Minecraft Play Spikes, Tops 126M Builders a Month Amid COVID-19 (cnet.com) 31
Minecraft has already become an international phenomenon, but it keeps getting bigger. Microsoft said its 11-year-old world-building game crossed 200 million copies sold, with more than 126 million people playing each month. From a report: Much of the game's recent success has come during the coronavirus pandemic. Microsoft said that in April, it tallied a 25% increase in the number of new players joining its game community, and a 40% spike in the number of people playing together. "In these extraordinary times, we're reminded more than ever before of the important role games like Minecraft can play in providing an escape from the day-to-day and fostering social connections between friends and families," Helen Chiang, Microsoft's head of Minecraft studio Mojang, wrote in a blog post Monday. The announcement came ahead of Microsoft's Build developer event, being held online May 19-20.
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I can tell you're not a parent.
Minecraft keeps those kids quiet , I can tell you. It's better even than heroin.
Re:oh you're one of THOSE parents (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck off.
Not even posting anonymously for this one.
Sometimes parents need a break too, and you might as well have your kid doing something constructive and learning. If you had a child who played minecraft you'd know it builds their interest in constructing things, learning from others, creating machines and automations, learning trading mechanics, seeking out information (which they will have to do a lot) and reading and understanding it, managing limited resources, exploration. You participate in a lot of this with your child.
I know a lot of great parents with great kids who play Minecraft.
Take your judgement and shove it up your ass.
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and absolves YOU from having to interact, and you know, BE A PARENT.
Holy crap you interact with your kid 100% of the time? Are you trying to get them to hate you? Have mental problems? WTF is wrong with you that you think being a parent involves fucking up your kid to that extent.
I bet you're the type of person who "parents" at the cinema while everyone else is trying to watch the damn movie.
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Anyway, how about people spend their time on producing tangibly useful things. I mean creating or doing things that society benefits from.
Like WeWorkMinecraftEdition?
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It's just the same as giving a child LEGO, with some framing of the environment and some built-in challenges.
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Why is this a surprise? (Score:3)
Once you experience a truly dynamic world (Don't like that mountain there? Just mine [youtube.com] it out! [youtube.com] ) people tend to get bored of genocide genres such as ARPGs, FPSs, and RTSs. Minecraft allows you to build whatever (*) you want. Not that there is anything wrong with mindless violence from time to time but eventually people want more -- they want to engage freedom to create whatever they can dream of when they get bored of other genres. People have created some amazing backdrops [pinterest.com] in Terraria as well.
And while the sky isn't the limit (build limit is y=255), Minecraft's redstone allows for all sorts of automation. [youtube.com]. Even something as simple as an item sorter [youtube.com] reminds you how tedious playing Inventory Tetris (TM) is in other games.
(*) Terrain only, no working vehicles such as planes, trains, automobiles, hot air balloons, etc. Maybe in Minecraft 2.0.
Fun (Score:2)
I agree Minecraft is a super-fun open world building game. But, isn't a core component "genociding" mobs?
Also, I think there is a great category of games that melds the FPS/Minecraft geners. Fortnite is the most obvious, though more light on the building aspects. Rust is probably a more even balance between the genres.
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Killing monsters is definitely part of the core survival mechanic but compared to multiplayer FPSs where that is ALL you do -- Minecraft offers a whole lot more freedom. Minecraft is built upon 3 pillars:
* Survive
* Explore
* Engineer
Once you put all 3 together possibilities open up. Namely, optimized [youtube.com] mob farms. [youtube.com] :-) Especially Skyblock [youtube.com].
The people who complain about "Minecraft's crappy 8-bit graphics" are judging a book by its covers and don't understand the entire point is Digital Lego.
i.e. The game is al
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1) The immense freedom and emergent gameplay. Other games have done a good job of replicating this.
2) The best cross platform multiplayer of any game, ever. Nothing else comes close here.
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I agree Minecraft is a super-fun open world building game. But, isn't a core component "genociding" mobs?
No, the core component is exploiting the mobs for their resources.
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I find it ironic that those who tend to accuse others of "wasting time" in a game (i.e. making a distinction between spending time in the real world vs virtual world), will deliberately ignor
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> you cannot permanently kill things in those games.
The duration is irrelevant. Minecraft is built upon 3 pillars of game design:
* Survive
* Explore
* Engineer
While ARPGs, FPSs, MMORPGs and RTSs have the first two, they hardly offer the 3rd one, if at all. (RTSs have zero crafting aside some "research" or a "Tech Tree".) Even the second one, Explore, is quite limited in FPS and RTSs -- it is usually trivial to run up to the map border. MMORPGs offer a larger world to explore but there is very little you
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(*) Terrain only, no working vehicles such as planes, trains, automobiles, hot air balloons, etc. Maybe in Minecraft 2.0.
I take it you've never seen a slime-block-sticky-piston flying machine? check out Mumbo Jumbo's youtube videos.
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I've invented my own flying machines, so yes, I'm familiar slime + sticky piston + flying machines. Who needs an elytra when you can build your own flying machine to travel the End Dimension to get one. :-) Minecraft just went Meta. :-)
ilmango has made flying machines that can travel in 4 directions. [youtube.com] There are even 6 way flying machines [youtube.com]
While impressive they suffer from numerous problems:
* No arbitrary flight paths, limited to the 6 cardinal directions.
* No proper flight physics
* Lag the server like crazy
*
But when is it coming to Quest? (Score:2)
I picked up a Quest recently because it's the first good quality untethered/affordable VR headset. I was pretty sad to see that Minecraft wasn't in the Quest store, nor anything similar.
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You need the modded java client vivecraft [vivecraft.org], and either a premium USB link cable, beta oculus software to run on the charge cable, or virtual desktop to run wirelessly. This of course assumes you have a VR capable PC. Keep in mind that due to it's very nature, minecraft has difficulty maintaining frames. On my Index, I get better performance in Half-life: Alyx, than I do in minecraft, but it's still quite fun if it doesn't make you sick! The quest does have lower resolution targets for minecraft to keep up, a
Guilty... (Score:1)
Count me as one of those new builders... With limitations on travel and quarantine restrictions, I've taken to spending a good deal of time gaming with my Godson. I've set aside games like the Division and Destiny and Ghost Recon Breakpoint to while away the hours on Minecraft and Fortnite chatting with him and keeping up to speed with what's on his mind and how he's coping with all the craziness going on. Can't say either is my first choice for gaming but I've come to see the appeal and I'm honestly a bit
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You'll want to check out this video -- SciCraft Presents: How Automation Can Enrich Your Game Experience [youtube.com] -- for how people are pushing the limits of Minecraft. :-)
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Indeed!
Some of the SciCraft people are German engineers. It shows. Their world maps and builds are astounding! They developed some fantastic flying machines and with them created farms and other builds 5,000 meters square and from below bedrock to the upper build limit. Their tunnel borers are monstrous. Their piston-bolt conveyors move the players faster than they could move flying. The only way to move faster is to use the teleportation command, which requires the creative mode.
My favourite M
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How many pixels is that?
Microsoft has changed. Minecraft proves it. (Score:3)
I bought a Minecraft license when the game was first released, and later I introduced it to my grandsons.
I and my grandsons have enjoyed playing Minecraft for the last four or five years. The oldest is going to college this fall to play baseball and major in engineering. The youngest will be in HS this fall, so their interests have begun to shift. But, for many years, I set up a server and they and their friends remotely logged in and we played Mincraft together. Using Discord we talk together as we planned and executed strategies, fought mobs and pillagers, built structures, made redstone devices, explored the environment for resources, and made farms to generate resources. Minecraft is extremely affordable. Almost free.
I was concerned when Microsoft bought Minecraft from Notch for $2 Billion. I thought that they would move it to a Windows only platform, jack the price, dumb it down and fill it with bloat and bugs, much like they've done with so much of what they've touched in the past. I have to admit that I was wrong.
Microsoft has significantly improved the game on both the Java and Bedrock edition. They've introduced new mobs, blocks and other features, and fixed annoying bugs. Iskall85 and Mumbo Jumbo posted videos yesterday showing off Microsoft's new RTX version of Minecraft. This on top of the VM system Microsoft showed off last year.
Microsoft is listening to the Minecraft community, and they've joined the Linux open source movement in significant ways. I'm 80 and I never thought I'd live to see that. Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates are gone, and so is my animosity toward Microsoft.
Spikes (Score:1)
Where can I download it?