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Leading the all formats chart and being released over a year ago now, Minecraft, on the Xbox
360 Is doing a tremendous job, and with it already
being confirmed for the Xbox One with bigger and
better worlds, what more could you want?
The PC version is doing equally as good. Ever since it's release a few years ago. Now,
I'm not going to sit here and argue that Minecraft is an innovation or a success,
because it already is. But one question does keep coming up for me. When will
Minecraft die out? When will this popularity of the legendary blocky game
vanish?
In January of 2012 Mojang reported around 20 million registered accounts for Minecraft
(on the PC), for argument's sake let's say there are now 30 million accounts.
Minecraft.net Stats reveal over 11 million users have purchased the game.
That's quite a significant loss, the game is now around £20, a lot for an "indie"
game, but worth it.
So that means over half of the registered users have pirated Minecraft. Notch himself
claims piracy isn't theft, and doesn't need it. But I'm not here to discuss
piracy.
Let's go back to the beginning, what made Minecraft so successful? Well,
the fact it was something different and just threw traditional game
features out of the window. There you were just put into a game with
no idea about anything.
But what is it that is keeping Minecraft alive today? The updates
every so soften? CraftStats reports than nearly three quarters of all
active Minecraft players use the default Vanilla client, meaning no
mods or other edits made to the client. So these purely play off
what Mojang add to the game.
Only a small percentage seem to play with mods. So are
mods keeping Minecraft alive? Well, from the stats it doesn't
seem that that is the case.
I mentioned "active" accounts. There is no way of finding out
how many Minecraft accounts are active and use Minecraft on a
regular basis. However CraftStats can reveal to us the last 48 hours,
the total player count reached near to 300,000 players at its
peak. For 48 hours and 11 million accounts, that doesn't sound very
accurate. But could speak the truth.
So are the updates the only thing keeping Minecraft alive?
90% of players use the latest version of Minecraft, at current,
1.6.2. Mojang would be keeping their own game alive with updates.
But are updates really keeping Minecraft alive? Of course they
are, but at the same time, the community is as well. Minecraft
was first spread by word of mouth, there were no fancy
billboards or TV adverts showing off this new fantastic
game. People had to show it to eachother.
Yet the question still arises when will the popularity of Minecraft
drop? Will it ever? Of course it will, but as long as we see updates and
an active community I believe Minecraft still has a long future
ahead of it, especially with YouTube playing such a big part in advertising
the game.