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You hear how Minecraft has sold half a million? That is unprecedented. Someone might say, “Well Malstrom, that doesn’t sound like much for worldwide sales.” But 100% of those sales were digital. The Big Lie the Industry keeps saying there is no decline in gaming because decline in retail sales is only being looked at and not digital sales. But the truth is that most sales are from retail. When a Blizzard business guy was interviewed by The Industry, when given softball questions of, “So digital sales are really on the rise?”, he shot it down immediately and said, “Even with World of Warcraft, that was sold almost entirely through retail and was made popular through there.” If Minecraft was a retail product, I imagine the sales would go up by a multiplier of 10.
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Anyway, don’t let the videos people put up showing their castles or towers fool you to think Minecraft is about ‘crafting’ or is a ‘sandbox’. What makes the game ‘work’ is the tension created by the monsters. As strange as it may sound, Minecraft is probably the scariest game ever made. This is why Notch’s approach to the updates have been in ‘harder monsters’ and ‘scarier places’ (such as The Core which is filled with Zombie Pigmen). Granted, once the player goes from mud hut to building a fortress, the monster tension goes away and the game can get boring. But the time to get to that point could be around 30 hours which is the playtime of a typical Final Fantasy game. There is tons of value in that $13 the game cost.
No one thought that a small game company called ‘id’ located in central Texas would change gaming even after they released Wolfenstein 3d. But First Person Shooters changed everything. Networked gaming and custom maps later carved out in Doom changed everything.
Minecraft will change gaming permanently in three ways:
Randomized Worlds– Randomized worlds are not new in gaming. Games like Civilization has always had them. There has been randomized dungeons such as in Diablo and other games. But it is rare when the entire game world is randomized. There have been some space exploration games that would keep generating the world around you as you flew. But Minecraft is stunning in that the randomized world is consistently interesting (and when was the last time you saw a randomized 3d world? Like never…).
This is a good demonstration of what I mean by the true exploration of the video game medium. While The Industry and old fart developers think the ‘exploration’ of the video game medium means to emulate movies or ‘interactive novels’ as much as possible, this shows that all of that is nonsense and that a compelling world can be generated by the computer. Remember the Ogre game from the book, Ender’s Game, where the world kept generating around Ender?
The reason why we keep getting ‘games as movies’ or ‘games as narratives’ is based on this fallacy: that interesting games depend on the personality of the developer. The truth is that interesting games depend on the personality of the gamer. Games are interesting only when the gamer is allowed to be interesting. Unfortunately, games-as-narratives is not about the gamer being interesting. Games-as-narratives is all about the developer being interesting (which is why games-as-narratives keeps getting shoved down our throats even though the big sellers this generation are anti-narrative games like Wii Sports,2d Mario, FPS multiplayer, Just Dance, etc).
Passive Multiplayer– The problem with multiplayer is players have to be playing at the same time. The only way multiplayer wasn’t simultaneous was doing email games for turn based games. In Minecraft, one can go to your server and see what your friend did to the world while you were gone. So every time you enter the server, you not only get a surprise… you get a surprise with a human touch. I don’t think I’ve seen passive multiplayer in a game… ever.
Selling the Alpha- Since I work with so-called “indie developers”, already they are changing the way how they do business. Minecraft isn’t even a finished product. It isn’t even beta. It is just an alpha version. But Notch decided to put it up for sale. (Impatient for profit is one of disruption’s bedrocks.) The standard has always been to sell the finished product… or sell the unfinished product and patch later.
What is interesting is that Notch is selling the product… as is. Not on what it will be. As more and more developers adopt this practice, it will transform gaming. Developers will immediately realize if they have a game people want to pay for based on these very early alpha sales. This fits disruption’s pattern of ‘a crappy product for non-consumers’ as alpha products are always crappy. But what if it is an alpha product for a game experience we’ve never seen? You’d get a different reaction than if the alpha product was for a game experience we HAD seen (no one would be interested). Many games start off with an imperfect hit and the sequels tend to iron out and really make the game ‘good’. Perhaps the correct perspective is that a game like Mega Man 1 was the alpha and Mega Man 2 was the actual game.
Since games are sold when they are ‘done’, you don’t really know what the actual market reception to it will be until it is released. And that could be two years or more before you find out.
One thing I always remembered complaining about is with PC game companies putting out the demo after the game had come out. It made so much more sense to me to release the demo BEFORE the game came out. Why? Well, demo feedback would immediately figure out technical issues (with PC games, developers have no idea how they will run with all the infinite configurations of hardware out there). Gameplay could be further ironed out. The demo would be a sort of ‘beta test’ if you will. Also, the demo would whet everyone’s appetite for the game. Unfortunately, demos are only put out after the game is released because The Industry fears (correctly) that the demo will reveal what a crappy game it is and turn players away.
Selling the alpha is, essentially, selling the prototype. And you are not selling the prototype for the cost of a full price game but only a few dollars. This also allows some gamers out there a way to participate as if they are ‘testing out’ a game and ‘give feedback’. The interaction between Notch and gamers is refreshing because there are no journalist middlemen and no Industry walls separating the developer from the ‘riff raff’ of The Masses. This is how gaming used to be before The Industry came along and ruined it. There was a time where when you beat an Ultima game, the ending encouraged you to mail Lord British and tell him of your accomplishment (which I did hahahaha) and Lord British would respond back.
So those are the three changes I see Minecraft bringing: Randomized self-generating world (this includes the emergent gameplay the monsters and all bring), Passive Multiplayer, and Selling the Alpha. This blocky Java applet game reminds me so much of “time waster” Tetris.
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