Alright, so this kind of thread, by the title itself, will be different from your usual "is Minecraft dead" ramblings, often if not always based on opinion and whatever happened to be thought of by the respective OP on a whim. No, this thread this time around is going to uncover facts - some of which are almost to over a decade (10 years) old at this point in time now - that show that Minecraft isn't dying - but it would've rather died long, long ago at this point. Get it now? Minecraft isn't dying; it's - in fact - suffering a fate worse than death. I'll try to explain everything as clear and concisely as I possibly can.
Chapter 1 - Mojang Studios
Since some if not most of you may already be considering protesting this thread for "fake news" or whatever the heck was the first thing that came to your mind, I'll start with the most damning piece of evidence first: Mojang Studios. Not the OG small team of "Notch's" beck and call, but the studio in its current state.
You see, while I don't support the idea of indie games being the answer to all the "same-y-ness" and "bugginess" AAA games out there (in fact, a lot of what even inspired indie games in the first place - if not all of them - was taken from those "fake news" and just being severely misinformed in general), I do have at least some genuine support for the industry in general. It puts spins on classic formulas, and I remember back in my teen-ager years when I just wanted to break new ground in gaming after having played the products of the big guys' for over ten years then at that point. But that's ultimately what makes indie games and studios unique from the AAA sector: innovating in ways that AAA normally wouldn't do for a smaller crowd of people.
Mojang, up until relatively recently, has had an identity of its own right: the brains behind classics such as Scrolls, Cobalt, and of course, Minecraft; and has tinkered with the original sandbox-survival genre to deliver an experience that the gaming industry leading up to that point has never heard of in its entire lifecycle. (OK, almost never heard of; Infiniminer existed before then, but it flopped early on due to its code getting leaked, and thus I won't be counting the predecessor to Minecraft as such.) The result was the birth of the voxel, basically 3D pixels, and thus its combination with sandbox-survival to create a unique experience where you literally punch wood to get started, mine your first stone with literal wooden tools, and beat an interdimensional space dragon (which is female, by her egg spawning upon defeat, by the way). Okay, maybe not that last part, but you get the gist of it by this point now.
And... then it happened. Mojang, with its acquisition by Microsoft, would eventually become one of the big guys - becoming the very thing it swore to destroy, and losing its unique identity as a videogame company altogether. Yep, Minecraft actually lost its identity as an indie game, and wasn't just revoked its "indie" status. Ever since then, they've had to keep up with a game that was already fundamentally flawed and broken by that point, and it's led to all sorts of bad decisions in the company - some of which were exactly what people feared would happen to companies that were always AAA, such as EA and Nintendo, such as an oppressive chat reporting system, and its willingness to completely ignore P-2-W servers that prey on minors who were just looking to play with some friends and other people - and ended up having to spend in excess of $1,000 just to win a single game and enjoy the overall experience. This actually leads us to the second chapter of our discussion: how their incompetence should've put the final nail in the game's coffin all these years ago, and why the buyout actually put the game into a fate worse than death itself when it should've rightfully perished.
Chapter 2 - Mojang & Microsoft
Fine, I'll admit it. I really wanted to call this chapter something like "electric boogaloo" or something along these lines, but I had to go with which my gut (or "little brain") insisted. Anyways, you might remember 1.8, the Bountiful Update, from almost 10 years ago at this point now, and the many, many controversies surrounding the update and if it was even "bountiful" to begin with. However, amid the opinions and arguments, one thing was obvious: the update was amongst the worst, having so many bugs almost to the point of being unplayable, from mobs not spawning outside of the player's render distance to endermen refusing to get aggro'ed upon looking at them or attacking them. Now, I would like to clarify that these issues are different from the ones you may have heard from AAA studios, which at least were usually the result of time and money constraints. But Mojang had no excuse to release the Bountiful Update in the state that it was. I mean, basic, fundamental features were either broken or refusing to even start working.
What Mojang should have done instead was with the amount of traffic that their game was keeping, and their utter inability to continue developing the game with the skill and competence they once had (or rather, a somewhat lack of it to ever begin with; you'll see in a later chapter), was to just abandon the game altogether while people's attention to the title was just beginning to soar - much like many if not most AAA games especially of its time. I mean, if you didn't want any fame in your life, wouldn't you just abandon a project early before it reached ample popularity? After all, you didn't want to burn out your audience. And it's not just that, but also that you may not have the skill or experience to continue providing quality updates to your project or game as popularity continues to soar. Mojang happened to get the short end of that stick in particular. They had all the time in the world to quit while things were still heating up, so as their passion project, Minecraft, would remain in a niche market, thus leaving the rest of us to play the AAA games we've all known and loved. Yet they've instead foolishly decided to keep going - and thus burning themselves out to the point where they actually had to be bought by a giant corporation, that being Microsoft Corporation, just to keep their decomposing game alive and on life support. But at what cost? Yep, they became a multimillion-dollar corporation themselves: Mojang Studios, and lost their identity as one of the new pioneers of gaming.
Chapter 3 - Busted from the Beginning
But of course, we simply cannot ignore Minecraft's troubled history - and how before it was even officially released to the public on November 18th, 2011, that other, even smaller, hobbyist developers had to pick up the pieces that Mojang had the nerve to even leave lying around. People like FlowerChild, OG developer of the Better Than Wolves total conversion mod. I won't link the actual article for now since children might be uncomfortable with the mod itself and some of its more "questionable" features, but my point here is that indie developers, in my honest opinion, should just make a game, no matter how simple it may be, and just leave it at that. No going big (which explains why the vanilla game is far more popular than BTW) or any of that mess; just give something the fans will enjoy, and go home right after. Ironically, going big was what prevented Minecraft from ever reaching "Notch's" original goals of being a more complete expansion upon Infiniminer and Dwarf Fortress - when nowadays, indie games at large spiked in popularity well over many AAA experiences, and that's not even to throw shade at either side. The bottom line: Minecraft really does feel soulless because of its current state, since it doesn't even come close to fulfilling the dream that "Notch" had ever since the beginning. It no longer has a unique identity; it's just another cash grab.
Again, FlowerChild and the OG devs behind TerraFirmaCraft (whom I don't quite recall) are all proof that indie games never needed to go down the path they've taken; overtaking AAA games - and by a huge margin at that, and taking all the money for themselves. Even if corporations were indeed evil and greedy (which I know from various confirmed sources that is obviously not true), indie games today have ironically become just like them, only far, far worse - again, the very thing they've sworn to destroy from the very beginning. They've lost what's made them so "small-business-y" in the first place, and in fact, the games themselves actually encourage the player to go capitalist themselves when originally they were going for taking down capitalism.
Chapter 4 - The Real Electric Boogaloo
Alright, I've done it. Are you happy now? Moving on, there was an incident around the same time as the Bountiful Update where Minecraft literally betrayed Bukkit, a popular mod for servers to ease the workload of starting up and running a Minecraft server. And I'm being completely serious here; I'm not bluffing or any of that jazz. But first, let's go all the way back to the former 1.8: the first part of the Adventure Update. Again, this was one of those versions that received near-universal dislike for one single, yet crippling, change: locking height variation to the biome itself, and not the other way around like it rightfully should've been. This actually resulted in masses of people taking to servers just to get an experience that was actually entertaining and at least gave them something to do at all - some of which, especially P2W that Mojang and Minecraft would solely rely on just to remain afloat.
It's not the same anymore. We've run out of things to do.
Some of y'all (and by "some" I mean a ton of y'all) may have mostly or totally forgotten about this one quote regarding the fundamentally flawed terrain generation back in Beta 1.8, and that's because it's now long since "obsolete." And you'd be correct! But that also depends on how much you remember about the game itself - because this quote still stands true as ever today as it did a whole dozen (12) years ago.
I obviously do not mean strictly about the terrain generation itself - although it was definitely gnarly (and again by that I mean just terrible all around). What I mean is that this major issue to the game itself would ultimately prove to be the very least of our worries - as this foreshadowed the freakshow that was feature creep, lack of competence on the team's part in general, and this: removing fireflies in 1.19 all because they were "poisonous to frogs" and that just making frogs not eat them would "make fireflies useless" - when bats themselves, mind you, were already completely useless to begin with, and that feature was added well over a decade ago at this point in time. If I went on about the many, many problems that Minecraft and Mojang have created over the past fourteen years of development and production, then not only would we be here all day, but this article might as well take up well more than ten pages worth of content, assuming of course it was on a word processor, and not something like WordPad (which cannot have individual pages by default without modding the crud out of that thing, mind you). It's up to y'all to figure the rest out for yourselves; you'd most likely be surprised.
Chapter 5 - "Where's The Mod API?"
Again, you've probably long since forgotten the song/meme by this point in time, but this was something that was actually proposed for a long time now - and not only would've allowed us to directly install mods without a whole bunch of file editing and text altering involved, but also allowed us to play on servers that themselves had the mod(s) without having to have the mod(s) installed client-side yourself in order to play at all. Yes, there are alternatives to this ill-fated official API, such as (the other ill-fated aforementioned) Bukkit and Spigot, but why settle on third-party sources, with potentially sketchy stuff if not viruses and/or malware involved, when you could just rely on a mod API already built into the base game with no strings attached whatsoever?
I know that the topic in the first chapter was the most damning part of this entire discussion, but it's not by a long shot the biggest flaw with Minecraft and Mojang (Studios) as a whole. That "nomination" would "officially" go to the game's official Mod API - or rather, a total lack of one. For years, people have asked for it, seeing it as the golden ticket to enjoying whatever mods they wish, and without major issues or sketchy software of any kind whatsoever. Now, please keep in mind that regardless of whether the absence of an official mod API is a relevant factor or not, I'd still much prefer Better Than Wolves and (only slightly less so) TerraFirmaCraft, as they bring about the vision of what the game was supposed to be about in the first place. Regardless, the mod API would've been a godsend for those who've had trouble modding with API's like Forge and Fabric and (especially so) have found themselves with malware in the past. Heck, it even would've prevented the Microsoft buyout from ever occurring in the first place, as people would be enjoying new and different experiences off of the single product they've bought with their 30 smackaroos - all with no extra charge at all whatsoever. But now, people have lost all hope in the idea, and it's all but completely dead and forgotten. It could've made the game into the indie beast it could've been today, and yet people dropping all hope has caused everybody's favorite block-building game, Minecraft, to lose its identity to the corporate bodies.
Conclusion
In just a few no uncertain words, Minecraft isn't dying anytime soon - but at this point in time, it would've rather died; it's already facing a fate worse than death. This is why I've talked about Minecraft terminating all development permanently after 1.20's release, as it's already certain that the game and the team itself clearly cannot competently (never mind professionally) continue to evolve the way it's already going now. Personally I don't even think Minecraft's dying at all - if you're still thinking this way about me like some kind of crazy person - rather, it's just sort of "petering out" ; it's growing less popular by the day and by the year, yet its popularity will never truly hit zero. Sure, the quote below does still apply to this day and age...
For every man who places his last block, there's a boy out there placing his first.
...but the way I personally see things overall, there will be more men placing their last blocks, and fewer boys placing their first as time continues to go by. But again, there will never truly be no more people playing Minecraft. Minecraft has ultimately proven that we as children, teens and young adults used to think that indie games were immortal compared to AAA games at the height of their popularity - but even these will one day die out, or at the very least, just merely "peter out" growing so unpopular and obscure that you'd be lucky to find it anywhere on the internet, but never truly die out completely.
I hope you've gotten at least the gist of what I'm talking about here, and that you've scrolled all the way down to the end, and reading as you went. If so, then congratulations! You're free to post your replies and opinions to this down below. If not, you're still free to do so; I won't stop you for not knowing everything there is to know. You're welcome.
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Order of the Stone - A mod idea of what Minecraft could've been had it been developed by a team with more expertise; by professional developers and producers.
Yeah I'm a bit lost as to what you're even trying to proclaim here. It merely seems like another spin on the last two threads you made about how Minecraft is bad, Mojang is bad, the game should therefore stop development, and with an added mention about how triple A is great (usually) and indie isn't so great (usually).
Starting your threads off with "this isn't opinion but fact" and then making an opinion piece isn't a good way to start things off. You tend to present your stances as fact quite a bit but doing it from the onset just guarantees people won't take it seriously. You're setting yourself up to have people not be open to what you say. Do you... realize this?
Fact is fact. Opinion is opinion. Opinion is not fact.
Worse, you claim this will be clear and consist but this is anything but. Elaborating or being wordy is fine (I'm rather guilty of that at times), but this is a ton of unrelated loose thoughts. I'm not even sure what you're trying to say, and if I wasn't aware of your prior posts as context, I'd be wondering what this is (my reaction would be like the above).
Additionally, I'd like to see a thread that supposedly claims to discuss Minecraft and its issues stick to Minecraft, and not going so far into the subject of triple A or indie so much like your threads of this nature tend to do. This really comes off as a self realization that there's a lack of a base argument, and needing to dilute with other unrelated arguments.
Personal remarks/suggestion: I get it. You don't like the way the game is and you'd rather it be something else. Okay, that part is fine. So then be honest. Just make a piece about "this is where I wish Minecraft diverged and here's what I wish it was" instead of trying to dress it up as something else. Forcing your opinion as more than your opinion doesn't get many people to accept it, it just does the opposite. People will still disagree with it merely because each of us has our own opinion on what an ideal Minecraft would be... but they'd probably accept it as your opinion if you are presenting it as such instead of trying to tell them it is fact that they should simply accept and deal with.
In shorter words, the problem here isn't your opinion. The problem is you trying to present it in a way that's more than it is. You're literally working against yourself.
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Minecraft is not dying, but changing. I don't exactly like its development, but we need to give minecraft credit for being the most played game worldwide over 15 years. They have to be doing something right. I wish they would listen more to the old community (I also play for 12 years) instead of expanding the game endlessly, you make very valid points, but I guess it's just nothing we have control over. We can just try to treat minecraft as before or even downgrade the version and hope the next changes will be better...
Nope. Most of things they did have been done years ago, and the most "right" (that's debatable) was done at the beggining, by Notch - game is written on Java.
Without that, there would be no mods and game would've died out years ago. And as you can see, devs are doing nothing to simplify mods creation.
Basically, it's a community that keeps game alive, not developers. And it's a community that brought all the popularity to the game. Otherwise, "Dungeons" and "Legends" would be bestsellers as well
But the problem with such state that community is also declining in numbers. Number of copies sold does not equal to number of active players. In MC case i think it's VERY noticable.
So yeah, game is slowly dying. And we might see it's agony in near future, since gaming department of Microsoft is bringing a lot of money losses overall, with Bethesda failing to make a good game, deal with Actiblizz still pending (not to mention it's price) and xbox and xpass loosing quite noticeably to Sony and conventional game-purchasing methods. That all may lead to restructurisation of gaming department, with heavy cuts on developers who's not bringing enough money. And something tells me that Mojang is not profitable at all.
I would argue that Minecraft died even before the sellout, when it let players steer it course by abusing the (many, many) loopholes the game has because the need to abstract everything, so much that the original experience of Mining and Crafting was then considered "annoying" because abusing loopholes was tolerated for so much time it's now almost official, aside from some pretty superficial nerfs that, at most, change how players abuse loopholes or, even better, create new loopholes to abuse. People think mining is "too grindy" and they unironically don't even know that's what made the game addictive in the first place.
"But you can play however you want". Yeah, and die all the time, and waste all the time I have because making a respiration potion is way harder that crafting doors. Such a weak argument.
Anyway, the game won't really die until a better alternative shows up. Not any alternative, there's plenty of those. One game that does the original Minecraft magic better than Minecraft itself, and it's not even that hard: just take the basic experience of beta MC, fix a few glaring gameplay problems, and proceed from there without making silly decisions like limiting furniture and color variations, ignoring the most basic risk/reward rules, not differentiating how SP and MP work at all, using politics as a reason to (not) add something, or attack their own customers for not agreeing with their worldview.
...without making silly decisions like limiting furniture and color variations, ignoring the most basic risk/reward rules, not differentiating how SP and MP work at all, using politics as a reason to (not) add something, or attack their own customers for not agreeing with their worldview.
I'll believe in Hytale when I'll see it.
I so agree with that. I would so love to see more actuall furniture in the game and but I guess Mojang likes a stair or a slab with a trapdoor behind it better then an actual chair
If you look what a Cocricot or Miniatura modded texture pack does, we could have all of that in vanilla game, but nop, Mojang just prefer to avoid or slow down the game evolution. Tbh, I don't think the game really changed that much since the beta days, all we have is a few silly mobs, a few new blocks a bit higher build heigh, all that in more then 12 years
On your point about modding API's, I don't see how an API from the developers that you keep framing as incompetent will be any better than the community made ones at this point. In fact, said official API already exists on the bedrock version, and is essentially locked behind becoming a partner with Mojang and has major limitations while Microsoft monetizes the hell out of it. (not to mention the fact that they were censoring LGBTQ+ content for a while) If you want to actually start a conversation about Mojang's sleazy business practices, I would talk about that instead of complaining about how they didn't take the game in the direction you wanted.
On your point about modding API's, I don't see how an API from the developers that you keep framing as incompetent will be any better than the community made ones at this point. In fact, said official API already exists on the bedrock version, and is essentially locked behind becoming a partner with Mojang and has major limitations while Microsoft monetizes the hell out of it. (not to mention the fact that they were censoring LGBTQ+ content for a while) If you want to actually start a conversation about Mojang's sleazy business practices, I would talk about that instead of complaining about how they didn't take the game in the direction you wanted.
The thing is, it would be part of the game. No need for additional effort from a player to download and install third party software. Not to mention checking that the versions all match and so on...
From what I've seen, it's already hard enough for players to download and instal a simple resource pack. They don't know how or they are just too lazy to deal with that
Again, Mojang made an in game API bedrock version, yes it is more convenient, but you have to pay for it. Obviously this does help the creators of the mods earn money (If Microsoft even gives them a fair cut) but the API is much more limited, you have to mess with the files to play mods on worlds other than the one provided with the mod, which defeats the purpose of a convenient in-game mod API.
I don't see much point in complaining about recent updates and how Minecraft has lost it's feel when older versions are literally provided in the launcher to play. If you want Mojang to stop updating the game, then don't update your game!
Java Edition also has an "add-on API" - data packs and all that stuff, even "experimental feature" data packs (like you previously could in Bedrock Edition you can enable a toggle to try out features like the recent changes to villagers before they become official; before 1.20 was released there was a data pack that added/enabled its new features, and so on), this is actually a major reason why updates like 1.8 took so long; the entire game is now basically data-driven by this point (for better or worse, worse since the game has become massively bloated and slowed down by all the additional resources needed to interpret all the data files; for the same reason mods using a mod API like Forge are much more resource-intensive than mods which directly edit the game's code, as mine do, and this is partly why they are so lightweight by comparison to "traditional" mods).
As a (former) Mojang employee once said regarding the code rewrites in 1.8:
Games can be either fast or extensible, pick one. I'll let you knife-fight it out with the ones demanding a plugin API.
Also, this by no means means that you can just make a "mod" and never have to worry about updating it - you certainly do, just as you must update resource packs; the changelogs for almost every update include countless changes to commands / data packs. Nor can you actually add new content, just modify existing ones (e.g. if you want to add a new type of sword you base it on an existing item). Java does still have the limitation of being unable to modify entities, at least to the extent that you can on Bedrock (you can use commands and attributes (speed, health, damage, etc) to modify their behavior to an extent but models can't be changed unless you use a 3rd partly mod like Optifine, which is more of a resource/data pack expansion mod than an optimization mod these days).
Myself, I don't bother with any of this and have been modding the same version for the past 10 years, I don't see mods (by which I mean mods that actually add/change many things, not just add a minimap, a few new items, graphical effects, or such) as "add-ons" but updates in their own right, creating entirely new experiences completely separate from vanilla's updates (basically a fork of the game, one of the most popular such mods was Better Than Wolves, and many such mods do result from the creator disliking newer updates, just like myself, but I'd also include any major modpack).
I am reminded of a recent visit to a toy store which was absolutely full of Minecraft toys, from Lego sets to Minecraft swords to all kinds of statues to display on one's desk. My reaction was "wow, Minecraft is as popular as ever! It never gets old!"
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People say things like that EVERY YEAR just to try to get attention and scare people! And it works too well on me, even causing me to lose motivation for Minecraft projects years in the making!
I think that this confirmation bias is like Mythology and Science... Hey Kids, this Game is really popular... Believe us!
According to those figures I find about 1/400000th of the total diamonds found by all players per day - so are there really only 400,000 active players? Likewise, I kill about 1/200000th of the skeletons per day; conversely, the ones for cake, pigs, etc seem way too high to me, I only ever crafted a single cake in each of my worlds and have averaged about one new world a year, traveling 30-100 meters by pig in each world just to get the achievement. Even if you count the pickaxes I buy from trading as crafting (as the game's own stats do) I only need around 250 of them per year (and used to repair a single pickaxe, so not the same as making a whole new one), and none at all in modded worlds once past the early game as I repair them with individual units; of course, since 1.9 Mending avoids the need to craft new ones, so all this suggests that a lot of players are playing the game for the very first time and/or make lots of very short-lived worlds where they never progress that far, not even to finding diamonds (e.g. they only make stone/wood pickaxes, hence the unusually high number compared to diamonds found).
Also, these stats probably do not include Java Edition as the game does not send such stats to Mojang, at least, I know that older versions do not, so they are most likely only from Bedrock/Console edition, which have very strict rules against e.g. using Creative on a Survival world, which disables achievements as they are saved to your online account, whereas on Java they are only local and 1.7+ even allows you to freely edit the file (1.6.4 and earlier versions will reset the file if a checksum doesn't match, the file name also suggests it may have been intended to be stored online at some point but they never implemented it for JE).
According to those figures I find about 1/400000th of the total diamonds found by all players per day - so are there really only 400,000 active players? Likewise, I kill about 1/200000th of the skeletons per day; conversely, the ones for cake, pigs, etc seem way too high to me, I only ever crafted a single cake in each of my worlds and have averaged about one new world a year, traveling 30-100 meters by pig in each world just to get the achievement. Even if you count the pickaxes I buy from trading as crafting (as the game's own stats do) I only need around 250 of them per year (and used to repair a single pickaxe, so not the same as making a whole new one), and none at all in modded worlds once past the early game as I repair them with individual units; of course, since 1.9 Mending avoids the need to craft new ones, so all this suggests that a lot of players are playing the game for the very first time and/or make lots of very short-lived worlds where they never progress that far, not even to finding diamonds (e.g. they only make stone/wood pickaxes, hence the unusually high number compared to diamonds found).
Why would you arrive at questioning if there's 400,000 users based on your own diamond rate? We both know you most likely find a number of diamonds that is above average, probably far above average. You're probably in the top 1% in that regard (probably more like top 0.1% or higher). And the numbers found don't trend linearly (that means, someone in the top 1% might not have just twice the amount of someone in the top 2%, but maybe more, now trend that down to the 50% percentile). What I'm saying is, I think you'd have to multiple the 400,000 many times over if we're going by your own diamond finding rate.
And yes, I imagine most people aren't playing worlds very long term like some others, nor are playing heavily every day.
Your play style (like all of ours, really) skews higher than average in some ways, and lower than average in other ways. If you only make one cake a year, for example, that should of course be expected to be below average.
Also, these stats probably do not include Java Edition as the game does not send such stats to Mojang, at least, I know that older versions do not, so they are most likely only from Bedrock/Console edition, which have very strict rules against e.g. using Creative on a Survival world, which disables achievements as they are saved to your online account, whereas on Java they are only local and 1.7+ even allows you to freely edit the file (1.6.4 and earlier versions will reset the file if a checksum doesn't match, the file name also suggests it may have been intended to be stored online at some point but they never implemented it for JE).
I'm not sure if they include Java. For reference, here's what modern versions disclose (and you have to opt-in to optional data collection).
It's interesting that you mention it resets in older versions if something doesn't match, because I was unable to get the advancements file from my month old backup of a world to be accepted by the same world after it got corrupted. Both the advancements and statistics files were null and reset themselves. I just couldn't get it to accept the advancements file. So it sounds like something might be happening in new versions? But the statistics file was accepted and many of those things are stored there. So yeah I don't know if this includes Java.
For all we know, they sampled just a portion of the player base and extrapolated (this is, after all, how almost all population sampling is done to begin with, and you can usually get accurate enough results with a total sampled percentage far lower than most people realize). Especially since it was probably meant to be for PR, it wouldn't surprise me if they were more lax on tallying things here, but who knows.
Maybe a form of existentialism, dealing with it's authenticity?
This Forum to me represents: Minecraft: Bedrock Edition... A micro that mimics the macro.
EG, Minecraft Live had less than 50,000 watching the Livestream on YouTube but within 5 minutes of finishing the Stream the Video had over 800,000 views... This is view Bot Traffic.
During the: MC Live event, they/them-Minecraft, felt it necessary to inform us how popular the game was.
I think that this confirmation bias is like Mythology and Science... Hey Kids, this Game is really popular... Believe us!
I'm just back to using Planet Minecraft more often but also my eyes are tired and the site textsize, graphics, and layout are too busy and small for me.
Alright, so this kind of thread, by the title itself, will be different from your usual "is Minecraft dead" ramblings, often if not always based on opinion and whatever happened to be thought of by the respective OP on a whim. No, this thread this time around is going to uncover facts - some of which are almost to over a decade (10 years) old at this point in time now - that show that Minecraft isn't dying - but it would've rather died long, long ago at this point. Get it now? Minecraft isn't dying; it's - in fact - suffering a fate worse than death. I'll try to explain everything as clear and concisely as I possibly can.
Since some if not most of you may already be considering protesting this thread for "fake news" or whatever the heck was the first thing that came to your mind, I'll start with the most damning piece of evidence first: Mojang Studios. Not the OG small team of "Notch's" beck and call, but the studio in its current state.
You see, while I don't support the idea of indie games being the answer to all the "same-y-ness" and "bugginess" AAA games out there (in fact, a lot of what even inspired indie games in the first place - if not all of them - was taken from those "fake news" and just being severely misinformed in general), I do have at least some genuine support for the industry in general. It puts spins on classic formulas, and I remember back in my teen-ager years when I just wanted to break new ground in gaming after having played the products of the big guys' for over ten years then at that point. But that's ultimately what makes indie games and studios unique from the AAA sector: innovating in ways that AAA normally wouldn't do for a smaller crowd of people.
Mojang, up until relatively recently, has had an identity of its own right: the brains behind classics such as Scrolls, Cobalt, and of course, Minecraft; and has tinkered with the original sandbox-survival genre to deliver an experience that the gaming industry leading up to that point has never heard of in its entire lifecycle. (OK, almost never heard of; Infiniminer existed before then, but it flopped early on due to its code getting leaked, and thus I won't be counting the predecessor to Minecraft as such.) The result was the birth of the voxel, basically 3D pixels, and thus its combination with sandbox-survival to create a unique experience where you literally punch wood to get started, mine your first stone with literal wooden tools, and beat an interdimensional space dragon (which is female, by her egg spawning upon defeat, by the way). Okay, maybe not that last part, but you get the gist of it by this point now.
And... then it happened. Mojang, with its acquisition by Microsoft, would eventually become one of the big guys - becoming the very thing it swore to destroy, and losing its unique identity as a videogame company altogether. Yep, Minecraft actually lost its identity as an indie game, and wasn't just revoked its "indie" status. Ever since then, they've had to keep up with a game that was already fundamentally flawed and broken by that point, and it's led to all sorts of bad decisions in the company - some of which were exactly what people feared would happen to companies that were always AAA, such as EA and Nintendo, such as an oppressive chat reporting system, and its willingness to completely ignore P-2-W servers that prey on minors who were just looking to play with some friends and other people - and ended up having to spend in excess of $1,000 just to win a single game and enjoy the overall experience. This actually leads us to the second chapter of our discussion: how their incompetence should've put the final nail in the game's coffin all these years ago, and why the buyout actually put the game into a fate worse than death itself when it should've rightfully perished.
Fine, I'll admit it. I really wanted to call this chapter something like "electric boogaloo" or something along these lines, but I had to go with which my gut (or "little brain") insisted. Anyways, you might remember 1.8, the Bountiful Update, from almost 10 years ago at this point now, and the many, many controversies surrounding the update and if it was even "bountiful" to begin with. However, amid the opinions and arguments, one thing was obvious: the update was amongst the worst, having so many bugs almost to the point of being unplayable, from mobs not spawning outside of the player's render distance to endermen refusing to get aggro'ed upon looking at them or attacking them. Now, I would like to clarify that these issues are different from the ones you may have heard from AAA studios, which at least were usually the result of time and money constraints. But Mojang had no excuse to release the Bountiful Update in the state that it was. I mean, basic, fundamental features were either broken or refusing to even start working.
What Mojang should have done instead was with the amount of traffic that their game was keeping, and their utter inability to continue developing the game with the skill and competence they once had (or rather, a somewhat lack of it to ever begin with; you'll see in a later chapter), was to just abandon the game altogether while people's attention to the title was just beginning to soar - much like many if not most AAA games especially of its time. I mean, if you didn't want any fame in your life, wouldn't you just abandon a project early before it reached ample popularity? After all, you didn't want to burn out your audience. And it's not just that, but also that you may not have the skill or experience to continue providing quality updates to your project or game as popularity continues to soar. Mojang happened to get the short end of that stick in particular. They had all the time in the world to quit while things were still heating up, so as their passion project, Minecraft, would remain in a niche market, thus leaving the rest of us to play the AAA games we've all known and loved. Yet they've instead foolishly decided to keep going - and thus burning themselves out to the point where they actually had to be bought by a giant corporation, that being Microsoft Corporation, just to keep their decomposing game alive and on life support. But at what cost? Yep, they became a multimillion-dollar corporation themselves: Mojang Studios, and lost their identity as one of the new pioneers of gaming.
Some of y'all (and by "some" I mean a ton of y'all) may have mostly or totally forgotten about this one quote regarding the fundamentally flawed terrain generation back in Beta 1.8, and that's because it's now long since "obsolete." And you'd be correct! But that also depends on how much you remember about the game itself - because this quote still stands true as ever today as it did a whole dozen (12) years ago.
I obviously do not mean strictly about the terrain generation itself - although it was definitely gnarly (and again by that I mean just terrible all around). What I mean is that this major issue to the game itself would ultimately prove to be the very least of our worries - as this foreshadowed the freakshow that was feature creep, lack of competence on the team's part in general, and this: removing fireflies in 1.19 all because they were "poisonous to frogs" and that just making frogs not eat them would "make fireflies useless" - when bats themselves, mind you, were already completely useless to begin with, and that feature was added well over a decade ago at this point in time. If I went on about the many, many problems that Minecraft and Mojang have created over the past fourteen years of development and production, then not only would we be here all day, but this article might as well take up well more than ten pages worth of content, assuming of course it was on a word processor, and not something like WordPad (which cannot have individual pages by default without modding the crud out of that thing, mind you). It's up to y'all to figure the rest out for yourselves; you'd most likely be surprised.
Order of the Stone - A mod idea of what Minecraft could've been had it been developed by a team with more expertise; by professional developers and producers.
Yeah I'm a bit lost as to what you're even trying to proclaim here. It merely seems like another spin on the last two threads you made about how Minecraft is bad, Mojang is bad, the game should therefore stop development, and with an added mention about how triple A is great (usually) and indie isn't so great (usually).
Starting your threads off with "this isn't opinion but fact" and then making an opinion piece isn't a good way to start things off. You tend to present your stances as fact quite a bit but doing it from the onset just guarantees people won't take it seriously. You're setting yourself up to have people not be open to what you say. Do you... realize this?
Fact is fact. Opinion is opinion. Opinion is not fact.
Worse, you claim this will be clear and consist but this is anything but. Elaborating or being wordy is fine (I'm rather guilty of that at times), but this is a ton of unrelated loose thoughts. I'm not even sure what you're trying to say, and if I wasn't aware of your prior posts as context, I'd be wondering what this is (my reaction would be like the above).
Additionally, I'd like to see a thread that supposedly claims to discuss Minecraft and its issues stick to Minecraft, and not going so far into the subject of triple A or indie so much like your threads of this nature tend to do. This really comes off as a self realization that there's a lack of a base argument, and needing to dilute with other unrelated arguments.
Personal remarks/suggestion: I get it. You don't like the way the game is and you'd rather it be something else. Okay, that part is fine. So then be honest. Just make a piece about "this is where I wish Minecraft diverged and here's what I wish it was" instead of trying to dress it up as something else. Forcing your opinion as more than your opinion doesn't get many people to accept it, it just does the opposite. People will still disagree with it merely because each of us has our own opinion on what an ideal Minecraft would be... but they'd probably accept it as your opinion if you are presenting it as such instead of trying to tell them it is fact that they should simply accept and deal with.
In shorter words, the problem here isn't your opinion. The problem is you trying to present it in a way that's more than it is. You're literally working against yourself.
When is this forum going to start a youtube channel about how Minecraft is bad now?
Minecraft is not dying, but changing. I don't exactly like its development, but we need to give minecraft credit for being the most played game worldwide over 15 years. They have to be doing something right. I wish they would listen more to the old community (I also play for 12 years) instead of expanding the game endlessly, you make very valid points, but I guess it's just nothing we have control over. We can just try to treat minecraft as before or even downgrade the version and hope the next changes will be better...
Check out my Youtube-Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@VanillaLongplayz
Nope. Most of things they did have been done years ago, and the most "right" (that's debatable) was done at the beggining, by Notch - game is written on Java.
Without that, there would be no mods and game would've died out years ago. And as you can see, devs are doing nothing to simplify mods creation.
Basically, it's a community that keeps game alive, not developers. And it's a community that brought all the popularity to the game. Otherwise, "Dungeons" and "Legends" would be bestsellers as well
But the problem with such state that community is also declining in numbers. Number of copies sold does not equal to number of active players. In MC case i think it's VERY noticable.
So yeah, game is slowly dying. And we might see it's agony in near future, since gaming department of Microsoft is bringing a lot of money losses overall, with Bethesda failing to make a good game, deal with Actiblizz still pending (not to mention it's price) and xbox and xpass loosing quite noticeably to Sony and conventional game-purchasing methods. That all may lead to restructurisation of gaming department, with heavy cuts on developers who's not bringing enough money. And something tells me that Mojang is not profitable at all.
I actually read most of this now and I can say that yeah it's pretty messed up that the game has become woke in an abstract sense
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Curse PremiumI would argue that Minecraft died even before the sellout, when it let players steer it course by abusing the (many, many) loopholes the game has because the need to abstract everything, so much that the original experience of Mining and Crafting was then considered "annoying" because abusing loopholes was tolerated for so much time it's now almost official, aside from some pretty superficial nerfs that, at most, change how players abuse loopholes or, even better, create new loopholes to abuse. People think mining is "too grindy" and they unironically don't even know that's what made the game addictive in the first place.
"But you can play however you want". Yeah, and die all the time, and waste all the time I have because making a respiration potion is way harder that crafting doors. Such a weak argument.
Anyway, the game won't really die until a better alternative shows up. Not any alternative, there's plenty of those. One game that does the original Minecraft magic better than Minecraft itself, and it's not even that hard: just take the basic experience of beta MC, fix a few glaring gameplay problems, and proceed from there without making silly decisions like limiting furniture and color variations, ignoring the most basic risk/reward rules, not differentiating how SP and MP work at all, using politics as a reason to (not) add something, or attack their own customers for not agreeing with their worldview.
I'll believe in Hytale when I'll see it.
I so agree with that. I would so love to see more actuall furniture in the game and but I guess Mojang likes a stair or a slab with a trapdoor behind it better then an actual chair
If you look what a Cocricot or Miniatura modded texture pack does, we could have all of that in vanilla game, but nop, Mojang just prefer to avoid or slow down the game evolution. Tbh, I don't think the game really changed that much since the beta days, all we have is a few silly mobs, a few new blocks a bit higher build heigh, all that in more then 12 years
On your point about modding API's, I don't see how an API from the developers that you keep framing as incompetent will be any better than the community made ones at this point. In fact, said official API already exists on the bedrock version, and is essentially locked behind becoming a partner with Mojang and has major limitations while Microsoft monetizes the hell out of it. (not to mention the fact that they were censoring LGBTQ+ content for a while) If you want to actually start a conversation about Mojang's sleazy business practices, I would talk about that instead of complaining about how they didn't take the game in the direction you wanted.
The thing is, it would be part of the game. No need for additional effort from a player to download and install third party software. Not to mention checking that the versions all match and so on...
From what I've seen, it's already hard enough for players to download and instal a simple resource pack. They don't know how or they are just too lazy to deal with that
Again, Mojang made an in game API bedrock version, yes it is more convenient, but you have to pay for it. Obviously this does help the creators of the mods earn money (If Microsoft even gives them a fair cut) but the API is much more limited, you have to mess with the files to play mods on worlds other than the one provided with the mod, which defeats the purpose of a convenient in-game mod API.
I don't see much point in complaining about recent updates and how Minecraft has lost it's feel when older versions are literally provided in the launcher to play. If you want Mojang to stop updating the game, then don't update your game!
Java Edition also has an "add-on API" - data packs and all that stuff, even "experimental feature" data packs (like you previously could in Bedrock Edition you can enable a toggle to try out features like the recent changes to villagers before they become official; before 1.20 was released there was a data pack that added/enabled its new features, and so on), this is actually a major reason why updates like 1.8 took so long; the entire game is now basically data-driven by this point (for better or worse, worse since the game has become massively bloated and slowed down by all the additional resources needed to interpret all the data files; for the same reason mods using a mod API like Forge are much more resource-intensive than mods which directly edit the game's code, as mine do, and this is partly why they are so lightweight by comparison to "traditional" mods).
As a (former) Mojang employee once said regarding the code rewrites in 1.8:
Also, this by no means means that you can just make a "mod" and never have to worry about updating it - you certainly do, just as you must update resource packs; the changelogs for almost every update include countless changes to commands / data packs. Nor can you actually add new content, just modify existing ones (e.g. if you want to add a new type of sword you base it on an existing item). Java does still have the limitation of being unable to modify entities, at least to the extent that you can on Bedrock (you can use commands and attributes (speed, health, damage, etc) to modify their behavior to an extent but models can't be changed unless you use a 3rd partly mod like Optifine, which is more of a resource/data pack expansion mod than an optimization mod these days).
Myself, I don't bother with any of this and have been modding the same version for the past 10 years, I don't see mods (by which I mean mods that actually add/change many things, not just add a minimap, a few new items, graphical effects, or such) as "add-ons" but updates in their own right, creating entirely new experiences completely separate from vanilla's updates (basically a fork of the game, one of the most popular such mods was Better Than Wolves, and many such mods do result from the creator disliking newer updates, just like myself, but I'd also include any major modpack).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
I am reminded of a recent visit to a toy store which was absolutely full of Minecraft toys, from Lego sets to Minecraft swords to all kinds of statues to display on one's desk. My reaction was "wow, Minecraft is as popular as ever! It never gets old!"
yes because of the reallly bad updates that make minecraft not as exiting
People say things like that EVERY YEAR just to try to get attention and scare people! And it works too well on me, even causing me to lose motivation for Minecraft projects years in the making!
YAWN.
*Moves on to an interesting thread......*
Lately I've found this forum uninteresting overall, somehow it has lost its former appeal to me, feels too busy to look at.
According to those figures I find about 1/400000th of the total diamonds found by all players per day - so are there really only 400,000 active players? Likewise, I kill about 1/200000th of the skeletons per day; conversely, the ones for cake, pigs, etc seem way too high to me, I only ever crafted a single cake in each of my worlds and have averaged about one new world a year, traveling 30-100 meters by pig in each world just to get the achievement. Even if you count the pickaxes I buy from trading as crafting (as the game's own stats do) I only need around 250 of them per year (and used to repair a single pickaxe, so not the same as making a whole new one), and none at all in modded worlds once past the early game as I repair them with individual units; of course, since 1.9 Mending avoids the need to craft new ones, so all this suggests that a lot of players are playing the game for the very first time and/or make lots of very short-lived worlds where they never progress that far, not even to finding diamonds (e.g. they only make stone/wood pickaxes, hence the unusually high number compared to diamonds found).
Also, these stats probably do not include Java Edition as the game does not send such stats to Mojang, at least, I know that older versions do not, so they are most likely only from Bedrock/Console edition, which have very strict rules against e.g. using Creative on a Survival world, which disables achievements as they are saved to your online account, whereas on Java they are only local and 1.7+ even allows you to freely edit the file (1.6.4 and earlier versions will reset the file if a checksum doesn't match, the file name also suggests it may have been intended to be stored online at some point but they never implemented it for JE).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Why would you arrive at questioning if there's 400,000 users based on your own diamond rate? We both know you most likely find a number of diamonds that is above average, probably far above average. You're probably in the top 1% in that regard (probably more like top 0.1% or higher). And the numbers found don't trend linearly (that means, someone in the top 1% might not have just twice the amount of someone in the top 2%, but maybe more, now trend that down to the 50% percentile). What I'm saying is, I think you'd have to multiple the 400,000 many times over if we're going by your own diamond finding rate.
And yes, I imagine most people aren't playing worlds very long term like some others, nor are playing heavily every day.
Your play style (like all of ours, really) skews higher than average in some ways, and lower than average in other ways. If you only make one cake a year, for example, that should of course be expected to be below average.
I'm not sure if they include Java. For reference, here's what modern versions disclose (and you have to opt-in to optional data collection).
It's interesting that you mention it resets in older versions if something doesn't match, because I was unable to get the advancements file from my month old backup of a world to be accepted by the same world after it got corrupted. Both the advancements and statistics files were null and reset themselves. I just couldn't get it to accept the advancements file. So it sounds like something might be happening in new versions? But the statistics file was accepted and many of those things are stored there. So yeah I don't know if this includes Java.
For all we know, they sampled just a portion of the player base and extrapolated (this is, after all, how almost all population sampling is done to begin with, and you can usually get accurate enough results with a total sampled percentage far lower than most people realize). Especially since it was probably meant to be for PR, it wouldn't surprise me if they were more lax on tallying things here, but who knows.
I'm just back to using Planet Minecraft more often but also my eyes are tired and the site textsize, graphics, and layout are too busy and small for me.