Gaming Industry Questions and their links with Minecraft

Minecraft Economic Context Table

Minecraft: The Story of Mojang - Official Complete Movie

• Markus Perrson had made many simple games before making Minecraft, none of which blew up in the same way.
• In the start Minecraft went from 40 sales aday to 1,000 sales a day - 2010
• Spread by word of mouth.
• Minecraft considered "one of the best gaming experiences" on its release.
• Mojang very small company to start off with, founded by Perrson.
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Minecraft and Let’s Plays How audiences engage with new media

Minecraft and Let’s Plays
How audiences engage with new media

Link to full article: https://jamiedevivobu.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/introduction/


Technological development has created a media landscape that is in constant transition; contemporary platforms such as Youtube and Twitch have blurred the lines between producers and consumers, allowing for so-called “Prosumers”. This has lead to a participatory culture saturated in paratexts and centered around fandom subcultures. The aim of this blog is to better understand the changes in production and consumption of contemporary media, using Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) and the ‘Let’s Play Phenomenon’, because of their recent success, to exemplify these changes.

YouTube

YouTube, launched in 2005, has laid down the tools for anyone to become a producer. The barriers to creating video content are lower than ever and this has led to an incredibly diverse collection of videos that include anything from notorious cat videos to short films. Petty producers have taken advantage of this to create their own work and this blog will analyse how they do this, how it’s been made possible by changes in the media landscape and what affect it’s had on key texts.

Using the concepts of fandom and participatory culture to analyse this phenomenon, this blog will explore how the culture of the way in which we consume these texts has transitioned from the past. Furthermore, it will also look at the reasons for the growing trend in Let’s Plays popularity and the overall effect they have on their parent texts and how these texts engage with audiences.

Minecraft and Audience

Minecraft and Audience

Why is Minecraft so popular?

• Players can do what they please.
• A unique 'retro' look.
• 4 game modes, so there is a lot to do.
• Players of the game have a lot of freedom.

4 Modes

• Survival
• Creative
• Adventure
• Spectator

Original Target Audience

Independent programmers and coders or budding ones were the original target audience for the game. The game has a "modding" scene where players can change the game as they please. However after Microsoft bought Minecraft its target audience seems to have moved more towards children from around 7 - 12.

Fandom

Fandom of Minecraft is mostly hated gaining the game criticism. The fandom of Minecraft is quite intense and even has it's own convention known as Minecon.

Community

Minecraft has a large community. Their audience helps to market the game.

Audience Profile: Minecraft

Audience Profile: Minecraft

The Minecraft audience is dominantly male with 75% of audience members being male and 24% being female and the other 1% being non-binary.

The median age for the game is 23.

Types of gamer that play Minecraft:

• casual - 11%
• core - 72%
• hardcore - 16%

The frequency at which audiences play Minecraft (for more than 30mins at least):

• 0-1 day: 5%
• 2-3 days: 17%
• 4-5 days: 24%
• 6-7 days: 53% 

Motivations

Different audience members will have different motivations for choosing to play. For Minecraft the three highest motivations to play were: community (59%), discovery (56%) and design (56%). The three lowest motivations were: power (4%), competition (4%) and completion (1%)