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.

As for what’s next with Minecraft, the game today arrived on Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft’s subscription service for the Xbox One. There’s also a movie currently in the works as well at Warner Bros.

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.

The 10th birthday celebrations are due to bring a pair of “big announcements” on Friday the 17th. Mojang have already slammed online a free browser-based version of an early alphatoo. Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson, who sold the game and Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014, is not invited to the festivities cos the hateful things he says online are somewhat incompatible with Minecraft’s family-friendly image.

Looking to meet available and heavily-armed men in your area for hot action… and maybe more? Check out Counter-Strike:…

Ah, Portal jokes – only 11 years past their prime.

Clean energy growth has reversed after a twenty-year trend upwards.

“Clean energy growth failed to increase year-over-year for the first time in nearly 20 years, a landmark report revealed this week. The finding puts the possibility of achieving the planet’s climate change goals into jeopardy, as annual growth currently stands at just a fraction what is ultimately needed.”

The first son of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry has been revealed to the world.

“Today, the world got its first look at Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, son of Meghan Markle, actress, philanthropist, the Duchess of Sussex, and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex. The young lad is 7th in line for the throne, and while the Sussexes have decided to not give him any formal titles, once his grandfather becomes King of England, he’ll be formally a prince.”

Uber drivers have protested the company’s policies on the eve of Uber’s IPO.

“Just days ahead of Silicon Valley’s most hyped mega-IPO, a group of a several hundred Uber drivers gathered in front of the company’s San Francisco headquarters and took over the street in a protest demanding fair pay, benefits, and greater transparency from the rideshare giant.”

Minecraft Classic has launched to celebrate the company’s ten-year anniversary.

“Video games are regularly patched, tweaked, and modified to the point where the original experience is lost for better or worse. For Minecraft $26.95 at Amazon, that original experience is being resurrected to help celebrate the game’s 10th anniversary. Posting on the Minecraft website, Tom Stone, creative communications assistant at developer Mojang AB, announced the launch of Minecraft Classic. It’s the original game, which provided players with, “just 32 blocks to build with, all the original bugs, and an (inter)face only a mother could love.”

New York may be the first state to ban declawing cats.

“A veterinary procedure criticized for being inhumane could soon be outlawed altogether in one state. As NBC New York reports, a bill that would ban declawing cats has been approved by one committee in the New York State Assembly, but it still has a few more rounds of voting to go before it becomes law.”

Netflix’s The Last Summer is a pretty boring coming-of-age movie. 

“The final moments of senior year and that summer after high school graduation have been the subject of more than a few coming-of-age films: Can’t Hardly Wait, Dazed and Confused, Say Anything, etc. It’s a time for goodbyes to old friends, last ditch hometown flings, and the crumbling security of adolescence as decisions about the future creep closer, forcing teens of a certain age into finding themselves… or whatever. Netflix’s latest entry into the post-high school, rom-com genre, aptly titled The Last Summer, follows a group of recent grads throughout, you guessed it, the last summer before college in an anthology focusing on the individual experiences of several Chicago teens. Mostly, it’s pretty boring!”

If you’re getting tired of being confined to the world of Minecraft, Microsoft and Mojang have some good news for you. This summer, Minecraft is entering the real-world thanks to augmented reality, mobile devices, and the Minecraft Earth app.

As the FAQ explains, Minecraft Earth is Minecraft, but as it appears in the real-world thanks to the use of augmented reality. Think Pokemon Go, but on a much larger scale and the with ability to “build creations with friends and place them in the real world at life-size.” Essentially, we’re being offered the Minecraft version of your location, be that at home, school, or wherever you choose to frequent.

Minecraft Earth will be made available for iOS and Android because those platforms make the most sense for augmented reality. To begin with, a closed beta will run on both platforms and starts in the summer. Hundreds of thousands of people will be allowed to play, but you must be at least 18 to participate. Simply sign up and cross your fingers if you want to take part.

Microsoft is giving no hint as to how long the closed beta will last, but it has confirmed Minecraft Earth will be free to play and also free of loot boxes. So expect the same Minecraft experience you enjoy today, but with a real-world, augmented reality twist.

Clearly, Minecraft Earth is the next big phase of the world’s expansion. However, last week the original Minecraft was made available to play in web browsers. You can therefore play Minecraft Classic while waiting for Earth to launch.

Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo have released a punchy Dead or Alive 6 launch trailer to celebrate its release today on PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox One.

Dead or Alive 6 is supposed to tone down the series’ emphasis on fan service when it comes the design of its female combatants, although it doesn’t seem like much has changed in this respect. The fighters do sweat an awful lot in the game, though, which is new, right?

Team Ninja’s latest brawler also features a story mode, and there’s a robust lineup of characters to pick from, including fan favourites and newcomers alike. Oh, and there’s a stage in the game that features an actual Kraken, for some reason.

Dead or Alive 6 is out now.

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.

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.

We’re expecting many more Minecraft announcements next week, when the game hits its 10th anniversary proper. Yesterday, Microsoft teased a new mobile Minecraft AR game, which looks similar to Pokémon Go.

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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.

Speaking of the event, Microsoft has confirmed Minecraft creator Notch will not be included in the celebration – due to his increasingly controversial “comments and opinions”.

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.

The post Enjin set to bring blockchain to Minecraft appeared first on Coin Rivet.

Ten years ago today, Minecraft made its debut into the world, marking a significant milestone in the history of video games. Just as we can’t imagine the gaming industry without this universally-loved title, which has now sold 176 million copies worldwide, we also can’t imagine what the video industry would look like without all those MinecraftYouTube videos.

Minecraft-related content has been a cornerstone to the game’s success, driving around 436B views to date on YouTube alone! In celebration of the game’s tenth anniversary, we looked at some of these videos to discover which creators, publishers, and brands are driving the conversation around Minecraft.

The Top Minecraft YouTube Videos of All Time

Minecraft and YouTube Are the Perfect Pair for Success

YouTube has been the go-to destination for content related to the game almost since the game’s inception. In 2015, for example, the game was one of the most-searched terms on YouTube and boasted the #1 spot across the top 20 game franchises on the platform.

While the popularity of Fortnite videos seems to have given Minecraft a run for its money, the sandbox-style building and adventure game is still the #1 game on YouTube.  In 2018 alone, around 311K user-generated Minecraft YouTube videos pulled in a total of 45.1B views.

Here are some other stats we discovered about the deep connection between YouTube and Minecraft:

• 5M Minecraft-related videos have been uploaded to YouTube to date.
• On average, these videos pulled in a 58.2K 30-day view count (V30) and a 30-day engagement rate (ER30) of 7.1x, which is seven times the normal engagement rate across YouTube!
• Longer Minecraft videos attract more views: clips of 10-15 minutes pulled in the most views (123B to date), with content that’s 20 minutes or longer pacing not far behind (114B views to date).
• The top five countries by views include the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Spain.
• Influencers have uploaded the most Minecraft-related YouTube videos at 4.2M. Brands claim 7532K videos, while media and entertainment companies have uploaded 9806K.

YouTube + Minecraft = one of the best matches in the entire online video world. Anyone can film their gameplay of the title and upload to the platform, while YouTube benefits from all the traffic and advertising on the clips. And of course, this symbiotic relationship gives Minecraft owner Microsoft plenty of free attention on its beloved game.

The Award for the Most Minecraft Videos Goes to Influencers

When a power trend occurs in online video, influencers are some of the first to pick up on it. And Minecraft was certainly one of the first power trends in all of digital media.

As noted above, creators and influencers have uploaded the most Minecraft-related videos to date on YouTube. Among these, four out of the top ten most-watched clips were animated song parodies by popular gaming YouTuber CaptainSparklez.

The video with the most views of all time across influencers is Sparklez’s parody of Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love,” which pulled in 176M views and 1.8M engagements:

The creator with the most overall views is PopularMMOs with 11.7B total views on content ranging from let’s plays, arena battles, and mod showcases. DanTDM is the second most-watched Minecraft creator to date with 8.5B views, while family-favorite stampylonghead comes in third with 5.9B views.

This data is only the tip of the iceberg. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that without the support of influencers, Minecraft wouldn’t be one of the top-selling games of all time. A note to game developers, brands, and media companies alike: never underestimate the power of a fanbase and what it can do to drive interest (and sales).

Brands and Media Companies Join in on the Minecraft Fun

While influencers are clearly leading the charge in regards to Minecraft YouTube videos, brands and media companies have also contributed their fair share of content. Their 12.3K videos on YouTube have garnered an all-time total of 4.4B views.

Fittingly, the company with the most views on YouTube is the official Minecraft channel itself. At 833M total views, the channel boasts seven of the top ten most-watched videos across brands and media publishers of all time. Minecraft’s most-viewed clip is the game’s official trailer from 2011, which has 139M views (in fact, almost all of the channel’s top videos are trailers or update announcements):

Some of the other brands which showed up in our search included retailer J!NX Clothing(64.9M views), Telltale Games (79.7M views), and LEGO (241M views). All of these companies created Minecraft YouTube videos introducing their own products themed after the popular game title, and in turn, benefited from millions of views and reach.

As for media companies hopping on board the Minecraft train, we’d be remiss by not mentioning two of the top-performing channels of all time: gaming property LetsPlay and its parent company Rooster Teeth.

The former has pulled in the most media company views and engagements to date at 492M views and 7.9M engagements, while the latter claims 369M views and 5M engagements. Rooster Teeth has been making game-related content since before YouTube even existed, so it makes sense that some of the company’s most-watched videos are on its Minecraft content.

Other media companies pulling in millions of views and high engagement rates on Minecraft YouTube videos include animation and cartoon company Mineworks (294M views and 2.2M engagements), gaming media and news company IGN (59.4M views and 632K engagements), and entertainment channel Smosh Games (169M views and 2.9M engagements).

Here’s to More Minecraft in Online Video

Of course, the breadth of Minecraft’s impact in the online video world doesn’t end here. Gamers around the world upload or stream live content related to the title on other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitch on a daily basis.

But this sampling of Minecraft-themed content on YouTube alone is enough to see exactly why the game is not just so well-recognized and widely-played, but also why it has become eternally ingrained in global pop culture.

Happy tenth anniversary, Minecraft! We can’t wait to see what the next ten years hold.

The Minecraft team at Microsoft has finally taken the wraps off a new mobile augmented reality game. It’s called Minecraft Earth, and it’s going to bring an augmented reality (or AR) Minecraft world to your Android or iOS smartphone later this year.

I was among the lucky few to try an early version of Minecraft Earth. Here’s what I learned.

Minecraft Earth requires augmented reality

Pokémon Go is often called an AR game, but its blend of the virtual and real is light and optional. Yes, you can see Pokémon appear in the world through your camera, yet you also have the option to turn that off entirely. Augmented reality is not a requirement.

Minecraft Earth is different. The game requires use of augmented reality because it always maps in-game elements to the real world. An overworld map based off Open Street Maps data exists, but when it comes time to see Minecraft come to life, you have no fallback option. You must use your camera, and you must hold your phone up to play.

The overworld will look familiar

Minecraft Earth lets you explore a virtual world built on Open Street Maps data of our real world. The graphics are given a bit of blocky Minecraft paint, but the overall look and feel of the overworld map isn’t far off previous games in this genre. It’s full of things you can tap for rewards when GPS says you’re close enough (I was told the range will be about 70 meters). These are officially called “tapables.”

Like Pokémon Go and other competitors, Minecraft Earth will be making some judgement calls about where game objects should be located. They will appear only in “public” spaces, and will avoid private residence, businesses, or places that could be dangerous, like busy roads.

Tapables reward you with blocks, items, or animals. There’s a variety of rarities, from common cobblestone to very rare obsidian.

The augmented reality adventures are unique

Tapables are only one thing you’ll find on the map. You’ll also encounter Adventures, and that’s where Minecraft Earth starts to set itself apart.

Adventures are essentially mini-games that are linked to a specific real-world location. You might be walking through a park and see an Adventure appear. Walk up to it and you’ll see, through your phone, some Minecraft blocks on the ground. You can walk up to mine them, and when you do, you might uncover a cave with skeletons to kill or a puzzle to solve.

All this happens in AR through your phone, so what’s happening in the game mirrors reality. If you want to dodge an enemy’s arrow, you must move. If you want to pick up loot sitting twenty feet away, you must walk there. There’s no shortcuts or alternatives to playing in AR.

You can play at home, too

You find Tapables in the real world, and Adventures as well. Does that mean you have to stop playing when you get home?

Nope! Minecraft Earth lets you play in your living room by throwing down a Build Plate. That’s where the blocks you collected on your commute or a walk through the nearest park can be used to build a home, a castle, or a dungeon.

Build Plates map themselves to a flat surface in your play space (a table, in most cases) and give you a god’s eye view for easy editing. However, you can blow up the Build Plate to life-size scale to experience what your creation looks like from a first-person perspective.

You can also invite friends to visit your Build Plate, though only so long as they’re in the same room as you. There’s no online multi-player in the traditional sense. And make sure your friends are trustworthy because, like with a normal Minecraftserver, they change the build plate when they visit.

It’s free-to-play, and micro-transaction details are slim

Minecraft Earth will be a free-to-play game. Microtransactions will certainly be a part of the experience, but details about what will be sold and how much it will cost remain thin. The developers of course promise the game won’t be “pay to win.” However, since the game is almost entirely cooperative – there’s no PvP of any kind – it’s unclear what the lack of “pay to win” will mean in practice.

The developers say the game won’t have loot boxes.

It runs the Bedrock engine

Despite its differences, Minecraft Earth still runs the same Bedrock engine that’s used in Minecraft. It’s an important point, and one the developers took care to maintain. The vanilla game is now 10 years old and has a huge fan base that’s come to know and love certain in-game oddities, like the specific way water flows, or how redstone switches work.

All that knowledge you’ve retained from Minecraft continues to apply in the mobile game. Minecraft Earth does have a few unique blocks and mobs, but they’re variations instead of all-new mechanics. You might run across a “Muddy Pig” that loves mud like no pig you’ve seen before, but it otherwise looks and acts like any other Minecraft pig.

Can you craft?

Yes, you can. The game will drop the traditional three-by-three grid for simple recipes, but the recipes will be familiar to Minecraft players. With that said, exact details about what can and can’t be crafted, and the materials required, haven’t been made public yet.

Can you use mods?

No, you can’t. Mod support has not been ruled out in the future, but it’s not planned for launch and there’s no timeline for when it might be included.

Is cross-play supported?

No. Minecraft Earth may use the same Bedrock game engine as Minecraft, but it’s a very different game in most respects. You can’t play with people playing vanilla Minecraft and you can’t import or export creations from Minecraft Earth to Minecraft.

Can you play on HoloLens?

The Minecraft team previously announced a HoloLens version of the game. The experience working on that helped inform the team working on Minecraft Earth, but the two games are separate entities and there’s no plan to make Minecraft Earthavailable on Microsoft HoloLens or HoloLens 2.

You’ll need a beefy phone

The game’s recommended technical specifications aren’t official, but I tried the game on a selection of Apple hardware that, to my eye, appeared to be the latest Apple iPhone XS. Playing the game caused the phone to become quite warm, a good indication that it was using all it had to render Minecraft Earth.

Augmented reality games tend to be demanding. They run best on relatively new hardware. They also drain battery life quickly. There’s no reason to think Minecraft Earth will be different. You’ll want a recently released phone for the best experience, and don’t forget to bring a portable battery.

When is the beta, and how do I join?

The closed beta will launch “this summer” on both iOS and Android. Entry will be limited, though the developers expect they’ll be able to invite “hundreds of thousands” of players over time, so your chances are good. You’ll also receive a free character skin if you sign up for the beta.

You can sign up on Minecraft Earth’s website. Note that players have to be 18 years or older.

And when’s the release date?

The final, full release date hasn’t been announced. Minecraft Earth is slated to come out later in 2019 and the team seems confident it will hit that window.

You can expect to hear more about the game at E3 2019.

Minecraft, which launched 10 years ago for the PC, has sold more than 176 million copies, which possibly makes it the best-selling video game of all time.

Microsoft announced the milestone in an Xbox Wire post that celebrates Minecraft‘s 10th birthday. Despite being around for a decade, the game’s popularity remains strong, helped by its presence in practically all video game platforms available.

At more than 176 million copies sold, Minecraft may be the best-selling video game of all time. Tetris is considered its closest rival, but it is difficult to compare the two games due to the different versions of the block-matching puzzler.

According to Windows Central, past iterations of Tetris, not including the free-to-play versions, have sold 70 million copies, which was reported in 2009. Electronic Arts then said that the mobile version reached 100 million copies sold in 2010, before adopting a free-to-play model. There may be some overlap, but even if the two figures are combined, they will come up short to Minecraft‘s reported copies sold.

There are estimates that suggest Tetris has been downloaded more than 500 million times, but with the different spin-offs, it is hard to keep track and make a direct comparison with Minecraft. The better comparison would be the also still wildly popular Grand Theft Auto V, which has sold about 110 million copies after launching in 2013.

In celebration of the milestone, Microsoft also announced Minecraft Earth, a free-to-play augmented reality game for mobile phones that looks to bring the game’s mechanics into the real world. It looks to better utilize AR technology compared to Pokémon Go, while staying true to the world-building experience with the same Bedrock engine used in all other versions of the game.

Minecraft Earth will feature microtransactions, but details on that remain scarce. The developers claim that it will not be a pay-to-win game, but that is also unclear because there will be no player vs. player mode in the mobile game.

The closed beta for Minecraft Earth will launch this summer on both iOS and Android. Microsoft seemingly has more in store for Minecraft‘s 10th birthday though, so fans of the franchise should stay tuned.

“Minecraft” may be one of the best-selling video games of all time – with more than 154 million copies purchased to date – but the developers haven’t stopped building more into the game.

Acquired by Microsoft in 2014, developer Mojang has just launched Village & Pillage, a free update that adds a plethora of new goodies to “Minecraft,” for both the Java and Bedrock versions of game, which includes Windows PC ($26.95 and $26.99 for PC and Macintosh), mobile (iOS and Android, $6.99), Xbox One ($19.99) and Nintendo Switch ($29.99), and virtual reality platforms.

Before we get into what’s new and newsworthy in this new update, take in these additional facts about the world-renowned building simulation, released ten years ago this month: more people are playing “Minecraft” than ever before at about 91 million unique players every month (across all platforms); more than 160 million people have watched more than 5 billion hours of Minecraft video content on YouTube; and not only is “Minecraft” one of the best-selling games in history, but also one of the highest-rated, with the PC version netting a 93% average “metascore” at Metacritic.com.

Building better ‘Minecraft’ villages 

As the name suggests, villages have changed quite a bit and are among the highlights in this latest ‘Minecraft’ update.

Visually, villages will look different based on biome, or region – plains, desert, savannah, taiga, and so forth – therefore you can expect to see changes based on climate and local resources. In fact, villages are now generated differently, so the layout and architecture of the village will vary.

Villages are generated differently now in ‘Minecraft,’ and enjoy a new look and gameplay elements tied to each biome, or region. (Photo: Mojang/Microsoft)

Along with new building types, villagers also look more unique, with clothing that matches the biome they’re in, as well as their level and profession. With the latter, villagers now learn a trade when near a job site block, such as a Blacksmith, Librarian, Butcher, Cartographer and Shepherd, to name a few.

Villagers go about their business with a specific routine – from bed to work to socializing with others – and with better “pathfinding” artificial intelligence, too. 

There are other additions, too, such as Masons and Nitwit villagers, kids who play tag, and more. 

Prepare to fend off Pillagers 

Want to pick a fight? Even if you don’t, you might be forced to defend yourself from an angry mob in the “Minecraft” Village & Pillage update.

While not too bright, the crossbow-wielding pillagers will disrupt the villagers’ daily lives, by attacking them in small groups, at fortified outposts, and will plunder indiscriminately throughout the land. Unlike skeletons, these pillagers may not be smart enough to move out of the way of your return fire; their aim isn’t the best; and they’ll often hurt each other with friendly fire (and say “Ow!”).

What’s better than a bow? A crossbow, of course. This is the main new weapon found in the ‘Village & Pillage’ update for ‘Minecraft.’ (Photo: Mojang/Microsoft)

But what they lack in brains they make up for in tenacity. Pillagers will respawn in large outpost towers and swarm and destroy villagers in their path. So, keep a shield handy to minimize damage from an onslaught of arrows.

Once you clear them out, you can score some loot. Players who successfully defend a village from a raid will receive some fireworks and the Hero of the Village effect, which provides a deep discount on trades with villagers (see below). And if you take out a pillager captain – the ones with the banners on their backs – you’ll be rewarded with a triggered raid when you enter a village. 

Along with pillagers, there are other new mobs in this update, including chubby pandas, stray cats, Ravagers (a powerful new mob), and some other surprises.

Trading up in the ‘Minecraft’ update

As previously mentioned, there are new occupations in each village you visit, and that means new opportunities for trading.

When villagers make trades, they gain experience. Gain enough experience and they level up. Leveling up unlocks new trades. You get the idea.

Villagers now have a new visual-based trading system and will hold up an item they wish to trade if the player is holding something they want.

Also new is Wandering Traders, which are mysterious salesmen – flanked by a llama on each side of him – who deal items from several different biomes, often with rare materials, and offering up to six randomly generated trades. These special characters stay alive at night by drinking invisibility potions. And their loyal llamas spit at mobs if approached.

The latest ‘Minecraft’ update adds several new professionals to the game, including cartographer, librarian, butcher, and, shown here, the stone mason. (Photo: Mojang/Microsoft)

Bamboo, berries and bells 

There are dozens of other new features (and fixes) in the Village & Pillage update. Here are a few more worthy features:

•Like bamboo? Then you’ll love the update as there’s plenty of it in two new biomes: bamboo jungle and bamboo jungle hills. You can not only chop it down easily by hitting it with a sword, but also combine it with string to make scaffolding in building structures.

•Several new blocks now pop up, including a variety of slabs, stairs, and walls. New textures have been added to blocks, too, such as stained glass. And there are new job site blocks that assign trades to jobless villagers.

•As you might expect, crossbows offer many benefits over a regular bow: the weapon enjoys higher damage (and can pierce multiple enemies), plus it reloads faster, and can also shoot fireworks.

•Other additions include a bell you can ring to warn villagers of an impending attack or danger – so they run inside and hide; campfires, which serve as a light source or to cook meat; Sweet Berries, a new source of food found in taiga biomes; seven new Achievements including one for killing a pillager captain; and some accessibility features such as text to speech, which can now be enabled to read in-game chat.