Minecraft
Media industry: How the media industries’ processes of production, distribution, and circulation affect media forms and platforms.
Media audience: How media forms target, reach and address audiences, how audiences interpret and respond to them and how members of audiences become producers themselves.
Digitally convergent media: Video games consoles are an excellent example of a digitally convergent device, you can not only play games but access social media, surf the internet, stream films and TV content and upload content into cloud-based servers. Cross-media content helps maximize profits and also improve reach to new customers.
Production: This refers to all phases of designing, developing and making the media product;.
Distribution: This refers to all processes linked to delivering the media product to audiences both through tangible (disc) and digital (Cloud-based) media.
Consumption: Explores the way in which the media text is used by audiences for pleasure but also explores the rise of user-generated content across several platforms.
Sandbox game: A world that is free for the player to explore and change on their own terms. no rules or stories.
Sold to the Evil Microsoft for $2.5 Billion!!!
It was created in 2009 (released in 2011) by Markus Alexej Persson Lead developer of Mojang the development team
Minecraft: It’s an open-ended game where players decide what they want to do by themselves!
Minecraft is the second most successful video game of all time behind Tetris.
It was created and designed by Markus Persson, a game programmer, who also developed and published the game through his company Mojang. A full version of the game went on release in November 2011.
To date, well over 121 million copies have been sold across all platforms, including over 27 million PC copies, making it the biggest selling PC game of all time.
The success of the games market.
The UK’s US$4 billion;
China, US$24.4 billion
America’s US$23.6 billion.
A recent report by the UKIE1 suggests that the global games market is now worth in excess of US$100 billion.
In comparisons to traditional media like film, radio, print, and television, video games are much younger, exponentially growing since the 1970s.
The advantages of lower cost user-generated marketing are that it costs relatively no money and spreads very quickly. One other advantage is that this form of marketing is very viable for word of mouth transportation because people can talk about the game, Ie Minecraft and the user-generated content, which then promotes more user generation, which promotes more of the subject matter, going round and round in a circle.
Minecraft and lego synergize because they are both children's games and focus around the same core elements. For example, they both rely on imagination and cognitive skills to build creations. There are no rules in their games, meaning anything can be done at any time. They both rely on blocks to build there structures and creations. So this means that a Minecraft Lego set would work well because there is very little difference between building on Minecraft and building with lego. Therefore because they have so many similarities it would be easy for lego to make a Minecraft set. This benefits both because Lego is a well-known brand that Minecraft can take advantage of and Minecraft is a new trend that is receiving a lot of attention and is now the main model for video games.
Uses for education: Collaboration, Coding, Creative problem solving, Hand-eye coordination, engineering
In November 2011, prior to the game’s official release, Minecraft had over 16 million registered users and 4 million purchases.
Due to its popularity, Minecraft was released across multiple platforms becoming a commercially viable franchise with increased interactivity. In particular, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released on Sony Xperia Play, available on Sony Xperia smartphones. Minecraft also becomes available on Android and iOS devices shortly after.
Game Genre:
Action
Arcade
Adventure
Fighting
Racing
FPS
RPG
Sandbox
Sandbox
TPS
MMO
Action Rpg
It is worth considering how a simple PC Java game has become a globally successful phenomenon across all consoles and hand-held devices
2017 Minecraft is now a multi-platform game which is not only just for PC gamers but those who own smartphones, Microsoft consoles (Xbox); PlayStation 3, 4 and PS Vita; and more recently Nintendo consoles (Wii U) and hand-held devices (Nintendo Switch and Nintendo New 3DS, New 2DS XL and New 3DS XL)
The audience was involved in the production of the game.
Then Microsoft took over and developed it in C++ allowing for Cross-Platform Gaming and more complex gameplay mechanics and items improving visuals.
Sky does Minecraft - Sky does everything does Minecraft 11Million 3.7 Billion views overall
Do vlogs, Minecraft and more popular games ie Fortnite
Pewdiepie 80 million subscribers 111billion views
Before Minecraft realms random people would have to make dedicated servers for the Minecraft community, and would then host their IP address on the internet, to allow people to join. The IP addresses would be put out on certain websites that people would look up. The income to support the server would often come from the people using it who would by special ranks unique to the server, or exclusive items that the creators of the server would add by using command blocks. The use of the youtubers listed above means that Mojang does not have to pay for advertising and that it is community-based.
Minecraft Market Place
Effectively a store that people can upload their creations to, which are then bought for money, of which Microsoft takes a small portion of.
Essay
Minecraft was produced by a Swedish programmer called Marcus Perrson. The game was originally called Cave game and was designed to be a college project originally. He started off working in his bedroom, asking around online and coding in java code, to make it easy to help with and accessible for other programmers. This helped to keep the production costs to just that of one computer and education costs. He announced the games progress and development on certain online forums and made regular updates on youtube. This quickly spread around the internet, and several online gaming news sites chipped in and wrote articles about the game that he was developing. This also kept the advertising costs to practically zero. The game was originally thought up and started development in 2008 and was officially released in 2011, this meant that Marcus had 3 years to build awareness for his game and 3 years to develop and patch his game to release a stable version that people would enjoy. From 2011 Minecraft exploded all over the internet, as it was a fairly cheap game with pretty much infinite options of what to do in the game. This was the beginning of the era of sandbox games. Sandbox games are games that involve the player having a set of basic game mechanics given to them, and then being told to do whatever they like. This was a big hit at the time because it had never been done on such a scale before. Where most games followed a core design of story, progression and overall goal and endgame, and the others just being online games that consist of the same thing over and over, Minecraft gave control completely over to the player.
Minecraft then proceded to pump out update after update, fixing bugs and adding new content to the game adding to the replayability which is the games main feature, although strangely, yet thankfully, this was not capitalised on massively as other corporations would have. However, by 2014 Microsoft bought Mojang, the company developing Minecraft, for $2.5 Billion. After this event that began to change. During the period before Microsoft bought Mojang they relied on youtubers making videos of their game as the advertisement, this kept costs to a minimum and is what helped them become so successful, but when Microsoft bought them Microsoft then began to advertise the game on their own sites and introduced several new features that helped to make even more money out of this game.
One of these features was called Minecraft realms, and this was Minecraft Realms. This is basically rented server space, making it easier for people to play over WAN (wide area networks), and while this did make it easier for people to play with each other because they did not have to set up servers which took some technological know how. But This killed off the public user-generated servers, communities that had up to1000 people on at a time had now been reduced to no more than 50 people if even that. Microsoft also created an educational mode, which made sense as they already had contracts with the education sector of the government so they can sell their computers to schools so, why not use one of their products to add to that part of their company.
The education mode is basically Minecraft but with certain subtle changes that make the game applicable for a teacher-student relationship. It is proven to help with hand-eye coordination, teamwork, problem-solving skills and other important skills that are developed in childhood. Also when Microsoft took over, they changed the games source code from javascript to C++, they claimed that this was so it could be played on multiple platforms, but it also made it harder for people to make user-generated modifications to the game, more commonly known as "mods". This meant that people could play with their friends on other platforms as this offered cross-platform support, but it also put an end to mods, yet another example of Microsoft's capitalization.
However, this cross-platform support meant Minecraft was available for so many more people than just PC, Mac and Linux players (pronounced Lin rhymes with tin ux..not line oox James). It instead opened up availability for PlayStation, Xbox and Switch users. Meaning their market would be much bigger, generating more sales and by extension more money. This also gave rise to Virtual Reality, and really Minecraft is the ideal game for VR conversion. Also considering Microsoft own their own VR device it was a no brainer.
Finally as the reason why Minecraft is so applicable to a wide range of different age groups is that creating your own world is amazing to a small child. But the game also offers some difficulty and has a really high skill cap for interesting builds, command block creations and Redstone circuitry. This makes it more appealing to higher ages as well.
Now am I going to go on a rant about Youtube because Minecraft and Youtube are involved with each other a lot. As I have discussed earlier Youtube is key to Minecraft's success and advertisement in the beginning but Minecraft was only successful because of Youtube. Also because of how Youtube chose to change its content at the time played a massive part. Instead of long blogs which was what people were doing, and moved on to short episodic series that left the viewer something to look forward to next episode. However, without Minecraft being viewed on Youtube, Youtube would not have become so popular either.
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