The Everlasting Success of Minecraft

When you think of a video game from the Modern Age, one of the first things you probably think of is Minecraft. Since it was officially released in 2011, the game has continued to retain an audience of millions for over 10 years in a row. As the most popular video game of all time, not to mention the game itself has surpassed one billion total views on YouTube, even something as small as hosting a Minecraft server can make you hundreds of thousands of dollars today. I'll go over that. story in an attempt to discover what makes Minecraft a long-term

success

.

To know the game, we must first know the Creator behind it, and that would be Marcus, the person better known online as Notch. Notch grew up in Ed's and later in Stockholm, Sweden. and began programming on his father's Commodore PC at the age of seven in 2004. Notch would find a position working at King, a company that was later known for its 2012 Smash Hit Candy Crush. Notch would work there as a developer. games for four years, but he would also make sure to spend time working on his own projects, like this four-kilobyte Mega Man recreation called Meg 4K man.

Notch would end up leaving King in 2009 to focus on his own endeavors and that endeavor was a game known as Ruby Dung, it was a top-down base building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but it never became anything until he found a little indie game called Infiniminer. It was a class-based shooter where you can build bases. and fight opponents something to note is the unique visual design, the voxel based art style wasn't something well known at the time so the simplistic yet detailed style really made the game stand out, not to mention playing with the different types of blocks were really fun.

Notch played the game and had fun with it, but also saw a lot of room for improvement. He wanted to make a similar game, one that had a little more variation in its mechanics. He took the fountain. rubidung code and transformed it into the first version of his next game, a project with the working title Cave Game. He made the world generation random, then added some characters taken from another of his old zombie town games and used that as a template. base to create all other mobs, the first public version of Minecraft was released on May 17, 2009, version 0.010a and then over the following months various features were added such as water, more blocks, trees, clouds and even multiplayer.

The design philosophy of Minecraft is that it is a Sandbox. similar game to Gary's mod and the player is encouraged to make the game however they want, as this was before there was a real end goal to the game. 2010 was the first time Minecraft Let's Plays and other gameplay videos featuring Captain Sparkles were created, so Dundee Pewdiepie and The Yogscast were the first people to cover it and they were also very

success

ful in their own right and just to make things more accessible On May 5, 2011, Minecraft Pocket Edition was released, so now even I can play it.

Minecraft on my old iPad in November of that year during the first Minecon Notch would finally flip the switch and release the first full version of Minecraft, the game was already considered a success before that, although with over 600,000 sales before the end of 2010 over the next few years, YouTuber after YouTuber picked up and started playing the game, leading to male success for a handful of lucky people. Much of Minecraft's early content was Let's Plays or tutorials without much variety in the game's fanbase. would enter a perpetual form where people watching YouTubers were inspired to play the game and then started making videos themselves or continued watching YouTubers to get more ideas on what to do in the game.

It's a system that benefited Mojang. and the creators, as Minecraft would become a bigger and bigger game, the same would happen with the most popular Minecraft channels, but not all content at the time relied solely on modifications to the base game and mini-games were rampant. on YouTube, be it the Skyblock dropper or even the lucky block or the Pixelmon mods, but as with everything else, the biggest Minecraft YouTubers were the ones that stood out and here would be the popular MMOs Team Crafted and Stampy Cat TeamCrafted was a content creation group with YouTubers Sky Does Minecraft Jerome Bajan Canadian Deadlocks husky mudkips Kermit plays Cyto Sorcerer of the Minecraft Universe and SSundee, they basically played the usual Minecraft minigames, Cops and Robbers being the biggest, with the most notable gimmick of being the group of great YouTuber friends who collaborate frequently, leading to a lot of cross-growth between everyone. channels involved, while Skydoe alone Minecraft did well with Mod Showcases, the success of the collaborative content would end up growing to be even more popular, but still not as popular as Minecraft parody songs, these things were everywhere.

The first popular Minecraft parody was released in February 2011. by Captain Sparkles, which was TNT, a parody of the song Dynamite by Taio Cruz, this led to a massive trend in the Minecraft community, basically, if you could think of a popular Minecraft channel, you could probably name a parody song they did at some point there. was a popular MMO with the Pat and Jen series of challenge games that involved using various mods, opening a set number of Lucky Blocks and using the random items gathered to fight an opponent in this Colosseum, which can be anything , from a horde of wild cards to Herobrine Herobrine.

It's kind of a strange thing in relation to Minecraft, well it started as an inside joke that was added in the patch notes every time which ended up turning into a pretty big creepy paste, but hey, that's not important, lastly there was Stampy and his friends. who would play on Stampy's beautiful world map and play mini-games, eat cake, visit the garden of love and generally have a good time, but behind the scenes things were not going very well in 2014. Notch was severely drained and while took a backseat in terms of development, people would still complain to him about various aspects of the game.

Exhausted, he posted a tweet saying, "Someone wants to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life," receiving hate for trying to do the right thing. not my job, although it was originally just a vent post, it would actually end up becoming something as several companies rushed to 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 . trading 71 shares of Mojang and, by extension, Microsoft bought Minecraft for two and a half billion dollars, this was enough to establish Notch for the rest of his life and Microsoft would allow Mojang to work as they already did, but with Microsoft. technology and money at your disposal some people attribute the later focus on Minecraft core and microtransactions to Microsoft but I couldn't confirm or deny that, not that that really mattered anyway because things only go up from here Unfortunately, things could not continue.

Straight Forever 2016 was the first year where the game was noticeably less popular than it was before, but why? Well, by 2016, much of the hype around Minecraft seems to have died down; it's almost as if everyone has collectively grown tired of the game. after doing everything they could do and that's not even mentioning the oversaturation that was prevalent in the genre on YouTube, for every successful Minecraft Youtuber, there were around 10,000 more that you'll never be able to see, people could only see a limited portion of the The same Minecraft content before you got tired of it and as the year went by all the most popular YouTubers would go under with Minecraft, they were too intertwined with the game and switching their content to any other game was useless, at that point it was already it was too late.

It doesn't help that many of these popular Minecraft YouTubers end up getting involved in YouTube drama. Remember that Team Crafted ended up disbanding in 2014 due to a fight between Skye and the rest of the group and then had a lot of drama. On your own, what about popular MMOs? He and Jen got divorced ruining what made his video so special in the first place. Stampy, well, he was actually clean drama-wise, but I can't say the same for some of his helpers, so the only real reason for his downfall was a result of the general decline of Minecraft, 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 shame culture.

Think of all the most popular YouTubers, Frank idubbbz's leafy dirty commentary as a genre was thriving and each and every one of them was able to grow up making fun of people considered embarrassing and since the majority of Minecraft's audience came from kid-focused YouTubers , it makes sense that Minecraft and its fans would be something worth making fun of. um dedicated to Wham, but Minecraft's lowest point was in October 2018, which happens to be shortly after Fortnite Battle Royale got its big break and became a household name as well as an epidemic for elementary schools of all the world. 2018 was also the year of a site-wide YouTube event PewDiePie versus T-Series it was basically predicted that T-Series would surpass PewDiePie by the end of the year, so the large YouTube community came together and rallied to keep PewDiePie ahead of T-Series by any means necessary to get people to subscribe PewDiePie became a massive trend as Mr Beast bought real ads only to have people press the red button in an attempt to get a advantage over T-Series in 2019.

PewDiePie would return to gaming content in an event called game week would end up playing roles please fortnite a B-movie game for DS and most importantly Minecraft on June 21 PewDiePie would release the first video of the games week a video titled Minecraft Part 1. The video featured PewDiePie's long-awaited return to Minecraft and began a series of 45 videos that would begin to reignite interest in the game with his wacky antics featuring the death of the Nether Portal and, uh, tonight, the viewers at home wanted to play Minecraft again. Keemstar hosted Minecraft on Monday, a weekly tournament that brought together new and old Minecraft YouTubers, but more importantly, a small Minecraft channel called Dream saw its opportunity to grow and made a video covering a potential strategy for getting the seed. from PewDiePie's Minecraft and from there he would continue to grow his channel to Massive Heights after making some follow up videos and following the damn Minecraft trend, he would create his signature series Minecraft Unsolved Wait.

The success of Minecraft Manhunt's dream not only brought a lot of attention to it, but the growth of it also inspired a ton of other developments. Minecraft channels will appear out of nowhere and bring Minecraft back into the public perception once again, but how do people stand out this time? use features not in the base game to keep things more interesting, but instead of mods and mini-games, Minecraft content today uses add-ons and challenges to keep audiences from getting bored of their videos. Dream needs to add addons and data packs so that Your challenges can work the same with any Minecraft channel that does anything that requires skills in the game, then there are the channels that directly add new things to the game that require the skill of modify or create textures to achieve what I want.

What I'm saying is that even when you get so tired of Minecraft to the point that you can die happy without playing it again, you can always find something new to watch on YouTube, which reinvigorates that cycle of watching it and then wanting to play it. For a lot of people, there is challenge content that has been around in games for quite some time, like beating Mario games without collecting coins, so it makes sense that people would choose to do these challenges in Minecraft, a sandbox game that was literally designed for people to do just that, was the perfect combination, not to mention SMP content featuring a similar cross-growth method as Team Crafted had, but now with a serialized format featuring a number of large, successful creators, but not We can forget that the content creators are not the only ones working on the game, of course, in 2020 the nether update was released which was the biggest update the game had seen in years and with Minecraft becoming relevant again, More work would be done on the game than we have done. seen in a long time still didn't stop us from adding the brilliant squid.

Minecraft was always designed to be a game with an infinite amount of content and with mods and addons, you can theoretically have an infinite amount of fun with the game, so why is Minecraftremained while other games disappeared over time? Minecraft had a massive community and YouTube viewing loop to ensure that Minecraft remained in the spotlight and is one of the few games that is lucky enough to have an audience from every demographic that doesn't. 't Pander specifically to children so that people who grow up with it can still be fans of the series, while other games of that nature could be classified as children's games, not to mention Minecraft survived and passed on to a new generation of players so people can both. discover and rediscover the game now that it's on everyone's minds again.

This has been the story of Minecraft although it has been a bit of a bumpy ride. Minecraft is still doing incredibly well. I really don't think I'll hit those lows again. At least not for another five years or so. I feel like there are a lot more safeguards in place today than there were in 2016. Also some of these games exist or existed at one point, but no one cares.