It’s Thursday somewhere, right?
…a quick search says no, it is currently not Thursday anywhere. Well!
So, for the very few uninitiated internet users, the topic of today’s post, Minecraft, is a sandbox game created by Markus “Notch” Persson in 2009. Since its inception, the game has seen an absolutely unheard of swell in its popularity, eventually leading to Microsoft buying out the company behind the game for a whopping 2.5 BILLION USD in 2014. I remember my friends and I at the time having a hissy fit over this. A bunch of nerdy high schoolers who hated big tech and didn’t want to see their favorite game consumed by corporate greed… I still don’t like Microsoft very much, but at least the game hasn’t spiraled out of control… Or has it?
A sentiment shared by a great deal of older players is that the game has lost its way, feeling much more like a modded version of the game than what it was created to be. This can be seen in the drastic increase as of late of players reverting to playing the old beta versions of the game to recapture that same feeling it had when they were children. Now, saying the game has changed for the worse is a big statement to make about the best selling game of all time. So, is there any truth to it?
Personally, I would say yes, there is. In recent years, the game has seen some of the biggest updates to it that have ever been rolled out for the game; namely the Caves and Cliffs update of 2021, which greatly expanded the game’s terrain generation… wait, hold on, no, that didn’t happen. Caves and Cliffs actually ended up being WAY too big to cram into one update, so the team at Mojang Studios announced with heavy hearts that they’d have to split it into two parts. To the developers’ surprise, this was met with resounding positive feedback.
The second part of the update rolled out a few months later, finally bringing the rest of the features. Wait… no, it still didn’t. They ended up delaying some of the more anticipated features once again. This time, the community’s response was a little less positive. They felt lied to, having been assured that the update would come out in two parts. This began the inception of a PR disaster for Mojang.
The next big fiasco, 1.19, the Wild Update, or as it was mirthfully dubbed by the community, the “Mild Update” was announced at Mojang’s yearly Minecraft convention. In it, they showed tons of concept art of fantastic new additions to the game, which they then did not deliver on and proceeded to talk down to the players as if they were children, saying that “concept art is not a commitment,” despite showing it off during a very public forum and never once saying that it would not be included. Players weren’t very happy about this.
I could go on for ages about all of the controversies Mojang have found themselves tangled up in, but that strays a little too far from the point. Gameplay wise, Minecraft has seen quite a few additions as of late that don’t really contribute to the game as a whole and end up feeling more like bloat than anything else. One such example is the Sniffer, a mob from one of the company’s (also very controversial) mob votes, that essentially does nothing. To sum up what I mean, you have to go through a very convoluted process just to have one of these things, and when you do, all it gives you are two very nondescript plants (also the Sniffer does not spawn naturally, so it doesn’t even make the game feel more alive). Ever since then, the game’s updates have been mostly small IV drips of questionably decent content without much focus, again contributing to the feature bloat problem.
But in the end, who’s winning? The multi-billion dollar company who owns the best-selling game of all time, or the disgruntled college student spending his study time whining about a kid’s game in a blog post?