In context: If you’ve played an online multiplayer game in your lifetime — particularly a competitive multiplayer game — you’ve probably heard plenty of insults. Whether they’re racial slurs, “homophobic” comments, or generic “your momma”-style insults, playful and not-so-playful jabs are the bread and butter of the competitive gaming industry.
For better or worse, though, this “culture” of “toxicity,” despite being relatively common in the past, has come under much more intense scrutiny in recent years. Now, that scrutiny is coming from none other than the Xbox chief himself: Phil Spencer.
In a new blog post published today (dubbed “Video games: A unifying force for the world”), Spencer discusses two “fundamental truths” about gaming. First, he says, no one group “owns” the industry or the hobby; it’s home to a wide variety of people with a wide variety of tastes. “…whether you’re new to gaming or are a diehard e-sports fan, you are welcome to play and welcome to all the fun and skill-building that comes with gaming,” he states. “In this way, when everyone can play, the entire world wins.”
“…whether you’re new to gaming or are a diehard e-sports fan, you are welcome to play and welcome to all the fun and skill-building that comes with gaming,”
Spencer’s second fundamental truth is that gaming “must promote and protect the safety of all,” regardless of their political beliefs, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.” He claims that as gaming has grown in popularity, it’s started to become a “toxic stew of hate speech, bigotry, and misogyny.”
Moving forward, Spencer says Microsoft as a whole commits to being “vigilant, proactive, and swift” to ensure gamers of all stripes can have fun without being targeted with “hate and harassment.”
Furthermore, the company will work “across the industry” to create comprehensive, modernized safety measures to expand upon existing Community Standards throughout the gaming sphere — whatever that might mean.
Why it matters: Microsoft revealed during its recent 10-year anniversary celebration for Minecraft that the sandbox has now sold more than 176 million copies to date “in virtually every country in the world.” If indeed accurate, that would make Minecraft one of the best-selling video games of all time.
Wikipedia has Minecraft in pole position with Tetris in the number two spot with sales of 170 million. As PC Gamer highlights, however, it’s impossible to know Tetris’ true standing in the ranks due to which versions of the game are considered actual descendants and who is doing the counting.
Wikipedia’s entry for Tetris is reportedly only accurate as of January 2010. Surely millions of additional copies of the game have been moved in the more than nine years since.
Either way, it’s an incredibly impressive feat for Minecraft to even be in the top five. Only one other game – Grand Theft Auto V – has managed to break 100 million units sold. Wii Sports is fourth with 82.87 million units sold and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is fifth at 50 million.
Microsoft used the anniversary celebration to announce a new Minecraft-themed augmented reality game called Minecraft Earth. It enters beta this summer on Android and iOS and will further add to Minecraft’s impressive resume.
One of the best-selling games of all-time, Minecraft, continues to set new benchmarks almost 10 years after release.
Nearly 10 years after initially releasing to the public, Mojang’s Minecraft is still setting new sales milestones.
Just recently, Minecraft’s PC version specifically has now passed 30 million copies sold worldwide. The official Minecraft website keeps track of this data in a ticker at the bottom of the webpage stating how many copies of the title have been purchased. As of the past day, that ticker finally turned past 30 million.
Even though this surely isn’t much of a surprise to many at this point, it’s still insane when you put it in perspective compared to other gaming properties. Minecraft’s PC sales alone surpass some lifetime sales for entire franchises that have multiple sequels and other various installments.
To date, Minecraft as a whole across all platforms has sold over 100 million copies and is one of the best-selling games ever made. For a game with such humble and small beginnings, it’s a success story for Mojang that likely will never be matched again. Even a game like Fornite, which is probably the biggest video game since Minecraft took off, has the backing of Epic, which was already a rather large company to begin with. Whether you like Minecraft or not, you can’t deny its meteoric rise over the past decade.
If you somehow haven’t gotten in on the Minecraft craze for yourself yet, it’s available on pretty much every platform imaginable. Go download it and build yourself a cool house, or something.
External storage for the PS4 has been an option for a while now, and a much quicker solution than installing a larger hard drive or SSD inside the PS4. Most USB 3.0 drives will work, but today PS4$299.00 at Amazonowners got a new, official option courtesy of Seagate.
Seagate has been offering its Game Drive external hard drives aimed at console games for years now, with 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities already available for the PS4. But the new Game Drive launched today is different because it’s an officially licensed product. That means it will match the look of your PS4 right down to the PlayStation logo on the casing.
In return for $89.99, Seagate is offering a 2TB drive which holds approximately 50 games. That’s based on each game requiring 39GB of storage space, so you could get a lot more on there depending on the types of game you choose to play.
Setting up the drive is as easy as plugging it in via the supplied USB cable, which also doubles as a power cable for the unit. As long as your PS4 is running system software 4.50 or greater, setup will happen automatically and takes about three minutes to complete. Seagate claims this Game Drive is as fast as the internal drive, so there’s no disadvantage in that regard. If you regularly visit a friend’s house to play games, you can take the Game Drive with you. As long as you sign into your friend’s console using your account, the games stored on the drive will be accessible.
2TB external drives cost around $60-$65, so you are paying a premium price for this official version of the Game Drive. However, Seagate already has an unofficial version of the 2TB Game Drive available to purchase and that costs $79.99. It seems likely the official model will enjoy the same price drop once retailers get their hands on it.
As part of Minecraft‘s tenth birthday celebrations, Mojang have commissioned a virtual theme park celebrating the build ’em up. It’s available as a free map for all players. Exhibitions include a sculpture garden of monsters in a glasshouse, demonstrations of redstone-powered doohickeys, museums, galleries, Easter eggs… it seems real fancy. A season of festivities for a mere tenth anniversary might seem churlish but hell, Minecraft has earned this. It broke into the public consciousness in a way few game games do then was surpassed only by a game it inspired, Fortnite. Take a victory lap, Minecraft.
“We created a map that celebrates everything about Minecraft past and present,” mapmakers BlockWorks explain. “Filled with Easter eggs, secrets and community references, this map is a tribute to the creative, curious and adventurous community of Minecrafters worldwide.”
BlockWorks are a professional Minecraft builder team who’ve made maps to promote all sorts of things. Their impressive portfolio of commissioned builds includes recreating the Great Fire of London for the Museum of London (a museum way better than its name might lead you to assume), dioramas of water infrastructure for Severn Trent, and that Brutalismfest Pip looked at. Fancy stuff. This one looks extra fancy.
The ’10 Years of Minecraft’ map is available free for both the Bedrock (Windows 10 & consoles) edition of Minecraft and ye olde Java. It’s on the Marketplace for Bedrock and here for plain ol’ Java. It’s in the library for Java Realms too.
Minecraft certainly isn’t ‘done’ yet either. Mojang launched the big ol’ Village & Pillage updateonly last month, and a dungeon-crawling spin-off named Minecraft: Dungeons is expected later this year.
