Minecraft Essay

Explain the impact of digitally convergent media platforms on video game production, distribution and consumption. Refer to Minecraft to support your answer. (15 marks) 

  

Minecraft is a sandbox game, which has been described as a virtual world of pixelated blocks that involves simple instructions in order to explore, mine and build. The Swedish-based Mojang Studios created it in 2011, which sold it to Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5bn. 

The player explores a square world, facing threats of monsters, animals and building amazingly detailed creations, for example the millennium flacon from star wars or the NASA space shuttle.

In the past 7 years the game has evolved dramatically adding new blocks, animals, biomes and servers letting the players progress with the game, and be inspired to create different things every time they play.

They can also play on different devices like phones, laptops and their Xbox with friends and family at the same time by using multiplayer mode allowing children, teenagers and adults to work together to produce different builds, pleasing vast range of audiences. The development of digitally convergent media platforms has had a major influence on the way the game is produced, allowing the same versions of the game to be downloaded and played on multiple devices, thus providing a cost saving for the company. Furthermore, the development of social media, such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, has enabled online fan communities to have an active voice in the on going development of the game, for example through feedback and taking part in beta tests of the up coming updates.

In 2012 piracy was actually publically condoned by Minecraft developer, Notch. In gaming, players copying coding and creating their own versions of the game on servers is seen as a positive thing, giving players different mods, which evolve there games give them different objects and services then everyone else. Even though they are not financially benefitting Microsoft, they have not prevented Minecraft selling 122M copies worldwide in 2017 and remaining the biggest selling PC game of all time.

In conclusion Minecraft is an example of the way the explosion of digitally convergent media platforms have transformed the video gaming industry in terms of the way games are produced, how they are distributed and how they are consumed across a myriad of devices.