was another reason why 2016 was the year of a notable downward shift for Minecraft. That’s because 2016 was the year of cringe culture. Think of all the most popular YouTubers: Filthy Frank, iDubbbz, Leafy. Commentary as a genre was thriving, and every one of them was able to grow by making fun of individuals deemed as cringe. And since most of Minecraft’s audience came from child-focused YouTubers, it only makes sense that Minecraft and its fans would be something worth making fun of.
But Minecraft’s biggest low point was in October of 2018, which just so happens to be a short while after Fortnite Battle Royale would have its big break and become a household name, as well as an epidemic for elementary schools everywhere. 2018 was also the year of a site-wide YouTube event: PewDiePie versus T-Series. T-Series was predicted to overtake PewDiePie by the end of the year, so the greater YouTube community rallied together and united to keep PewDiePie ahead of T-Series by all means necessary. Getting people to subscribe to PewDiePie became a massive trend, with Mr. Beast having bought actual advertisements just to get people to hit the red button.
Minecraft’s Renaissance in 2019
In an attempt to get a lead over T-Series, in 2019, PewDiePie would make his return to gaming content in an event called Gaming Week. He would end up playing Papers, Please, Fortnite, a B-movie game for the DS, and most importantly, Minecraft. On June 21st, PewDiePie would release the first video of Gaming Week, a video titled “Minecraft Part 1.”
The video features PewDiePie’s long-awaited return to Minecraft, and it started a series of 45 videos that would begin to reignite interest in the game with his wacky shenanigans featuring Nether portals, death, and uh, this good night. The viewers at home wanted to play Minecraft again. Keemstar set up Minecraft Monday, a weekly tournament that brought both old and new Minecraft YouTubers together. Most importantly, a small Minecraft channel by the name of Dream saw his opportunity to grow and made a video covering a potential strategy for getting PewDiePie’s Minecraft seed. From there, he would go on to grow his channel to massive heights after making a few follow-up videos and following the cursed Minecraft trend.
He would create his signature series, Minecraft Manhunt. Dream’s success didn’t just put a lot of eyes on him, though. His growth also inspired a ton of other new Minecraft channels to appear out of nowhere, bringing Minecraft back into public perception once again. But how do people stand out this time around? What’s going to stop people from just getting tired of the game again? Much like the modded Let’s Plays of old, a lot of modern Minecraft videos use features that aren’t in the base game to keep things more interesting. But instead of mods and mini-games, Minecraft content today uses plugins and challenges to stop the audience from growing bored.
For his videos, Dream needs to add plugins and data packs so that his challenges can work. The same goes for any Minecraft channel that does anything requiring in-game skills. Then there are the channels that straight up add new things to the game, which requires the skill of either modding or texture creating to pull it off. What I’m saying is that even when you get tired of Minecraft so much to the point where you can die happy never playing it again, you can always find something new to watch about it on YouTube, which reinvigorates that cycle of watching it than wanting to play it. For quite a lot of people, then, there’s challenging content.
The Role of Updates and Expansions
It’s existed in gaming for quite some time, like beating Mario games without collecting any coins. So it only makes sense that people would choose to do these challenges in Minecraft, a sandbox game that was quite literally designed for people to do just that. It was the perfect match.
Not to mention SMP content, which features a similar cross-growth method that Team Crafted had but now with a serialized format featuring many large and successful creators. But we can’t forget that content creators aren’t the only ones working on the game. Of course, 2020 saw the release of the Nether Update, which was the biggest update the game had seen in years. And with Minecraft back to relevance, there would be more work done on the game than we’ve seen in a very long time.
Still, it didn’t stop us from having the glow squid added. Minecraft was always designed to be a game with an infinite amount of content, and with mods and plugins, a theoretically infinite amount of enjoyment can be had with the game. So why did Minecraft stick around while other games drift off over time?
Minecraft had a massive community and YouTube viewing loop to ensure that Minecraft would stay in the spotlight, and it’s one of the few games to be lucky enough to have an audience of all demographics. It doesn’t pander specifically to children, so people who grow up with it can stay as fans of the series, whereas other games of that nature might be categorized as children’s games. Not to mention, Minecraft survived moving to a new generation of players, so people can both discover and rediscover the game now that it’s on everyone’s minds again.
Conclusion
This has been the story of Minecraft. While it’s been a bit of a bumpy ride, Minecraft is still doing insanely well. I don’t think it’ll ever hit those low points again, at least not for another five or so years. I feel like there are a lot more safeguards in place today than there were in 2016. Also, all of these games exist or existed at some point, but no one cares.”
