Minecraft, a strange game (classmate link)

Hey guys, today I wanted to talk about a very strange game: Minecraft.

Minecraft is not actually a game in the sense that it has no storyline, no characters, no objectives, nothing.
Just as me, you may be thinking, well, why is it popular then? Minecraft is nothing more than a sandbox, where the main and basically only feature is construction. The game has no manual, tutorial or any other kind of learning experience for the player, it simply shoves you into the world and you need to fend for yourself. There is only one thing to do, mine caves. Players mine caves, and can then use the materials gathered to build anything they want. The possibilities are quite limited as far as material options goes, but hey, if you want to build a giant castle out of nothing but rock you don't really need much else but... well, rocks. The game has graphics worthy of a 1989 video game, and a basically non-existent physics engine, with nothing but basic water interaction, and not much else, it astounds me how this game has become so popular.



The creator of the game took a week to develop it, were talking about one man, and 7 days to produce a game, and yet it has over 700,000 customers who have all paid $15 to play this game. Now, I will concede to the creator that the game is put simply, fun. Building things is very fun, and very rewarding if you mined every single one of your two thousand square blocks to build your castle, the game does provide a sense of self-fulfillment and I have seen very impressive works of art made in-game. However, I do not believe this game gets even close to being worth $15, and it amazes me that so many people have bought it, a crappy, empty game. I would also like to take the opportunity to link to Calvin's blog, where he has some intersting thisngs to say about pricing strategies:  http://blogs.ubc.ca/calvinkwok/2010/11/12/43/

Anyway, the point I wanted to make is, even though this game has had no advertisements, no marketing campaign. The only two things this game relied on to get popular was product and price. The product, we have established, is... crappy. Entertaining, but crappy, very crappy. Why oh why would a crappy game charge $15, are they crazy? Well, what I believe is that this is actually the reason the game became popular. By slapping a $15 price tag on it, consumers automatically assume a certain level of quality. This makes the game stand out from the rest of the crappy, independent games, and then keeps its fan base by providing a virtual Lego game, where you mine your own Lego blocks. As you can see from the image above, Lego Rock Raiders, a game quite similar in some ways to Minecraft, had better graphics, and it was released more than 10 years ago.




In short, did not like this game at all and I think it is nowhere near deserving of the amount of money it has made.