Cats? Pandas? Notch? Minecraft is a very different game now to the one which launched back in 2009. It’s a more complex, customisable beast – and sometimes I yearn for the simplicity of its earlier days.
Well, today you can tickle your nostalgia buds and fire up Minecraft as it used to be, via your browser. Just head to classic.minecraft.net and you can play straightaway.
Steve, circa 2009.
It’s basic. Very basic. But if you want to place some blocks and remember all the good times before Notch went weird, this is for you. This is Minecraft as it once was, just a handful of resources and the most basic of biomes to tinker with. Smells like memories.
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You know how sometimes a new iPhone model will leak because an Apple employee leaves it in the back of a taxi?
Well, that’s the excitement Microsoft wants to conjur up in this new Minecraft teaser for what looks like a new Pokémon Go-style game.
Microsoft has dabbled in bringing Minecraft to other platforms before (remember that snazzy looking HoloLens tech demo?) but this one looks a little more familiar – it’s a mobile AR game you play on your phone while out on the street.
The video below shows a preened Microsoft employee leaving their mobile on a public bench. A woman picks it up and sees the new Minecraft AR game running, and is promptly excited by the pixelised pigs and Villagers around her.
More, we’re promised, will be unveiled at Minecraft’s big 10th anniversary event on 17th May.
Microsoft has announced that its annual MineCon livestream event, which offers a look at Minecraft’s future plans, will return (in this tenth anniversary year) on 28th September. Oh, and it’s got a new name.
Back in 2017, Microsoft decided to turn Minecraft’s massive real-life MineCon event, which had been held on a somewhat annual basis around the world since 2010, into a smaller-scale digital-only affair. The change in format heralded a new name – MineCon Earth – but that’s now been swept up by the newly announced Pokemon-Go-like Minecraft mobile game. As such, this year’s MineCon livestream will be known by the highly imaginative name of MineCon Live.
The show kicks off at 5pm on 28th September in the UK (that’s 12pm EST), and will last for around 90 minutes. It will feature, says Microsoft, “juicy Minecraft news, content creators… pre and post show bits, as well as on-demand community panels.”
Microsoft also promises new information on Minecraft’s next major game update, and the opportunity for fans to vote and decide on a new biome to be added to the game – similar to a competition held during MineCon Earth 2017, in which the community was able to vote on a new mob. That later gave the world the flying Phantom (the tongue-squid was robbed).
MineCon Live can be viewed on the official website come 28th September, and it’s also scheduled to appear on “a bunch of streaming sites”, says Microsoft somewhat unhelpfully. Presumably Mixer, Twitch, and YouTube then, but don’t quote me on that.
NetEase has tripled its net income year-over-year and has sights on international expansion. Niko Partners’ Daniel Ahmad says Minecraft’s achievement in China is ‘extremely impressive.’
China, even with its restrictive licensing policies, continues to be a huge market for the global games business, worth almost $31 billion in 2018 according to Niko Partners. Online game company NetEase is certainly one of the major contributors to the region’s growth, and the firm has just reported another very solid quarter with big gains in both revenues and net income to kick off its 2019 fiscal year.
“We are pleased to begin the year with a strong quarter. Our total net revenues grew robustly by 30% and our net income more than tripled year-over-year,” said Mr. William Ding, Chief Executive Officer and Director of NetEase. “Online game services revenues continued to grow steadily with the support of a diversified portfolio and impressive performances from all of our leading titles.”
Net revenues for the first quarter came to RMB (Chinese Yuan) 18,356.2 million ($2.7 billion) while NetEase saw its net income jump to RMB 2,382.1 million ($354.9 million). The publisher cited strong performances from titles like Night Falls: Survival, Onmyoji, and Invincible, along with steady performances from its Fantasy Westward Journey and New Westward Journey Onlineseries, which also saw new expansion packs released.
One particularly impressive achievement during the quarter came from Minecraft, which NetEase began publishing in China in August 2017. In less than a year, the game racked up 100 million registered users in China, and as NetEase reported, that number now stands at 200 million users, not even two years since it launched. For a game that’s well over a decade old, that’s quite a feat, and it shows just how globally appealing Minecraft truly is.
“Minecraft’s 200 million registered user number is extremely impressive given the game has been on the market for less than two years. Only a handful of games have been able to reach 200 million users in such a time frame. [Tencent’s] Honor of Kings reached this milestone shortly after one year on the market. We note that the game was popular in China prior to official entry, which helped pave the way for demand that has contributed to the success of the licensed Chinese version,” Niko Partners’ Senior Analyst, Daniel Ahmad, commented to GameDaily.
Minecraft was launched in China before the country’s restrictive game policies were put in place. That doesn’t mean that the popular block-based title is immune to the nation’s censorship, however.
“The Chinese version of Minecraft is quite similar to the Western version, as the game content was benign anyway, in that it is aimed at younger players. The main changes generally involve the interface and localization for Chinese players. However, NetEase was recently fined RMB 50,000 by China’s National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications after it was discovered that users were able to spread adult content in game through the rooms feature. The result was that NetEase deactivated the ability to rename rooms and implemented a stronger reporting policy to curb immoral content in the game,” Ahmad explained.
The fact that NetEase has been able to perform this well as the market continues to work through licensing pains actually makes the company’s first quarter even more impressive. Ahmad added that a number of other publishers “are still feeling the impact of the temporary game license approval freeze which ended in December 2018 [but NetEase] is diversifying its game development pipeline to create games in multiple genres and is working on global expansion through self developed titles and partnerships.”
NetEase CEO William Ding stressed that his company is making a concerted effort to expand beyond the MMORPG space and also into international markets. He specifically cited the “strong debuts’ of Night Falls: Survival and Cyber Hunter in Japan. Knives Out also has been popular in Japan, topping the iOS grossing chart in March and May, while Identity V reached Japan’s top 5 iOS grossing chart for the first time in April. Beyond that, NetEase is looking to launch Ancient Nocturne in Japan and Korea this year.
But will the Chinese giant’s ambitions lead it to take new steps in the West? The company opened a Western HQ back in 2015, but its business has been more about taking Western titles (such as those from Blizzard) and bringing them to China. That said, there’s more and more global thinking going into its product launches moving forward.
“NetEase has evolved significantly over the past couple of years and has shifted to a global game development approach for its new titles,” stressed Ahmad. “While previously focusing on developing games for China first, the company is now creating games with a global audience in mind with recent releases such as Cyber Hunter, a sci-fi Battle Royale game, showing that NetEase is able to develop and release games overseas prior to the China launch.
“We expect the company to grow its overseas revenue significantly over the next few years. In addition, as people look at Tencent and NetEase as the two gaming giants in China, NetEase has been able to stand out through its focus on high quality self-developed titles.”
Blockchain gaming giant Enjin is set to bring blockchain technology to the hugely popular sandbox video game Minecraft following the launch of its new Minecraft plugin.
Coin Rivet recently interviewed co-founder and CTO of Enjin Witek Radomski. During the interview, Witek revealed the exciting news for Enjin and Minecraft enthusiasts alike.
He noted: “One thing we’re working on now is actually the Minecraft launch. The Minecraft anniversary is coming up here in just a few days, and we are going to be launching a public server that uses our Enjin Coin platform.”
Anybody who owns a copy of Minecraft will be able to join the public server. Players will be able to roam around the world and complete quests – some of which will reward the player with tokenised items.
“There’s going to be some Multiverse items hidden in the world as well, so players can discover some chests and figure out how to unlock them.”
Witek went on to reveal: “We’re building out this Minecraft server with a cool little medieval world. It’s really exciting, and it’s going to be the first example of Minecraft that we’re going to put out there.”
Enjin’s Minecraft public server launch will coincide with the launch of Enjin’s Java software development kit (SDK), with the “whole thing” having been developed in Java.
The Java SDK will be released as open source soon, with the release of the Minecraft plugin set to take place a few weeks later.
“We’re going to release our Minecraft plugin to the public, and that means any Minecraft server can now integrate blockchain,” added Witek.
Interested in reading more Enjin-related stories? Discover more about the collaborative blockchain gaming Multiverse which is spearheaded by the Enjin team.
