Erik Andersen had never been interested in architecture, but playing Minecraft – a popular 3D video game where users build and navigate their own digital environments – he found himself constructing a brick-by-brick scale model of a temple he’d once seen in Bangkok.

“Suddenly I was actually starting to look at buildings and think about their design features,” said Andersen, assistant professor of computer science. “I’m generally interested in education in games, and I was impressed by how this game got me interested in architecture.”

Seeking to harness that educational potential, Andersen and three other Cornell computer scientists developed a Minecraft modification that uses artificial intelligence to tell players whether their buildings fit into certain architectural styles, and offers ideas for how the structures could be improved. Their modification – which is not yet publicly available – also helped advance the researchers’ work in computer vision and human-robot communication.

The authors will present their paper, “Design Mining for Minecraft Architecture,” at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, Nov. 13-17, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

“Minecraft, without intending to be an educational tool, has been pulled in so many different directions, where originally it was just for fighting monsters,” said senior author Ross Knepper, assistant professor of computer science. “One of the things that’s important to learn when you’re a kid and throughout life is creativity, abstraction – how to envision what you want and then create it. That’s not an easy skill for anyone. So this is a tool that helps people not get discouraged, maybe if they’re beginning at Minecraft and don’t know how to use their imagination right off the bat.”

“When you’re working with images, it’s really hard to actually get at the essence of what something is. A machine observing how people build can actually learn quite a bit about about what shape is, what structure is, what buildings are.”

Bharath Hariharan, assistant professor of computer science
Based on buildings that Minecraft players created and uploaded for others to use, the researchers created a deep neural network – a kind of machine learning trained to predict whether data belongs in a certain category. Through that network, players could learn whether their building is medieval, modern, Asian or classical – four especially popular tags used by Minecraft players. Once the building is classified, another algorithm can show the users similar buildings to inspire them to make improvements to their own.

The program also allows users to import similar buildings into their Minecraft worlds, creating a neighborhood of like styles.

“It’s a way for the users to learn more about the thing they built,” said Irene (Euisun) Yoon ’19, first author on the paper. “People are really interested in having more design spaces in Minecraft, and being able to build certain types of architecture, but there weren’t any design tools as far as we were aware that can teach them.”

Yoon personally curated the data set to make sure the buildings were labeled correctly, since their algorithm was less accurate than they would have liked because it was trained with fewer than 1,000 player-created buildings. Ideally, such an algorithm would be trained with tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of data.

“If you ask an architect to tell you what a building’s style is, the architect will say, ‘OK, it’s one-and-a-half stories, it has dormers, it’s a Cape Cod.’ Deep learning is doing that but it’s doing it in a black box way (hidden from view). It learns patterns, but not necessarily the same patterns an architect would say are the key things,” Knepper said. For example, if all the modern-style houses in a data set have pools on the roof, the computer could assume that rooftop pools are a requirement for modern houses.

For Knepper, a roboticist by training, the Minecraft project helped answer questions about how a robot might follow a human’s instructions.

“If I say, ‘Build a house,’ today a robot is going to say, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ ‘Which brick should I put where?’ is the level at which robots need instruction,” Knepper said. “We’d like humans to be able to interface with robots more like we interface with each other. So if I tell it to build a medieval house or an ancient house and give some of the high-level details, it would know at that point how to turn it into a plausible thing that does everything you want. We’re not there yet, but this is the first step towards that goal.”

Co-author Bharath Hariharan, assistant professor of computer science, approached the research from the perspective of his own work in computer vision. In trying to interpret an image, a computer can be trained to pick up cues such as shape and solidity, but may have trouble processing perspective or scale. Using people’s intelligence through their Minecraft structures and tags can help computers learn to solve those problems.

“When you’re working with images, it’s really hard to actually get at the essence of what something is,” Hariharan said. “A machine observing how people build can actually learn quite a bit about about what shape is, what structure is, what buildings are.”

The paper is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation.

Think that the headline-grabbing Fortnite is the world’s most popular video game right now? Think again. Publisher Microsoft has revealed that Minecraft, the voxel-based building and survival game, has over 91 million active monthly players.

That’s a significant 13 million advance on the record 78.3 million players that Fortnite posted in August this year. Minecraft is the second highest selling video game of all time, behind classic puzzler Tetris, with 154 million copies sold worldwide.

In addition to these sales, the game is available for free in China, published by Chinese tech giant NetEase in collaboration with Microsoft, and has over 100 million registered users, giving Minecraft a pool of over 250 million potential players that continues to grow. The amount of monthly players has increased by 20 million in 2018 alone.

This vast player count means that Microsoft, who bought Minecraft and its development studio Mojang for $2.5bn in 2014, are unlikely to develop a Minecraft 2 any time soon as they do not want to split the enormous, active user base.

“I don’t think that makes sense for Minecraft, given the community,” Minecraft Head Helen Chiang told Business Insider. “It’s something that always fractures the community.”

“We don’t want to ask players to move from ‘Minecraft 1’ to ‘Minecraft 2.’ We want them to just enjoy ‘Minecraft,” said Chiang. “And there’s other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do.””

Instead, Microsoft are looking to expand Minecraft’s popularity with spin-offs such as the recently announced Minecraft: Dungeons. This is a combat-based dungeon-crawler crafted in the style of Minecraft and will not feature the traditional building and survival elements.

This isn’t the first time that Minecraft has expanded beyond its core conceit, which has groups of players building incredibly detailed worlds, with Telltale Games’ narrative game Minecraft: Story Mode proving such a success it was commissioned as an interactive show for Netflix before Telltale faced a majority studio closure last month.

While Minecraft hit the heights of its mainstream media attention just ahead of the 2014 sale, Microsoft have continued to grow the franchise to its current high. Often dubbed ‘digital Lego’ the main Minecraft game has expanded across multiple platforms, including Nintendo Switch, while continuous free updates has kept the game thriving.

On Nov. 1, Microsoft will be releasing its newest Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial, which, according to a recent announcement, could be “possibly the most adventurous tutorial yet.” The company has teamed up with Code.org for the release of “Voyage Aquatic,” in which students “explore aquatic worlds and uncover hidden treasure” by writing code to instruct agents to execute commands. The lesson specifically covers two programming concepts: loops and conditional statements.

Code.org runs the annual “Hour of Code” campaign, a global effort to help students learn how to code in an hour with free tutorials.

The Minecraft tutorials are interactive and use the same characters and concepts from the Minecraft video game, but it’s not the game itself. For Hour of Code, Minecraft developers work with educators and Code.org to create a Minecraft game-inspired lesson that introduces players to basic coding concepts. (Minecraft Education Edition is a separate game that schools need to purchase to play.)

Typically, the Minecraft tutorials come with free teacher resources, such as facilitator “quick start guides” and PowerPoint presentations for use in presenting the unit to students.

The new tutorial will be available through Code.org’s website starting next month.

The big news from Minecon Earth 2018 was that of spin-off co-op game Minecraft: Dungeons, but it wasn’t the only announcement to come out of the convention. Mojang also detailed the next Minecraft update, Village and Pillage, which adds new NPCs like the librarian and the butcher, as well as new enemies called Pillagers and Beasts. Pillagers carry crossbows, and players will be able to craft their own to use against them.

Big changes to the way add-ons work have been announced too: “Previously, add-ons only allowed you to modify existing mobs in the game, but with New Entities you can add more mobs. You can use Data Driven Spawning to control which mobs spawn in your worlds. Animations will give you more customisation options, so you’ll be able to craft the horrifying eight-legged mob of your dreams/our nightmares. Particles will let you pretty up your mobs with cool effects. All of these features are on the way and you can try them in the Minecraft beta on October 3rd.”

Scripting API is also close, and when it arrives it will be another step in Mojang embracing mods. As their blog post puts it, “We’ve never officially supported modding in Minecraft, but the Add-Ons system combined with the Scripting API is the beginning of the era where we do.”

Panda bears are coming too, as are more cats, a floating theme park called Inspiration Island, and biome updates beginning with Taiga.

A new live action trailer for Fallout 76 aired during the “Saints vs. Vikings” game earlier today which, for the benefit of anyone living outside of the United States, was some kind of football match. The official Fallout Twitter account tweeted as much, and you can see the trailer itself above.

There’s a woman standing in a lush green field, slowly and blissfully rotating as she fires off indiscriminate rounds from dual-wielded pistols. Later, two heavily-armed fellows in Power Armor are also enjoying the shooting of their weapons. The only time people look serious – ie, the only time they are not smiling – is when they’re not shooting their weapons (though being in the presence of a reason to shoot their weapons – such as the arrival of a deathclaw – seems to make them happy too).

Fallout 76 releases November 14. Chris played the recent Xbox-exclusive beta, but there’s a PC equivalent coming soon.

Welcome to our roundup of Minecraft commands. Whether it’s to copy an existing build, change the gamemode, or flat out cheat your way to glory, Minecraft console commands are an important part of playing the game day-to-day. While there are a lot of different commands out there, all varying in complexity, we’ve got a run down of the ones you need to know, and, of course, the ones you can use to troll your friends. Because what’s Minecraft without a bit of friendly griefing?

If you’re wondering how to enter the Minecraft console commands listed below, all you need to do is hit the forward-slash key (/) and that’ll bring up a small window. Input the code and hit enter and your command will activate.

If you need more Minecraft advice from us, check out our best Minecraft seeds and best Minecraft mods.

Shorthand Codes

Below are the shorthand codes to save you from typing in different player names. These are worth memorising so you don’t have to type in names like “Sniper_Kitty_Bruv_91” every time some jobber joins your game.

@p – the player nearest to you
@r – a random player
@a – all players
@e – all entities in the world.
@s – yourself
The clone command

/clone

Clones a selection of blocks to another location. Very helpful if you’re building a city space and want to duplicate multiple buildings to different areas. “ ” is your start point. “ ” is the end point. And “ ” is where you want the cloned blocks to spawn.

Example: /clone 100 234 -10 200 100 0 300 200 100

How to change the difficulty

/difficulty

Changes the in-game difficulty. Replace the latter section of the code with one of the following:

peaceful
easy
normal
hard
Example: /difficulty peaceful

Add an effect to yourself or someone else

/effect [seconds] [amplifier] [hideParticles]

Adds a status effect to the targeted player. “[seconds]”, “[amplifier]”, and “[hideParticles]” are all optional conditions, so feel free to ignore them unless you want to change the length, how strong the effect is, or whether the effect shows as particles or not. If you want to remove an effect from a player, type “/effect clear”.

Example: /effect PCGamer water_breathing 30

Enchant an item

/enchant [level]

Adds an enchantment to the item the player is holding. So that’s smite, bane of the arthropods, sharpness—any enchantment you’d pull from a book or enchant table. Here’s a list of Enchantment IDs.

Example: /enchant PCGamer minecraft:smite 1

Exp modifier

/xp [player]

Gives the targeted player an amount of experience points. If you just want to add levels instead, which is easier for enchanting, try “/xp L [player]”.

Example: /xp 100L PCGamer

Change the gamemode

/gamemode

Changes the gamemode for everyone in the session. Add a player’s name to the end of the code to alter the mode for different players. Replace “” with one of the following options:

Survival
Creative
Adventure
Spectator
Example: /gamemode Survival

Give an item or items

/give [amount]

Drops an item into the player’s inventory. Perfect for if you want to start a run with a full set of diamond gear. Just keep in mind the amount section only works for stackable items. You can’t give yourself 100 diamond swords in one go, as cool as that’d be. For a full list of item IDs, head here.

Example: /give PCGamer diamond_sword 1

Help if a command isn’t working

/help [command name]

Offers additional information about any console command. If you’re trying a command and it isn’t working as it should, type the above command before the name of the command that isn’t working and you’ll be treated to more details about how it works.

Example: /help kill

Turn keep inventory on

/gamerule keepInventory true

Changes the game rules so should you die, you keep all the items in your inventory. Replace “true” with “false” to turn it off again.

Kill everyone or everything

/kill

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Kills everything, including the player. But should you want to kill another player, use “/kill ”. And to kill a certain type of mob, “/kill @e[type=mobType]”.

The play sound command

/playsound

Plays a specific sound file. Great for if you want to use a command block to play a sound when someone opens a door. Who doesn’t love a good doorbell? Take a look at all the sound file names here.

Example: /playsound minecraft:entity.elder_guardian.ambient voice @a

How to check the world seed

/Seed

Displays the seed for their current world should you wish to replay the seed again from scratch or pass it along to a mate.

Set the world spawn

/setworldspawn

Changes the world spawn to wherever the player is standing. If you don’t want to do that, you can also set it to a predetermined location with “/setworldspawn ”

Stop time from changing

/gamerule doDaylightCycle false

This completely turns the daylight cycle off so it’ll always be the current time of day. To reenable the cycle, replace “false” with “true.”

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Spawn a mob

/summon [x] [y] [z]

Summons a mob to a specific location. Remove the “[x] [y] [z]” section at the end to have the mob spawn right on top of you. Just remember if you’re spawning the Wither you’ll need to leg it as fast as possible.

Example: /summon creeper

Teleport

/tp [target player]

Teleports the targeted player to a designated location. And yes, you can indeed teleport a friend into the sky and laugh as their body flails back down to earth.

Example: /tp PCGamer 100 0 10

Alter the in-game time

/time set

Sets the in-game time. Add one of the following numbers onto the end to change the time of day to something else:

0 – Dawn
1000 – Morning
6000 – Midday
12000 – Dusk
18000 – Nightist
Change the weather to something nicer, or worse

/weather

Changes the in-game weather to a different type. I.e. “/weather thunder” would start a thunderstorm. This one’s a must if you’re going after charged creepers. Nobody’s got time to sit around waiting for it to thunder.

When I first walked through the double doors of Great Ormond Street Hospital, it was a little before midnight. The cavernous reception stood before me, with people bustling back and forth. There was a bizarre ambiance: sombre yet fuelled with adrenaline. Parents and guardians shuffled from foot to foot outside, chain-smoking or making calls. My daughter had been rushed in after a car accident and standing within the famous hospital for kids was daunting for me at the age of 24. Even during the day, the hospital can look imposing: a blue-and-white NHS awning sandwiched between monumental architecture, ambulances coming and going, dropping off precious cargo.

My daughter never recovered, but we were there for five days before she died. I watched as kids came and went through inpatient and outpatient wards, being treated for everything from broken bones to life-threatening cancers. Beyond the reception, the wards are decorated with colourful murals to relax the children, and a trip to the roof reveals a wonderful 3D diorama of Pixar’s Finding Nemo for kids to explore between treatments. For a child, the idea of going to hospital for any reason is scary, and companies across the world are doing all they can to help children in this situation.

Teams at GOSH are constantly attempting to break down the fear that can overcome children who will be receiving treatment on-site. After recently introducing an inflatable MRI scanner to help kids adjust to the cramped conditions of the real thing, they’ve gone a step further and built the entire hospital within Minecraft. Now children and parents can tour the hospital virtually, exploring the wards and the different departments they may have to attend. This sounds at first like another story of a vast DIY building project within the Mojang game, but in this case the hospital struck a partnership with Minecraft owner Microsoft to ensure high-quality work and parity with the building.

1
The walkway to the main entrance of Great Ormond Street Hospital, in Minecraft.
“The project took around two months to complete,” says Lee Stott, senior software engineer for Microsoft UK. “As you’d expect, lots of research went into building Great Ormond Street Hospital in Minecraft.” But it wasn’t an easy project to manage. Minecraft blocks are one meter thick, which skews the dimensions of the hospital. “To work around this, each floor is separate and the buttons at the elevators simply teleport the player from the elevator on one floor to another.” Microsoft and a crew from professional Minecraft build team Shapescape were provided with hundreds of images and video clips – and, crucially, they were able to study floor plans which have been constantly updated since before the turn of the 20th century.

“Throughout the project, we worked with Shapescape, a company steeped in heritage amongst Minecraft Content Creators, who have previously recreated places such as Trafalgar Square, Chicago and Florence. We trusted them to build the most realistic experience possible using their team of more than 30 people from 11 different countries,” explains Stott. The project will allow children to explore the hospital on computers and soon also in VR. No section of the hospital is off limits, from Paediatric Intensive Care to the café or the golden chapel. The possibilities this generates are seemingly endless; community staff on-site could set challenges for the kids within the game, or use it as a tool for them to meet others their age in similar situations.

2
The hospital’s main reception.
Academic studies are increasingly showing the benefits that video games and the supporting technology can bring to the healing process. Away from Minecraft, companies are using emerging technology in exciting ways. “Today, hospitals are using games to encourage socialising, create a distraction and even aid in therapy. We’ve seen cases where gaming or virtual reality have enabled patients to focus on those activities while nurses have swapped out bandages covering a severe burn or taken a blood sample,” explains Stott.

In fact, Hermes Pardini Labs in Brazil has been using VR to distract children while being vaccinated. The nurse will fit a VR headset onto the child and follow along with a story on a second monitor, ensuring that their movements and actions mirror those of the magical fairy the child can see. When the time comes to inject the vaccine, the child is being given a ‘powerful shield stone’ which will protect them in life. The study accompanying this form of treatment has seen great success and a decrease in upset children.

Back in the UK, Microsoft is hoping that it will see a similar effect from its work at GOSH, thanks to the accessibility of Minecraft. “Kids at different levels of experience and ability can play together in the same world, and whole families can join each other on adventures or work on collaborative projects,” says Stott.

The possibilities don’t end with recreating Great Ormond Street Hospital, as Naomi Owen, PR for the hospital’s charity, explains: “We see this as a big project and one that can be explored with other hospitals across the world and bring new ways to interact.” Another way Microsoft is helping GOSH is with the Cystic Fibrosis team. Cystic Fibrosis is a progressive, genetic disease that causes persistent lung infections and limits the ability to breathe over time. A defective gene causes mucus to build up within the lungs and other organs, meaning the child has to engage in a ‘clearance exercise’ for 40 minutes per day.

3
An exterior view of GOSH.
Stott talks about how the Microsoft team is helping to alleviate the boredom and mundanity of this daily routine with Minecraft. “In order to help with this aspect of the disease we have been working on a project that we call project Fizzyo, which gamifies the Cystic Fibrosis exercise through custom hardware that turns standard airway clearance devices into a game controller. To further boost participation, we have created a Minecraft mod with custom blocks that allows children to construct their own Fizzyo games inside of Minecraft itself. To do this we’ve introduced two new types of block to Minecraft. The Fizzyo block glows and emits red stone power as the participant carries out their airway clearance exercise.” There is also an ‘exercise tracker block’ which provides an interface to configure and track the exercise’s needs into the game.

“This is all about helping patients and their families at the most challenging time of their lives,” says Owen, “and we hope that this technology leads to more ground-breaking uses to be rolled out across the NHS.”

So how does it feel to walk through this version of Great Ormond Street Hospital? I decided I would walk the route that is burned into my brain from my time there. While many years have passed, and the hospital has evolved, I was able to begin from the entrance, next to the statue of Peter Pan, wander through the brightly lit foyer and ‘ride the elevator’ up to the Seahorse ward. I walked the corridors to PICU, saw the beds lined up under the windows, passed the room where my daughter spent her final moments. And even in the blocky, pixelated view before me, my memories unravelled. I’m not a child who needs treatment, but I am a bereaved parent who finds comfort in those hallways and sees how special this project can be for those who need it.

Theatre Replacement is exploring mothers and sons through the lens of Minecraft.

MINE, the theatre company’s new production, is onstage at Shadbolt Centre for the Arts Nov. 17 through 20.

Using the computer construction game Minecraft as a kind of theatre, a group of gamer-performers from ages 10 to 45 enact different narratives live.

In a rocky and mountainous landscape they tell the story of Grendel’s mother’s brutal act of revenge from the Beowulf saga. They travel to a clearing in the woods to reveal the brief but powerful lessons that Bambi’s mother taught him before that horrible day in the meadow. Somewhere in a nearby city, a cyborg assassin travels back from the year 2029 to 1984 to destroy a woman named Sarah Connor and her son John Connor, who hasn’t been born yet but who will one day save the human race from machines.

“As the performance unfolds, personal stories begin to emerge from the landscape and weave themselves into the narrative,” a press release notes. “Grendel becomes a tweenage kid who just wants to stay in his room and play videogames; Bambi’s mother’s instinct to protect her son becomes a metaphor for a failed family trip to the Grand Canyon; the Terminator story evolves to reveal all the misplaced prophecies a mother places on her son – it’s a lot of pressure, and Mom worries way too much.”

The press release notes that the stories mingle and mash up as MINE both interrogates and recognizes the role technology plays in modern parent-child relationships.

MINE is created and performed by Maiko Yamamoto and her son Hokuto MacDuff, with Conor Wylie, Remy Siu and a group of four local gamer-performers aged 10 to 14.

Dramaturgy is by Carmen Aguirre and design by Leah Weinstein.

(The company also notes that MINE is not an official Minecraft product, nor is it affiliated with Mojang.)

Showtimes are 8 p.m. Tickets range from $15 to $36, available through tickets.shadboltcentre.com or 604-205-3000.

Think of it as all the fun of an outdoor music festival without the crowds—or the outdoors.

In late September, nearly 3,000 people logged on to their Minecraft accounts and got ready to party. The world-building video game has been often used to create larger than life sculptures, buildings, and artworks, but internet-collective Thwip Gang had bigger ideas.

After hosting a Minecraft-based “Birthday Party” for one of their members back in May, the Thwip Gang got to work organizing a full-scale concert completely within the gaming platform. With no more promotion than a few tweets on the organizers’ personal Twitter pages, Coalchella drew in 27,000 listeners over its 8 hours across various streaming platforms. (“Coalchella” because in Minecraft one mines coal, among other minerals. Just go with it.)

The free festival required nothing more than a Minecraft account to attend and drew some big name headliners like ANAMANAGUCHI and Electric Mantis. The musical lineup came together somewhat serendipitously—in an interview with the blog Melting of Age, one of Coalchella’s creators and Thwip Gang collaborator, Umru Rothenberg said, “It was a very random process of just asking whatever friends came to mind or saying ‘this person would be cool’ and checking if anyone was mutuals with them.”

After entering, festival goers arrived at the stage of their choosing — REDBLOCKS or BEDROCKS — and tuned into a livestream on the broadcast audio website Mixlr. Just like IRL, when the performer’s avatar took the stage, the crowd of block people burst into life and the music started. The digital attendees then started dancing and the in-game chat flooded with commentary about the concert.

As if a full-scale two-stage concert “venue” isn’t enough, the Thwip Gang also scattered brands and logos thoughout the virtual site. An IHOb restaurant, a giant Bass Pro Shops Pyramid, and an overhead IKEA blimp were among those featured. Only there was a catch: None of the brands knew their logos were being used for the event — they were mostly plastered around Minecraft as cultural touchstones.

Ad Age reached out to some of the brands referenced in the festival. Stephanie Peterson, head of communications and merchandise at IHOP said, “We’re thrilled that our fans got in on the fun and took it to a new level, creating an epic virtual IHOb restaurant in Minecraft.” A spokesperson for Bass Pro Shops added, “Virtual worlds are interesting but our primary goal is to inspire everyone to get outside and connect with nature.”

At this stage at least, the advertisements are mostly tongue-in-cheek—but having actual sponsor messages is not completely out of the question—and now they have proof-of-concept.

“What will always be most important to me is…that [brands] are not influencing, openly or otherwise, what I am experiencing in any way,” says co-organizer Robin Boehlen, “We can coexist with brands without them becoming controlling.”

Co-organizer Braden Wolfe adds “preserving that [grassroots] presence is really important to what we’re trying to accomplish; creating a universally accessible music event free of region or monetary restriction.”

None of the artists actually paid (or were paid) to play. “All of our impressions were purely organic and the results are a testament to the importance of putting forward unique, inclusive ideas,” explains Max Schramp, one of the festival’s organizers.

Here’s a sample of some of the buzz surrounding the event:

Rothenberg was thrilled by the response and contributed the success of the event to the Internet’s ability to bring people together, both physically and virtually. “Most of us grew up with the internet as a major part of our lives and personally some of my best friends are people I met on Soundcloud and Twitter. An event like this where so many of us from all over the world could hang out together alongside our favorite artists in a virtual space is a literal dream for this kind of community.”

Artifact, the Dota 2 digital card-collecting game, is still on target for its launch date at the end of November, but its planned beta period is going to be shorter.

An invitation-only somewhat public beta had been planned for this month. Users who either got a code or signed up to request access are saying (via PC Gamer) they have gotten emails saying the beta is now on Nov. 19, 2018; Artifact is due to launch in full on Steam on Nov. 28, 2018.

“We have added Artifact to your [Steam] account but we have a bit more work to do before letting everyone in,” said an email in a screenshot posted in the game’s subreddit. “Right now we’re planning for that to happen on November 19.”

Artifact got its first public showing at PAX West in Seattle. Fans have gotten beta keys at events this summer (such as The International tournament) and from Valve community relations representatives over social media.

It is currently in a closed beta right now with much tighter restriction on access. The game will launch on Linux, Mac and Windows PC for $19.99. A version for Android and iOS devices will come sometime later in 2019.

In 1998, Disney launched the original DisneyQuest. The five-story, 100,000-square-foot space at Walt Disney World housed an arcade and remote-controlled cars, but it also contained some of Disney’s earliest work in virtual reality.

With Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride, players zoomed down a virtual recreation of Agrabah’s streets. With Ride the Comix, players lived out what it would be like to jump into a superhero comic book. Other attractions — like the cars — weren’t strictly VR, but many dabbled in augmented reality.

These were elaborate experiments, with hardware costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and headsets referred to internally as “gator vision,” due to the front sticking out like an alligator’s head. The headsets were so heavy they had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the high-end Silicon Graphics computers used for the software quickly raised the costs.

“At the time it was very expensive to do virtual reality anything,” says former designer Aaron Pulkka. “Since Disney was willing to apply the resources to buy the very best supercomputers to run [VR] and to build, internally, the very best head-mounted display for comfort […] it seemed like it was a very unique place to actually explore this space that was otherwise not something you could do at home.”

DisneyQuest was about more than just virtual reality, but for many who worked there, it presented an opportunity to work on these projects that felt ahead of their time.

“We knew the equipment was too expensive to be practical,” says one former employee who asked not to be named because their current employer hasn’t permitted them to do interviews, though they are no longer at Disney. “But the goal was to buy our way into the future, to learn about VR 10-plus years before everyone else.”

WHAT IT WAS
It’s important here to distinguish between “DisneyQuest,” the buildings and initiative, and “DisneyQuest,” the rides and attractions that went inside them. While not technically responsible for DisneyQuest itself, Disney had created a VR studio that ended up designing the majority of these attractions, with outside contractors designing out the rest, and Imagineering ultimately installing them.

Jesse Schell joined Disney the VR studio in 1995 as a show designer after seeing the initial Aladdin ride that was installed at Epcot Center in Disney World. “The VR studio was very focused on creating virtual reality attractions for the parks,” Schell says. “That was very much the vision.”

Another group within the company — headed up by Joe DiNunzio as strategic project lead — had a different idea, however. The pitch was simple: a chain of location-based entertainment centers in every major city. And, according to Schell, they wanted the studio’s VR work to play a significant role.

“They were pitching that, and they were looking at what we were doing with Aladdin as a kind of prototype to prove out the technical effectiveness and the consumer appeal of this sort of thing,” Schell says. “These two things were sort of going on in conjunction.”

MAKING A MOUNTAIN OUT OF A MOLEHILL
DisneyQuest’s design, described by many speaking for this story as a “theme park in a box,” meant that space was at a premium. These spaces could only ever house so much, relative to Disney World’s 40 square miles. VR meant each ride had less of a footprint than other attractions, so by staying small, VR allowed the DisneyQuest model to imitate the functions of much larger rides.

“Without [VR], it would have been hard to imagine a scenario under which you could create those kind of immersive experiences,” DiNunzio says. Larger attractions at Walt Disney World or Disneyland can handle thousands of people an hour, but the smaller space of something like DisneyQuest just can’t deal with that sort of throughput without using things like VR.

“Disney, in its park division, builds these giant things, but it takes a continent or half a continent to support each one,” says Joe Garlington, interactive creative director for DisneyQuest. “And that means if you’re not above a certain level of affluence, you may not be able to see it, or may not be able to see it very frequently — may have to save up for half a lifetime to go to one of the parks if you live in Boise or Chicago or someplace where you’re not near a park.”

So, the question was, could a smaller version of the Disney experience be created? Was there a way to distill the magic, to capture that lightning, in a building-sized bottle? “Theme parks are about immersions in stories,” Garlington says. Traditionally, that’s accomplished through scale. Given the limitations with space and time, the team decided this immersion would have to come through interactivity instead. Which meant it would need some pretty slick tech.

“The idea at DisneyQuest was to use absolutely cutting-edge technology and hide it as deeply as possible,” says Larry Gertz says, the executive show producer for DisneyQuest. In other words, Gertz’s job was to preserve the magic of Disney by designing around bulky or otherwise unsightly gadgets in such a way that folks wouldn’t even realize it.

Though the vision of the VR studio was initially to create location-based attractions specifically for the parks, the small group — Schell estimates there were between 15 and 25 staff at any given time — quickly fell in line with DisneyQuest’s mandate of regional destinations. “Even though there was still kind of a desire to find ways to do things for the parks, the rallying cry became, ‘Hey, let’s make DisneyQuest succeed,’” Schell says. “So basically the whole VR studio was thrown behind the DisneyQuest effort.”

The idea was that Disney’s Imagineering division, which included the VR studio, would create attractions that would appear in each DisneyQuest location, with rides swapping out every couple years. So DisneyQuest Chicago would look much like DisneyQuest Philadelphia — which was planned but never went anywhere beyond a hole in the ground — and it meant that there’d be no need to create and build brand new physical rides; much of that effort could simply be duplicated via software.

“THE REAL MAGIC OF THAT MOMENT WAS WHEN YOU HAD THE 3D GLASSES ON AND YOU STEPPED ON THE BOAT, AND IT FELT LIKE YOU WERE ON A BOAT ON WATER BECAUSE OF THE PNEUMATIC MOTION BASE”
“Theme parks are about mass production of entertainment,” Garlington says. In other words, he says, they are about getting butts in seats.” If DisneyQuest was to be a theme park in a box, one major problem was figuring out how to do “mass” on a smaller scale — which is where the interactivity of the rides came in. But that caused its own share of problems. “Interactivity is code for personalization, and mass personalization sounds like an oxymoron. So how do you make it not be one? That was what we were exploring in DisneyQuest.”

As an example, Garlington points to the virtual Pirates of the Caribbean ride — a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) attraction and the one and only major attraction swap to ever occur at DisneyQuest when it replaced a Hercules ride Garlington “hated with a passion.” Sure, Pirates had the usual trappings and theming, like wallpaper and a couple set pieces, but the actual ride itself couldn’t possible mimic the size and scale of a normal attraction. The designers had to do something else.

It used a series of screens and projectors to produce 3D in a manner inverted to what might be considered traditional. Specifically, it gave the appearance of depth rather than having images jump out at the viewer. But Garlington and crew went a couple steps further.

“The real magic of that moment was when you had the 3D glasses on and you stepped on the boat, and it felt like you were on a boat on water because of the pneumatic motion base, and you looked out into what should have been a tiny booth,” Garlington says, “… all of a sudden you were out on a giant ocean, there were ships, you were fighting ships, and the virtual world that we put you physically into was the immersive tool that we used.”

The ride allowed four in the group, but there were six guns. This meant there was always one captain and up to three gunners. The design intentionally had folks move across the deck — which was moving — by getting them to focus on one side before having ships come at the other. All of this conspired to make folks feel like they were really there, according to Garlington.

This sort of trickery would have been relatively easily repeated across installations. But when DisneyQuest Chicago faltered after opening, the plans for the double-digit number of locations were dropped. It wasn’t that Chicago wasn’t making money; it simply wasn’t making enough to be viable.

SO LONG, CHICAGO
In 1999, Disney launched the second DisneyQuest in downtown Chicago, the first of what it hoped would be 30 “location-based entertainment destinations” outside Disney’s parks. In addition to typical Disney branding from films like Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin and Hercules, the location held a number of virtual reality, or otherwise augmented, rides. That included the likes of Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride, CyberSpace Mountain, Virtual Jungle Cruise, Ride the Comix, Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for Buccaneer Gold and other physical rides. The Aladdin ride and Ride the Comix are the two that fit the strict definition of virtual reality, but the folks at Disney’s VR Studio had their fingerprints all over these experiences even when they didn’t specifically design their concepts.

Just over two years later, the Chicago installation closed in 2001. Reports at the time cited a lack of broad family appeal as well as the theme park-like payment model — too expensive as a one-time fee with no way for à la carte entry — as reasons for the closure. Disney never opened another DisneyQuest.

“We have concluded that the expected returns on the investment required to achieve DisneyQuest’s cutting-edge technology standard in a stand-alone environment will not meet the company’s financial requirements for this type of business,” Randall Baumberger, senior vice president of Disney Regional Entertainment (the umbrella under which DisneyQuest operated), said at the time of DisneyQuest Chicago’s closure. In other words, Disney thought it’d be a lot more successful than it was.

Sixteen years later, the original DisneyQuest location closed. It ceased operating the night of July 2, 2017, to make way for an NBA-affiliated attraction. The building that once housed DisneyQuest was eventually demolished months later.

This sort of theme park slotting, with old rides or buildings making way for new attractions, isn’t uncommon, but this specific instance marked the death of several early VR rides and experiences — likely permanently. Some may be shelved, sold in parts, or just plain scrapped, but the end result is the same: They’re gone.

Why DisneyQuest failed exactly, why it didn’t make the magic amount of money for there to be a whole chain of them around today, isn’t officially known. Disney declined to answer any questions about the matter. There’s even a burgeoning industry of location-based VR kiosks for malls and movie theaters right now. But some of those interviewed offered their own opinions as to why it didn’t work out.

“THE WHOLE ATTITUDE OF THE COMPANY CHANGED”
“The business clearly failed, because it didn’t thrive,” DiNunzio says. “It didn’t expand to 10 and then 25 units. It didn’t deliver profit targets that were part of the plan. So, you know, on any reasonable measurement, it did not meet its objectives.”

But people liked it, he said, and the concept was strong. Even so, enough people just didn’t visit for whatever reason. Because he left before Chicago closed, he isn’t privy to the exact problems or decision-making process.

Several people speaking for this story blame the corporate attitude toward the project. “The whole attitude of the company changed,” Gertz says. The trend of location-based entertainment died down, and the interest in that trend from Disney management died with it.

The Chicago location closed, the rest were nixed before they moved into any sort of production, and the one single remaining DisneyQuest in Florida continued to exist in a limbo of sorts where Disney never added anything innovative or on the same level as its original lineup. Once Disney decided not to move forward, convincing management to continue to make new rides was all but impossible, because it only made sense financially if they were in multiple locations.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IT’S OVER
Gertz last visited in 2010. “It was sort of sad because it was well-worn, and nothing had been updated — they did replace the carpet,” he says. “It was still operating nicely, people were still having a good time, but the designer always looks at it with pristine eyes.” Now it’s gone too, and exactly what happens to the remains of what was pioneering VR work isn’t clear. Even so, the tech was showing its age by the time the Florida location closed. “You could do more robust imagery today with an Xbox,” Gertz says.

“Some things I think get discarded, some things get put in an archive, and who knows,” Schell said. There’s really no telling where the attractions might end up. For example, he previously bought bits of the remote-controlled cars from DisneyQuest on eBay after it was dismantled.

“When Chicago DisneyQuest got dismantled, for example, I know there were people who made sure to collect and save a lot of the pieces and parts for posterity/decoration,” Schell said when we spoke before the closure of the final location, “and goodness knows what will happen when they close Florida DisneyQuest.”

DisneyQuest – Buzz Lightyear flying above the floor
A look inside DisneyQuest Larry Gertz/Disney
That doesn’t mean that DisneyQuest’s footprint at Disney is completely gone, however. The perspective and the technology and the approach that was used was applied subsequently to other venues, though none of the rides were duplicated elsewhere.

“The legacy that [DisneyQuest and the team that built it] provided to the Disney theme parks is the beginning of things like Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters and Midway Mania and other interactive attractions that got implemented in the theme parks,” DiNunzio says. “A lot of that came from the team that developed the attractions for DisneyQuest.”

DisneyQuest might be gone, but it certainly isn’t forgotten by the people who made it what it was. They’ve moved on to other jobs and ideas, but both Gertz and Garlington think the world of what they created together with more than 300 other people.

“I was with Disney for 20 years,” Gertz says. “In that 20 years, I never worked on a project that was more exciting, more creative, more innovative, with a better team, with a better attitude, and with an exceptionally wonderful outcome. It was far and away the best project I have ever worked on, in part because of the results of the project, but mostly because of the incredible talent, dedication, and congeniality of the team. We are still friends, and I think that says something.”

It was a big gamble, and it didn’t work. Not all gambles do. Disney continues to experiment, and Garlington specifically points to the new Star Wars attractions as effectively pursuing the spirit of what made DisneyQuest special all those years ago.

“We felt like we were inventing a new world,” Garlington says. “You want to slay dragons; you don’t want to step on cockroaches, right? And it felt like we were out there slaying a dragon.”

Most of us know how expensive music festivals can be, and that’s seemingly the thinking behind the hilariously named Coalchella event, a free-admittance music festival hosted in a Minecraft server. Where better to host a free music festival than in the world’s second-most popular game?

Many artists and organizers made the event possible

After a successful 450-guest birthday party for a Minecrafter who goes by Max, his friend Sam, came up with the name Coalchella, a funny spin on the name of the ultra-famous Coachella yearly festival in California. Sam, along with the help of another friend named Robin, organized the get-together as well as coordinating with the many DJ’s and musicians who participated by lending their talents to the occasions soundtrack.

“Reaching out to artists was based almost entirely on including people in our communities instead of focusing on trying to get the largest names.” —Robin

Despite the careful organization of the crew, difficulties still arose. As many as 900 guests showed up to the event within the first few minutes—twice as many as the entire guest count of the birthday party it was based on. The team didn’t expect such a large volume, so, expectedly the server suffered the consequences.

Luckily for them, the folks from the famous Hypixel server lent their expert hands and moved the event to a new server spun up during the event. In the end, the participants had fun. As for the Coalchella 2019,

“The only thing to do now is to make it even bigger. We have solid plans for another event early next year, and when it happens, you will hear about it.”

Will you be participating next year? Let us know what you thought of the event down below.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is as impressive as it is anomalous. The game contains very little that hasn’t been done first by others, but it approaches those features in a way that’s so polished and unique that it doesn’t really matter if they’re particularly original. It also lacks a single-player mode, marking the first ever modern COD game to strip itself of a story campaign — and it’s become more focused and fun as a result. Black Ops 4 could have been a mismatched jumble of ripped off game elements, but developer Treyarch has instead reinvented the franchise in a way that may have lasting effects on how people play Call of Duty well into the future.

To be fair, the narrative around COD was one of lowered expectations. For a while, it’s seemed like publisher Activision and the small army of developers it employs to make COD games each year had simply run out of good ideas. The series remains a best-seller as new installments continue to make gobs of money from its diehard fanbase. But starting roughly around 2014’s Advanced Warfare, COD began to stagnate creatively, forcing its creators to turn to increasingly unrealistic and far-out ideas. Jetpacks and exosuits? Sure. Cybernetics and AI? They went there. Space warfare? Why not.

CALL OF DUTY STAGNATED CREATIVELY YEARS AGO, WHEN ITS CREATORS RAN OUT OF GOOD IDEAS
By the time Activision announced that last year’s entry would return to WWII — after a particularly vocal online backlash against the sci-fi Infinite Warfare — it seemed like the franchise had hit a dead end. Meanwhile, innovation in online multiplayer games was changing everything.

Bungie’s Destiny opened up all new avenues for treating shooters like persistent, online services. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege delivered unprecedented levels of strategy and customization through its use of a robust class system. Blizzard’s Overwatch completely rethought the competitive team-based shooter, creating a global phenomenon and e-sport almost right out of the gate. And perhaps most importantly, PUBG and Fortnite helped establish battle royale as the new, hottest genre in the industry.

And now there’s Black Ops 4, a game that takes elements from all of the above and remixes them in a clever way to create the most cohesive, forward-looking COD game in a long time. It’s still very much COD at its core: the game is brutally fast and overtly militaristic, and it’s designed solely for the hyperactive teenager in all of us. (Sometimes it feels like it’s primarily for those that are literally hyperactive teenagers.) But setting aside its aesthetics and the untouched core game design, Black Ops 4 is a creative and fascinating deviation from the formula. It is no surprise that the title is topping the Twitch charts in its first week, giving mainstays Fortnite and League of Legends a run for their money and keeping the competitive community in thrall. Casual players seem to be returning in droves, too.

The mode feels vibrant and dynamic, and just playing a handful of hours this past weekend was enough to hook me in a way that feels reminiscent of my first few Fortnite and PUBG sessions. The big difference I’m seeing with Blackout — and what I think will help it stay relevant to a uniquely large audience that doesn’t typically like battle royale games — is the skill gap and the necessary tools it takes to win.

PUBG matches are long, arduous, and can end in a flash if someone gets off a couple lucky shots from half a mile away. You can often die without ever seeing it coming, and in situations where you simply couldn’t have done much of anything about it. Many newcomers to the game, even when it first launched last year, found it hard to secure just one kill per game, let alone make it to the final circle and win. And because the matches are so long, practicing is hard and improving your play takes serious time and effort.

Fortnite, on the other hand, now relies almost entirely on your ability to build structures and sharpen your aim until it’s lightning-fast and accurate. Epic continues to add zany new items like a structure-destroying ATV, deployable fortresses, and invisibility stones to mix it up. Yet unless you master the core skills of building, quick aiming, and maneuverability, you’re unlikely to ever win a Fortnite game as the average player is much more skilled than they were six or even three months ago.

BLACKOUT HAS A MUCH MORE ACCOMMODATING LEARNING CURVE THAN PUBG AND FORTNITE
Blackout is a different story. Sure, the best of the best will always be able to aim better, move faster, and out-maneuver their enemies. But the playing field feels more level, and not just because the game mode just came out. By its very nature, combat in a COD game is more flattened — it’s easier to kill and get killed in almost every situation. That gives less skilled players an opportunity to beat opponents and even secure victories by playing smart and getting lucky.

I can of course see the player base getting better at moving around the map, using strategic positions, and relying on the most effective firearms as the mode matures. But the learning curve here is much more inviting. Blackout is like playing a standard first-person shooter, but in a different context and at bigger scale. That’s a whole lot easier to manage than building structures out of thin air or maneuvering an environment for 20 minutes without seeing a single opponent.

There’s also a lot of room for the mode to grow. Treyarch plans to add new modes, vehicles, and items that shake up the combat and change how players get around. Even right now, players are finding ways to take out opponents with basketballs, the tomahawk projectile, and by crashing vehicles into another. Over time, there’s a good chance Blackout can become the more polished and accessible version of PUBG, yet with Fortnite’s willingness and capability to constantly evolve.

While Blackout has certainly dominated the narrative around Black Ops 4, the standard multiplayer remains largely intact and refreshing. Now, players choose not just between a set of custom loadouts, but also special subclasses that grant you abilities and a more powerful ultimate-style ability, like you’d see in Destiny or Overwatch, that charges up over time. These existed in Black Ops 3, but Treyarch is leaning harder into them here, adding new specialists and letting a lot of the late-match combat revolve around strategic ability use.

Those abilities also have heightened importance considering game modes are now more objective-based and not simply about who kills more of the enemy team. Control, Hardpoint, Heist, Search and Destroy, and Domination outnumber the traditional kill-or-be-killed modes, of which there are just three. It’s clear Treyarch is encouraging players to try the objective-based modes by giving them prominent placement in the featured list. Attached to the mode is the same progression system we’ve come to expect from COD, but with even more unlockable cosmetics, weapon skins, and other vanity items to keep players hooked and fixated on goals and milestones, including the ever desirable prestige emblems you get from maxing out your level and starting over anew.

A lot of the changes you’ll recognize as the influence of Rainbox Six Siege, with little bits of Destiny and Overwatch sprinkled in. But no one element feels so prevalent that it dilutes the core COD experience, which is still about running around as fast as you can and racking up a high kill count while (hopefully) achieving an objective for your team. Players who’ve liked past COD games, especially the recent ones, will still find this one enjoyable, while those lapsed players that maybe haven’t played since the Modern Warfare or Black Ops 2 days should be able to acclimate just fine with a few hours of practice.

IT’S HARD TO THINK COD FANS WILL PURCHASE ANOTHER GAME IN THE SERIES UNLESS IT HAS BATTLE ROYALE
Rounding out the experience is a revamped Zombies mode, which sends wave after wave of AI-controlled undead at you and a team of strangers or friends. There are now two distinct storylines to Zombies, Aether and Chaos, that have different maps and characters, and it’s clear the mode is designed to stand in for a traditional campaign as the story is fleshed out through dialogue and secret cutscenes locked behind Easter eggs. It’s a far cry from the Hollywood-style stories COD has delivered in the past, but Zombies should, for most people, get the job done and scratch the single-player itch.

It’s too early to tell how big Blackout will become, or what the future of COD will look like next year, when it’s developer Infinity Ward’s turn to release the next entry as part of the franchise’s three-year development cycle. But Black Ops 4 will have an undeniable and outsized impact on where this series and the genre it dominates goes in the future, if only in cementing the battle royale mode as a must-have for any big-budget online shooter.

We might see the return of a story campaign next year, while Zombies fades into the background until it’s Treyarch’s time to shine again. But I can’t see COD fans eagerly buying another entry unless it does everything and more that this game has accomplished, Blackout included. For a franchise that’s older than many of its players and hasn’t stopped annually releasing a game since the PS2 era, that’s quite the accomplishment. And while Black Ops 4 might not be a Fortnite killer, it’s certainly proved that the sluggish, risk-averse shooter industry can still take a big leap when it wants to.

Normally priced at $79.99, you can get a pair for $55.99 with the offer code EMCEPRR37 used at checkout. At the time of writing, Newegg offers a few different color options to choose from, including blue, gray, red, or the red and blue controller combo that comes with some consoles.

Picking up an extra set of Joy-Con is something that most Switch owners will eventually do, or have already done (at full price, no less), and discounts on the controllers are rare and rarely this good. The Switch celebrates couch co-op and playing with or against friends, so you’ll be glad to have a few extra Joy-Con laying around once Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launches in December.

Updated at 2:22PM ET, October 22nd: Newegg’s stock of Joy-Con controllers has sold out, and a company spokesperson shared with The Verge that the short-lived offer code has expired.

The Minecraft universe is set to expand once again. Today at Minecon, developer Mojang revealed a new dungeon-crawler set in the blocky universe. Called Minecraft: Dungeons, the new experience is described as “an all-new action-adventure game inspired by classic dungeon crawlers, where you’ll constantly discover new weapons and items that will help you defeat a ruthless swarm of new-and-nasty mobs. You’ll fight or flee through canyons, swamps, and — of course — mines!”

Dungeons is, naturally, set in the Minecraft universe, but it looks like it will offer a more structured experience than the sandbox building game. You can explore solo or play with up to four friends. It seems like a pretty natural extension of the best-selling Minecraft, which is no stranger to spinoffs, including the narrative-focused Minecraft: Story Mode. Minecraft: Dungeons is expected to launch next year on PC.

“Minecraft” launched nearly seven years ago, and with 144 million copies sold, still shows no sign of slowing down both in terms of sales and development.

During this weekend’s Minecon Earth 2018 event, Mojang announced the coming of another major update to the game.

The Village and Pillage update will populate the villages of the game’s Overworld with a slew of new and classic villagers. And to keep things interesting, the update will also deliver “pillagers” and their beasts to attack those freshly housed villagers.

The villages and those in it will all look and act differently depending on what biome they’re located in, said Jens Bergensten, lead developer at studio Mojang. The game will also add a few new professions for villagers.

“The pillage part of the update is that the village will be under threat from a new group of villagers, evil villagers,” he said. “They will raid in groups with pillagers and a new monster like a new miniboss.”

The major update is set for a release next year, but this holiday Mojang will be adding stray cats and pandas to the game. Pandas, Bergensten said, will bring with them bamboo forests and the ability to harvest bamboo and create scaffolding with it.

“We recorded real pandas in China to help create these,” he said.

Apple TV’s version of “Minecraft” will no longer receive updates or support, The Verge reported Thursday.

Sadly, Microsoft pulled support on Sept. 24, stating in a pop-up message on the Apple TV version of the “Minecraft” app that “We’re grateful to the Apple TV community for their support but we need to reallocate resources to the platforms that our players use the most.”

That few appeared to notice until now seems to prove that Microsoft made the right call.

For anyone who already purchased the game for the Apple TV, they can still play but won’t receive the support that other versions have. As such, Microsoft is issuing full refunds for anyone who purchased the Apple TV version in the last 90 days.

“Minecraft” is still a wildly popular title on other platforms, particularly among young players. The game could be seeing its first signs of diminishing popularity, though, as the playerbase for “Minecraft” actually experienced its first decrease this year, according to market research firm Interpret.

“‘Minecraft’s’ share of all gaming time by kids age 6-12 has dropped 5% since [2017], although it still commands a hefty 13% of total game time,” according to Interpret.

This could be in part to the increasing popularity of “Roblox,” which also attracts young players who like to build games and play already-created games within the “Roblox” community.

Plus, the ever-increasing popularity of battle royale game “Fortnite” can’t be discarded, which has become so popular with young players that some parents are even hiring “Fortnite” tutors to help their kids improve.