What on earth is Minecraft?
First things first, I want to say that Minecraft is an absolutely amazing game. I’ve been playing it off and on for over a decade now and I’ve seen it develop from a weird indie game played by supernerds and bored college kids to an unstoppable juggernaut that teaches kids how to make wiring diagrams.
My sophomore year of college was when I first played the game. During finals week, I found the game and spent the first night I downloaded it playing it nonstop for 12 hours. Unsurprisingly, this semester was the one in which my average GPA was the lowest.
It’s a truly unique game, but I’ll try to describe it as best I can here for readability. Because it’s a sandbox game like Minecraft, you can pretty much do whatever you want there. There are no predetermined goals, so it’s up to you how you want to spend your time. You are able to construct a house if you so desire. You can also become a wizard, explore caves and mountains, and battle dragons. You can achieve almost anything you set your mind to, including becoming a rail tycoon, artist, farmer, or mayor.
Minecraft is also a procedurally generated game. This means that no two Minecraft worlds are alike since the computer builds entirely new landscapes for you. Every landscape is rich in various biomes, including jungles, tundras, vast oceans, and deserts. You can travel to The End (Space) and Hell (The Nether).
Everything in the world is made of blocks, which you are free to arrange however you please. It resembles a very large, extremely intricate Lego world.
It’s a survival game. To survive, you must hunt and farm, construct a basic home, and make ends meet until you can gradually work your way up to a better life. All the while being pursued by skeletons, enormous spiders, and green creepers that explode.
A whole mode of the game is devoted to letting you build anything you want, wherever you want, whenever you want, and however you want with no restrictions at all. It is also a creative game.
Lastly, it is a massively multiplayer game. On a large public server, you can play with everyone or just your family on a private server. The choice is up to you.
But no matter what you decide, Minecraft is a game that rewards you for maintaining and expanding a world. And to tie in with my more poetic description of what Minecraft can be, I’d like to simply link a few videos of what real people have done with the game to demonstrate what it is.
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What do people do on Minecraft?
Some people create impressive cities with imposing skyscrapers and inviting suburbs.
Some people build functioning computers.
Others still fight dragons.
I could go on about how anything is possible in Minecraft for the rest of the day, but I won’t because this is a business blog. Additionally, you can probably turn it into a group activity while you’re at it.
When everyone’s nerves were frayed during the coronavirus quarantine, I called my family and got them on a shared Minecraft server. We created a quaint metropolis made up of numerous towns and cities connected by a network of rail stations, waterways, and ice highways (yes, it exists). During the most terrifying year any of us had ever lived through, it served to ease our tension and keep us connected.
Minecraft’s marketing budget was basically $0
Given the multi-billion dollar success of Minecraft, you might be tempted to conclude that it succeeded by the merit of a massive marketing budget. This simply isn’t the case. Indeed, Minecraft more or less didn’t make any serious effort to market.
It succeeded almost entirely because of word-of-mouth. People who played Minecraft fell in love with it and invited their friends to join them as well.
It may seem glib to attribute Minecraft’s popularity to word-of-mouth, but it’s not. In fact, it’s the only plausible explanation when a game is this popular without any funding. And it’s not like the game’s creator, Notch, personally went door-to-door to promote sales. With the game, he obviously had lightning in a bottle, and it couldn’t help but catch on.
But it happened this way for a specific reason, and as a marketer and a fan of Minecraft who has been playing since it was in alpha, I’m going to explain why.
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Minecraft was unlike any other game ever made, and that made up for its flaws
Minecraft was clearly a happy accident. If you read about its creation, you’ll learn about a man who essentially desired to create an open-ended mining game. It was a ridiculously straightforward idea that wasn’t immediately apparent that it would develop into a huge open-world game with limitless potential. However, the creator continued to incorporate new features gradually until Minecraft just sort of…happened. Out of chaos, the game emerged.
The game is a brilliant piece of programming. Despite having a vast open world, it is lightweight and requires basic hardware. Roller Coaster Tycoon, which was created using assembly code, a machine language that is raw and unprocessed, is the only game that comes to mind that has programming that is more clever. But despite being a very popular and well-received game, Roller Coaster Tycoon didn’t develop into Minecraft.
Minecraft, especially early on, felt like an accident. Stuff fell through walls. You might be moving around when you suddenly pass away without warning and lose everything. Servers would inexplicably boot you off. Your whole game would crash.
And yet improbably, the glitches gave it charm. Somewhere deep down, between fighting the elements and fighting the game itself, the game became deeply social. Up until that point, most video games were about shooting something, battling someone, or otherwise fighting. Minecraft just let you chill.
Minecraft gave people something they didn’t know they needed
I think that Minecraft was the first game to really address a fundamental psychological need that had gone unfulfilled up until that point: the need to collaborate and create. Minecraft became a space where anyone and everyone could come together to create something beautiful and unusual in a world where everyone was being sorted into social media echo chambers.
Even when you play alone, though, you’re not truly alone. At the time Minecraft was taking off, Let’s Plays were taking off. At one point, Minecraft accounted for 41% of fan-made videos on YouTube. Even solo players couldn’t resist saying “look what I’ve made!”
And this isn’t just an online phenomenon. They probably asked you if you wanted to see what they had created if you know anyone who has played Minecraft. They would then show you something that you found either incredibly fascinating or incredibly dull. (There is no middle ground. ).
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Not only can anyone play, but anyone can play the way they want to
The other remarkable thing about Minecraft is how accessible it is. While the initial learning curve is tricky (current tutorials have done a good job of smoothing this out), the game itself is very approachable. Kids as young as 6 can build dirt huts to get away from creepers when the sun goes down. Yet adults can dive deep into the Minecraft wiki to make marvels of engineering.
Perhaps the only game where a second-grader can build a house and be content while their father constructs a massive agricultural complex to automatically grow and harvest wheat is Minecraft. While their father sets up pistons and redstone using intricate wiring and timing mechanisms along with water-based conveyor belts and beautiful lighting systems, the child battles any monsters that are present. While their mother constructs strip mines beneath lava lakes in hell to extract ancient debris for the creation of incredibly durable black metal, the child can explore caves.
Two distinct mass transit networks in my own Minecraft universe allow for quick movement between towns that are hundreds of kilometers apart. everything was built by excavating tunnels and lining them with powered railroad tracks. However, one need not do that to enjoy the game; I simply found the challenge to be fun.
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Minecraft started as a weird, glitchy indie game
Despite the fact that it has always been a game for geeks, from 2010 to 2012, Minecraft was a strange, underground game that was passed from friend to friend. Even though the community was already expanding quickly at that point, most players were still geeks. They ignored the bugs and advanced the game to its limit.
The community was ingrained with this mindset of battling the system and using limitless creativity to get around its restrictions. Even after the game became a huge success ten years later, that spirit has never left it.
When Microsoft acquired Minecraft, they realized that what they had was very special. Microsoft wisely left the glitches in and didn’t try to milk the game for money the way, say, EA would. Nor did they inhibit creativity the way Nintendo would. They became caretakers, figuring out what people wanted added to the game and finding out how to do that. They figured out ways to make a little extra money by selling skins for the game, but that’s not essential to the basic experience of Minecraft. It’s ancillary, like hats in Team Fortress 2.
When Minecraft showed up on the Xbox in 2012, the floodgates opened
When Minecraft was poised to go live on Xbox in 2012, I was anxious, as were many players. It could have very easily become our Eternal September, with wave after wave of outsiders coming in and destroying what made the game fun.
Oh sure, Minecraft going live on Xbox is what led massive amounts of children to get into the game. And yes, this is exactly what caused Minecraft to change from being a weird indie game to being a massive mainstream success that’s being used in schools and to literally smuggle forbidden literature into dictatorships. But for whatever reason, the game’s basic vibe stayed intact. It’s kind of a miracle.
Early on, the people who could do that were the ones who had desktops and laptops, would be willing to put up with bugs, and knew how to install a Java runtime. Recall how I said that Minecraft was the kind of game where a player desperately wanted to show you their world? The game was already spreading with those limitations.
Then when the game became publicly available on the absurdly successful Xbox 360 system, those hurdles went away overnight. People could super easily share their worlds, film their games, and get together to play socially. That also opened the floodgates for a thriving community on YouTube, which further spread the world.
In conclusion, the Minecraft community existed long enough to become unique. After that, distribution issues were resolved when the game was made available for a widely used console. The world was engulfed in an all-consuming blaze of Minecraft when a match was struck against some kindling. You can still purchase Minecraft merchandise at Hot Topic today.
Minecraft is going strong, and it’s not going to stop for a long, long time
The popularity of Minecraft reached its peak in 2013, but at no point since 2011 has it been anything less than extraordinarily popular. Its most recent resurgence was during the COVID-19 pandemic as people stayed at home with nothing to do and a desire to socialize.
Minecraft is going to be around for a very long time, just like Tetris or Pokemon. Although its popularity will fluctuate with the passing of the seasons, its cultural impact has been nothing short of extraordinary.
Ideas don’t often take off with no effort. Marketing is a crucial component of business, which is why Pangea is so busy. However, occasionally, when an idea is perfect, product-market fit alone can push a product farther than you could ever imagine.
Minecraft is one of those ideas. Its success is a clear case of product-market fit, to put it simply. In other words, Minecraft provided players with limitless creative freedom and a world they would want to share with others.
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How Much Does Minecraft Cost? How Much Does it Cost to Make a Minecraft Account?
FAQ
How much did it cost to make Minecraft originally?
During the alpha phase, the first stage of development, Minecraft was to cost around thirteen dollars, primarily because that was a price he felt comfortable with. When the game was completed, the price would double.
How much money did Minecraft cost?
You can buy Minecraft: Java Edition from minecraft. net for $26. 95 USD or local currency equivalent. This is a one-time purchase.
How much does it cost to build Minecraft?
Minecraft costs around 30$ for the java edition. Being a cross-platform, the cost varies for different platforms. The table below provides a quick overview of the cost of Minecraft.
How much does it cost to make a game like Minecraft?
An independent video game typically costs around $250,000 to produce, but some smaller projects can be completed for virtually nothing. The lower figures assume that you’re working alone and haven’t brought on any additional developers yet, but once more people are involved, the costs quickly add up.
