
Why Minecraft Matters - solipsist
http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/01/15/a-brief-explanation-of-why-minecraft-matters/
======
ugh
Minecraft’s story is even more impressive than the article makes it seem. The
game was not developed by a few people, it was developed by _one_ guy
(“Notch”). He hired six people only recently and they started working together
around Winter 2010/2011.

He now gets help with the business and support side of running a company but
only one of the developers he hired is working on the game with him together.
The other developer is getting their next game up and running.

What’s also interesting is that Notch does not want to run the business, at
least not at the scale at which it is now. He hired people to do that for him.

~~~
sliverstorm
If you think Minecraft is an impressive one-man project, have you ever played
Cave Story? (Doukutsu Monogatari)

~~~
jonshea
Agreed. Doukutsu Monogatari is, rivaled only by Braid, the most beautiful,
fun, and moving video game I have ever played. It is astonishingly creative
and innovative. The gameplay is challenging, but fun. And there’s not even a
hint of repetition.

It is a masterpiece. I wish that I could play it again for the first time.

~~~
Radix
Thank you both.

------
Goladus
_The reason you should care is because a team of four or five people using
free libraries and cross-platform tools have just made a mockery of the last
five years of franchise-oriented, $50 million budget, yearly-release, AAA game
development._

Eh, I would not say that. Minecraft is not seriously competing with AAA big-
budget titles like God of War. They have completely different audiences. Yes,
GoW is extraordinarily expensive to create, but it offers a gameplay
experience that Minecraft doesn't and never will. Or at least, by the time
minecraft can procedurally generate an experience like GoW, the big-budget AAA
franchises will have moved on to something flashier.

And certain franchise titles are attractive because of the licensing, eg the
NFL. That is unfortunate but not something the gaming industry can do much
about immediately.

~~~
solipsist
But the idea is that it doesn't matter if the game genres are completely
different. What matters is that indie developers like _notch_ have shown that
they can make games that will become immensely successful in new genres, such
as sandbox games. Perhaps the audiences are different, although I'm sure there
is still quite an overlap. However, even if the audiences are different, this
just goes to show that indie developers are beating top notch companies (no
pun intended) to taking advantage of these audiences.

~~~
Goladus
The audiences are different, it's possible for people to like Minecraft and
God of War, but for different reasons. That's what I mean by different
audiences. I like classical Opera and NFL Football, but they have different
audiences.

I picked GoW to contast with Minecraft because its a big-budget title with
exactly the strengths that Minecraft lacks. It's narrowly focused on the theme
of a god-slayer who engages in brutal close-combat. It's loaded with detailed,
hand-crafted content that all fits together coherently, supporting that theme.
The story, the art, the scenario/level design, the cinematic design, which is
seamlessly integrated into the actual gameplay and superb performance on its
target hardware (at least, for the length of time I've played it) all make a
difference.

A cow in Minecraft looks like a Gateway computer box:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD6qUTQDvU4>

A cow in God of War is a 35-foot tall minotaur whose armor spews some sort of
steam as Kratos rends it asunder: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_xbbD7RgCg>

I'm not taking anything away from Minecraft here. It is a fantastic game-- the
point of Minecraft is entirely different from the point of GoW. Anyone playing
Minecraft cares more about what the cow represents than what it looks like.
But people playing GoW care a great deal what that Minotaur looks like. They
care how he looks, how he moves, how the camera tracks him during the
encounter, whether there is a brief fps hit when the garbage collector kicks
in, etc. Currently, to get a game full of scenes like the one linked in that
GoW youtube video, you need a team of designers, artists, and developers
working with excellent directors and leaders.

~~~
chipsy
But here's the thing: Who is pushing the idea that people want the God of War
cow? Are players really asking for that, or is it a fantasy on the part of
publishers?

Publishers definitely like the idea of pumping up their games with
unnecessarily large budgets, even though it works against them on a
risk/reward basis, because, at least in theory, throwing money into a game
will lead to a work of higher quality than the competition. And internally,
everyone in charge of such projects can fall back on the prestige and instant
attention assumed from having such an obviously detailed, polished work.

And yet Nintendo has never felt much need to compete on that level. They give
their games plenty of marketing, for sure, but product development stays
pretty tight. As far as the public knows, they never let a product explode
into a monumental 4-year effort. But their games are still good and still
attract a sizable audience, and they've had the most success of the big
publishers in substantially expanding the game market.

Comparing the two approaches, I take the opinion that most of the console
publishers are overextending themselves with an outdated strategy. It was more
compelling to try to push the budget upwards in past eras, where the
technology was just barely making new things possible each time, and the
market was full of early-adopter types who wanted to see the shiniest thing
around. But the differences between the best-looking games of 2011 and the
best-looking games of 2006 are pretty subtle to the uninitiated viewer,
nothing like the gap between any previous five-year comparison. And the
overall trend of gaming has been towards more accessibility and less (overt)
complexity. So our notions of quality have to change with it, and that greatly
upsets the balance of power in game development.

~~~
commandar
>Who is pushing the idea that people want the God of War cow?

The people buying games? God of War 3 moved 1.1 million units in a single
month[1] at ~$60 retail. Minecraft just topped 1 million units _total_ last
week, at $13-20 a piece.

This isn't taking away from Minecraft's success at all -- and what was
essentially a one-man show making $15M+ off a single title is absolutely
phenomenal success -- but I think it's silly trying to directly compare the
two given the differences in scale. Neither is a replacement for the other.

[1] [http://www.next-gen.biz/news/npd-god-of-war-iii-tops-
march-s...](http://www.next-gen.biz/news/npd-god-of-war-iii-tops-march-sales-
chart)

------
SirWart
To me, the more interesting part about minecraft's success is that it gets a
lot of people doing things that look like work to me for fun. Also, it does
this with a high learning curve and without using any kind of reward schedule
mechanics that are in vogue now. As far as I can tell (and I've only watched
others play), the appeal is based on the joy of creation and sharing your
creations, and the difficulty of it actually enhances the experience. It just
seems so fresh compared to what everyone else is doing.

~~~
intended
Its worth noting that the audience/gamer who plays this game is pretty unique
as well.

I heard of the game from the dwarf fortress forums, penny-arcade, and then
later on Techcrunch and other blogs. The people talking about the games, who
made the most out of it, tended to be the type with gaming experience,
willingness to turn a blind eye to its current graphic set, and an imagination
large enough to see the potential of the game world.

Basically, outside of the core audience of the game, there will be a sudden
drop in the number of people who would be willing to give it a shot.

~~~
thorax
Except that many who get into it, gets their friends into it and their
families into it (since it's such a great family game). I think you
underestimate the appeal of a sandbox game like this. It's got all the casual
gaming characteristics and enough depth for hard-core gamers. It's really
quite impressive that way.

------
solipsist
Notch seems to be adopting Google's 10% time (to some extent), but rather with
50% time.

    
    
       "Because I want to avoid us just focusing on reaching release,
       I suggested that we should dedicate 50% of the development time
       in Minecraft towards adding fun new stuff. Basically, any developer
       working on the game (two people at the moment) can just come up with
       something they’d want to add on a day-to-day basis, as long as the
       rest of the team thinks it’s a decent idea. If it ends up being fun,
       it gets added." [1]
    

Sure, that 50% time will still be spent working on Minecraft. But it won't be
the same as the other 50% time when the developers are trying to reach
deadlines and so forth. I think that Notch is now taking control of how the
company functions, which is a good thing. Before, it was just him and there
was nothing but meeting deadlines. Now that he has more people to help him, he
can focus on fun things like this.

[1] - [http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2687176736/information-dump-
inc...](http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2687176736/information-dump-incoming)

------
solipsist
Excerpt:

    
    
       "Braid and Minecraft are both examples of how a few good
       ideas, executed in an accessible and affordable way, will
       outsell franchises by orders of magnitude."
    

This just about sums it up. Many indie developers are harnessing potential new
game genres. They're finding low-budget ways to create addictive games with a
high chance of becoming viral. They're finding classic ideas to expand on and
platforms to build off of. Big game publishers are failing to do this. They'll
spend tons of money, yet lack the innovation to break through in these new
areas of the market.

~~~
tedunangst
Except that quote's not accurate at all. Minecraft has sold 1 million copies
lifetime. CoD Black Ops sold 7 times that amount in 24 hours. The franchise
outsold Minecraft by an order of magnitude.

~~~
DrStalker
To get some useful figures to compare:

How much profit has CoD made after all costs are accounted for? (including
advertising, which minecraft skipped by going viral)

How much money did CoD make per developer?

~~~
marvin
This isn't a good comparison; Minecraft is an extreme statistical outlier.

------
zitterbewegung
This is a great article on techcrunch on why the gaming industry needs to wake
up and try new things and not keep on going for IP that has already been done
before again and again. Sometimes gamers actually want new and fresh games not
the next FPS.

~~~
stesch
"not the next FPS" is funny. I have 3D sickness and can't play FPS anymore.
And I got sick watching the YouTube videos about Minecraft.

~~~
mambodog
Are you sure your sickness isn't being caused by an unnaturally small or high
Field of View (FOV)? This is a common cause of motion sickness-like symptoms
in gamers. Usually adjusting to a FOV of 90-100 degrees fixes this (depending
on your screen's aspect ratio).

------
kayoone
Notch is a really refreshing person. Instead of all the wannabe-entrepreneurs
that want to build apps/games for money (mostly), he just seems to really
enjoy what hes doing. I also think all the money doesnt mean too much to him,
other than he now has the freedom to only do "fun stuff". The fact that he
doesnt want to run the business and just keep coding underlines that even
more.

------
mmb
I like that Minecraft is proof you can write something cool in Java, a
language considered by many to be corporate and boring.

All Java haters should watch the video of Notch coding away in Eclipse.

~~~
spacemanaki
I'm one of those haters who thinks Java IS kind of corporate and boring. On
the other hand, it's just a programming language, and it's what you do with it
that counts. You could write enterprise CRUD apps in Lisp if you wanted to.

I think it's more interesting that Minecraft is a Java APPLET. (at least the
free version I played was)

~~~
teraflop
Once you click that "allow permissions" button, an applet is pretty much
exactly like any other Java application. It has all the permissions it wants,
up to and including running native code.

The paid version gives you the option to run it either as an applet or a
downloadable auto-updating jar.

------
Tycho
Jeez, someone cut APB some slack. It may have been a flop but it was hardly
your run-of-the-mill linear action game.

~~~
chc
I do think its massive budget was its undoing. I thought APB sounded pretty
fun, but the pricing structure just sounded usurious and I wound up not even
trying it out. I don't recall the specifics, but as somebody who has paid for
lots of subscription services and games in the past, APB just sounded
singularly like they were nickel and diming you.

------
kmfrk
I think it's ridiculous to use one game like Minecraft to announce a new era
for videogame developers. Who's to say Minecraft wasn't an anomaly, a result
of a ridiculously talented person like Notch and a perfect storm of hype and
word-of-mouth PR?

> Why it matters

>

> Sounds interesting, you say, but why should I care that a few guys have put
> together a cool little indie game? The reason you should care is because a
> team of four or five people using free libraries and cross-platform tools
> have just made a mockery of the last five years of franchise-oriented, $50
> million budget, yearly-release, AAA game development. And it’s not just a
> fluke. The Humble Indie Bundle, World of Goo, Braid, and a number of other
> extremely low-budget titles have electrified the gaming community, while
> games with millions in marketing budget like APB and Kane & Lynch fall flat
> on their face critically and commercially. Gamer discontent with these
> barren blockbusters is palpable, and Minecraft is the new poster boy for it.

Oh, they've "electrified the gaming community", have they? But how well are
they doing financially?

Apple's App Store has enough successful apps to give developers hope, but the
PC videogame scene needs more data points, before I'll start considering going
"indie", as the kids call it.

How well does Minecraft do in terms of protection against piracy? I haven't
heard a lot about it, and considering games like the aforementioned World of
Goo's problems with it[1].

This is like saying that the success of Audiosurf on Steam ushered in a new
era that developers would now be able to repeat. Steam has definitely made a
big different, but everyone, calm down and take a deep breath for a second.

Notch is a friggin' wizard, and as much as people will try to reverse engineer
its success, don't try to create a trend graph with one data point. I think
it'd be devastating to give aspiring developers the impression that the road
to success has been paved. Notch has found a way, but he hasn't paved it for
the rest of us.

[1]: [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/14/world-of-goo-
vs-p...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/14/world-of-goo-vs-piracy/)

------
Roritharr
This fits right into the pattern we've seen in the game development scene for
the last two years. It's getting cheaper and easier for indie gamers to go
from zero to hero every day. If you look at tools like Unity3D then its easy
to imagine that the dream of so many people to be able to get a sustainable
income from gamedevelopment AND gamedesign(people working as a coding monkey
at EA aren't really living the dream, are they?) is closer than ever.

In a while i'll show HN my project relating to this. :)

------
sliverstorm
_But it also doesn’t have ..._ a scruffy 30-ish white protagonist _, ... or
any of the other hundred things that plague gamers in practically every major
release._

I find myself thinking only of Half Life and Portal. Half Life, in which
people were crazy about Gordon Freeman (and he fit the part) and Portal, which
did not do this in the slightest.

Has it become conspicuously common? I've fallen a bit out of touch with modern
games.

~~~
corysama
<http://www.eatliver.com/i.php?n=5925>

------
InclinedPlane
I've long thought that new tools (especially procedurally generated content)
will pave the way for a new era of game design that allows much, much smaller
teams to create top tier games. It's a lot more difficult to express an
artistic vision through a large and complex bureaucratically controlled
organization than it is to express it through a small group or an individual
(compare the artistic quality of books written by a single author vs. by
committees, etc.)

Moreover, the incredibly high cost of production of many modern games limits
the sorts of games that get made. Minecraft level sales are barely enough to
cover the costs of making a game at a company like EA or Activision.

Hopefully Notch's success will lead to the development of Minecraft as a
highly modable platform for roughly similar games and also to the development
of new low-cost game systems that produce no less enthralling experiences.

------
JeanPierre
Something interesting to note is that this would've been extremely much harder
to do in 2000. Small companies and one-man teams would have a hard time
publishing games and gain enough ground to stand a chance against the giants
at that time.

And when we look at the quality from that time period - A little over a decade
ago - games like Diablo, Starcraft, Quake (2) and Unreal were the ones with
the best quality. With a bit of effort, indie developers and startups these
days can easily beat the quality they had.

If this continues, what will we see in 2020? As the quality a game can achieve
converges towards some limit (At least I'm assuming so), will indie games be
more and more common and actually manage to make games that _will_ challenge
big-budget franchises?

------
hugh3
A point that seems to be missed is that Minecraft is a niche game. That niche
is geeks. Now, that may be quite a profitable niche to exploit, but a game
which is essentially about building things out of blocks will never have the
mainstream appeal of a God Of War or an Angry Birds.

------
Joakal
FPS + Farmville = Profit?

~~~
solipsist
Minecraft is not an FPS, neither does it have elements to it that are similar
to Farmville's. Go try out Minecraft and come back when you're more informed
on the subject.

~~~
Joakal
FPS = First Person Shooter, there's melee and range weapons. What is your
definition of a FPS?

For Farmville part. Isn't there not much to do after the 'survival mode' at
night?

~~~
solipsist
While Minecraft may be in first person and let the user use an bow-and-arrow
as a weapon, calling it an FPS is distorting what the game really is. Shooting
is a feature of it, but it is not what the game is known for.

------
klbarry
An interesting note here for those of who who like Minecraft: There has been
another sandbox game called Dwarf Fortress out for a while now, which Notch
said he used as a big inspiration for Minecraft. Dwarf Fortress lets you build
out your world in millions of unique ways, liquid flow mechanics are accurate,
gravity, civilization actions, pretty much everything.

However, one huge warning: The learning curve is 100 times harder than
Minecrafts, and the base art for he game is asci!(although you can upgrade it
with user made graphic packs) It will also take all of your processing power.

~~~
malnourish
I recently tried to get into DF. I downloaded the lazynewb pack and tried for
hours to get it to run at a proper resolution. The window would never size to
what I had set it in the config editor as included with the pack or with
manual editing.

I really wish I could have played that game.

~~~
spacemanaki
I had a similar experience the first time I tried it. It was unplayably slow,
but now I can get a solid framerate. Check back in a few months, the DF guys
seem to be making some progress in performance, etc and the next build might
fix your issue.

~~~
malnourish
I don't think it's my computer performance (I have an i7), but something with
the package.

I'll try again with vanilla DF when I have the time.

------
mkramlich
Minecraft is awesome. But nothing about it's business or distribution model is
new. I was playing computer games I got from "The Net" (well, back then, it
was BBS's-over-modems) that were (a) made by a single guy and/or small team,
and (b) sold directly (or mostly so) and/or pirated. Now, this thing is
awesome and he did a hell of a job at overall game design and coding. But this
meme I've seen going around how the fact that it's the work of basically one
guy is some new new thing: it's not.

