Minecraft Renaissance: The rise, fall, and revival of Minecraft
DK Seo (ISB 11)
Minecraft veteran and guest contributor of Buddy!, DK Seo can be found in his Minecraft realm hanging out with buddies during this lockdown period.
In his Buddy! debut, DK combines his interest in social studies and Minecraft to analyze the reasons behind the game’s long-term decline and later revival in 2019.
Released in 18th of November, 2011, Minecraft is a gaming staple— loved by PC, Xbox, and iPhone gamers alike. In the past decade, Minecraft has ruled supreme in the gaming world: selling over 180 million copies to around 112 million monthly players. It’s status in the gaming pantheon has set it as culturally significant as the prestigious furniture chain IKEA for it’s country of origin, Sweden.
At the risk of angering the Minecraft gods, I fully consider myself a Minecraft veteran. I made my account on March 7th, 2013, when the 1.5 edition came out (I actually played a pirated version of the 1.3 update in 2012, but we don’t talk about that). For a while, Minecraft became my life. In the 4th grade, I started learning about 3-D modeling and rigging just to make Minecraft animation videos. 5th grade was when I was truly wildin’, learning how to portforward just to play on a private server with my friends. Looking back at those days brings a wave of cardiac-arrest-inducing cringe. Still, my experience then was not an isolated case. Those years were precisely the Golden Age for Minecraft. Just as I introduced Minecraft to my close circle of friends, a surge of popular Minecraft Youtubers like SkyDoesMinecraft pushed the game to a yet wider audience. Even here in ISB, Minecraft became a mandatory part of the fourth grade curriculum (a course that honestly should be reinstated in highschool).
But as all good things must end, so, too, did the Minecraft Golden Age. A quick look at how the frequency at which “Minecraft” search term was used has changed over time reveals a gradual but undeniable decline by late 2013. To many at the time, this seemed like the death of the beloved Sandbox game as we came to know it. Why did Minecraft, a game that sat immutably in the #1 spot in the IOS app store, die?
(From Google Analytics)
The primary reason was that people simply got bored of it. As interest in the game peaked, the developers at Mojang were faced with a pressing dilemma: How could they release new and interesting updates without infringing upon defining features of the game? For example, many discontented gamers began asking for an update on the central mining component of the game, demanding an expansion of cave features. This placed Mojang in a difficult situation. There were a few cornerstones of the Minecraft gaming experience that had become so iconic in the community that the developers did not dare touch them: diamonds had to be the most coveted ore, lest they desecrate the holy hymns of “Mine Diamonds” and “I Found a Diamond”; the Ender stronghold had to remain the most sought-after site below ground, so as to keep the same end goal for the game. Fearful of changing these essential qualities of the game, Mojang chose to do close to nothing: only occasionally pushing out minor mob updates.
At the same time that gamers grew bored of Minecraft, other games started kicking in. A classical example many compare with Minecraft is Terraria, a game with similar elements of gameplay (e.g. open-ended, mining, fighting mobs) that sidestepped Minecraft’s fatal flaws by constantly adding new bosses and quests. As more people boycotted Minecraft for better, more interesting alternatives, the game quickly grew out of fashion. Minecraft was now “childish” and “cringey,” warding off any self-preserving teenagers that would’ve played the game otherwise. For the longest time, gaming Youtuber Pewdiepie (who, ironically enough, is now the reason most people know Minecraft) refused to even touch the game.
Just as it seemed that Minecraft would never regain it’s spot in the Youtube trending tab, the 2019 Minecraft Renaissance rolled along. The game experienced a sudden resurgence in players, with active players growing by the tens of millions in late 2018. In 2019, Minecraft had over 4.3 million total hours of view-time on Twitch, ranking #12 of all games on the platform. Though many cite the change in the Youtube algorithm as the reason behind this revival, the releases of the 1.13 Aquatic and 1.14 Village & Pillage updates were the primary reasons behind the return of interest. As large Youtubers like Pewdiepie broadcasted these new releases on a wider platform, this effect only snowballed. Suddenly, Minecraft was “cool” and “hip” once again. Many TikTokers (the “coolest” and “hippest” of teens) even began making content about their beloved characters of Jeorgen, Sven, and Water Sheep.
In hindsight, though, the revival of Minecraft was far from surprising. Though the lack of updates provided a temporary damper to its success, the central elements of the game made a resurgence inevitable. For many children and teenagers, Minecraft provided a safe, magical escape from a confusing, daunting world. At the same time that the iconic cubed design of blocks encapsulated everything in a neat, tidy way, the infinite possibilities in building, mining, and adventure made the game constantly exciting. Though I cannot speak for everyone, you can expect to catch me on my server sharing a milk bucket with the boys.
Me and the boys in our Minecraft server
