![]() “You have to feel it – it’s a game of consequence.” Instead, intrigued by a 2015 on-stage demonstration of Minecraft being played in augmented reality – intended only to show off Microsoft’s HoloLens headset – he started thinking about how to put Minecraft into the real world, in a version that would satisfy casual gamers as well as hardcore fans.īut Persson’s insistence on people being able to play together in the augmented reality game world poses a tricky problem. “Why is there no tutorial? Because it’d ruin the game,” says Persson. ![]() Messing with the core game to make it more accessible was always off the cards. Fifty per cent of all 9 to 11-year-olds in the US play Minecraft, but Persson’s mind is on the other half, and the masses of people who quit the game shortly after picking it up, turned off by its baffling gameplay. If 2014-18 was the era when Microsoft consolidated its Minecraft fiefdom, 2019 is all about expansion. While it was doing all this, Microsoft released a version of the game specifically for schools, cementing the idea that – in a world where games are often presented as violent and addictive wastes of time – Minecraft was that rarest of rare things: a good game that was also, well, good. Now versions of the game are on 20 different devices, including consoles, desktops, mobiles and virtual reality headsets, with many people installing the game on multiple platforms. Part of its post-acquisition success is down to Microsoft’s goal of trying to get Minecraft on as many devices as possible, and making sure that players could play online with each other across most of them. That’s just not a gaming lifecycle thing.” “Now we’re three times bigger than we were back then and nobody is more surprised than us. “Prevailing wisdom then was that Minecraft had peaked,” Persson says. When Microsoft bought Mojang, the Swedish studio behind the game, in 2014, it already had 31m monthly players. Unlike most games – which start with a bang and fizzle out slowly – Minecraft has gotten more popular every year since its release. This stickiness has been a big part of its success. ![]() “But the people who churn out do so almost immediately because the game is pretty unforgiving.” If a player manages to survive two days on the trot, odds are that they’ll stay with the game for years. “The people who stay, stay for years,” says Persson. On YouTube, which does a roaring trade in Minecraft videos, players share their creations with tens of millions of subscribers – videos of the game were viewed 80 billion times in 2017 alone.īut the impenetrable interface and complete lack of guidance are also the game’s biggest weaknesses. Others use redstone – the game’s version of circuitry – to engineer random maze generators or complex systems full of traps and obstacles. Some build painstakingly precise replicas of Cologne Cathedral or Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. The open-ended nature of Minecraft means that the game is mostly a creation of the player’s own imagination. Wearing a dark black jumper and with a thick tattoo wrapped all the way around his right wrist, Persson speaks while fiddling with a set of Lego bricks – a staple feature of Minecraft meeting rooms. “It's the antithesis to many modern games that are very prescriptive, but to reach a high fidelity you have to put the blinders on and follow a specific path,” says Persson, who joined Microsoft in August 2009, just three months after the very first version of Minecraft was released by its creator, Markus Persson – no relation to Sax. And he wanted this new game to be played by more than the 91 million people who already log on to Minecraft every month. He wanted to hide mines beneath pavements, fill parks with in-game creatures and tuck exotic treasures away in unexpected places so gamers would have to search high and low to find them. His idea was to bring Minecraft into the real world at an almost unimaginable scale. Once they were in, staffers were told where Persson planned to take Minecraft next. On the fourth floor of a drab, red-brick office block in the centre of Redmond, Washington State, Persson and his colleagues have been building the next version of the second-biggest-selling video game of all time: Minecraft.Įven inside Microsoft, which bought the studio behind Minecraft in 2014, news of the plan has been restricted to a small group of employees who were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements before becoming part of what was known internally as Project Genoa. For the last eighteen months, Sax Persson has been sitting on the biggest secret in the gaming industry.
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