Why do people play video games? - Minecraft
Part 1 of a series exploring consumer attention in the gaming industry
In the summer of 2019, when Fortnite was at it’s height, and streamer celebrities were being minted left and right, a decade old game with antiquated looking graphics surged to the top of the streaming charts. That game was Minecraft. And it ended the year as the most watched game on Youtube, and one of the most watched games on Twitch.
If you’ve never heard of Minecraft, at first glance, you might think you’ve traveled back in time to the era of pixelated computer graphics. Don’t be fooled. Those are voxels, and that’s just an art style.
Minecraft describes itself this way:
It’s a game that was released around 2010, and would be considered a “sandbox” game. Essentially you run around acquiring resources, using those resources to craft materials, then you build things, then you battle off little monsters, etc. The game is simple at a glance, but as an ecosystem is quite complex. You can set up dedicated servers to play with just your friends, studios and indie developers have created extensive “mods” of the core game that have their own unique rules and that are often monetized on their own, and there is a die-hard community around the game, with dedicated conferences like Minecon.
But this article isn’t about what Minecraft is.
It’s about why people play it.
This is the first article in a series around consumer attention in the video game industry. For the time being, each article will focus specifically on one game that is uniquely shaping the trajectory of the gaming industry.
More than an exercise in pure gaming market research, for me this is a passion project around the idea of media and entertainment. I’m fascinated with how people spend their time, and what compels them to do so.
Read more about what I’m exploring here. And subscribe!
So, why do people play Minecraft?
Luckily, we can thank Ninja, aka Tyler Blevins, one of the most successful streamers (if not, the most successful) for asking his 5 Million Twitter followers that very question during this “summer of Minecraft”.
The responses were a dream for anecdotal market research. I read through all of them. There were a lot.
People’s responses generally fell into one of three categories:
Minecraft has endless possibilities
Minecraft feels rewarding
Minecraft has a positive social experience
The open-endedness of Minecraft is one of it’s most enduring qualities. It allows it to be all things to all players. Lest you think it’s just a building game, there are mods for everything. What about competition? There are competitive mods. It’s only for kids, right? The kids that played it 10 years ago are now adults.
To boil the three categories of responses from Ninja’s tweet even further, I would put it this way:
People like to play Minecraft because they like to do fun stuff together.
That’s too vague, right?
Not at all. But what it does is challenge our assumptions about what a video game is at all. What are the rules and parameters around this particular medium?
Why do people give their attention to certain titles, and what are the levers that effect that consumer attention?
For that we need to solve the mystery of the Summer of 2019.
So, why did Minecraft streaming spike in the summer of 2019?
There is actually an answer to this question.
At first it seemed like some mysterious, inexplicable occurrence, but after digging into it a bit, the answer was clear, and it has to do with Fortnite, and another video game celebrity, one much bigger than Ninja.
Here is the google trends graph for the terms “fortnite” and “minecraft” from 2019.
See how Minecraft overtakes Fortnite about a month before Ninja got curious about why people like Minecraft? And see how interest in Fortnite was waning during that same period?
Two reasons for this, and they really explain the entire “summer of Minecraft” phenomenon:
Mech backlash in Fortnite
Pewdiepie
The Mech Debacle
Mech’s debuted in Fortnite with the launch of Fortnite’s 10th season, and the backlash from Fortnite’s most rabid fans was immediate.
Intended as a way to level the playing field and allow casual players the opportunity to experience a Victory Royale, the unintended consequence was a maddening experience for competitive players.
Mech’s allowed seemingly anyone who was lucky enough to find one during a match near invincibility.
There was a whole #removethemech campaign, and Epic officially explained the data behind their new feature, but to no avail. The mechs were upsetting the most vocal fans, the ones with HUGE audiences. People like….Ninja.
Meanwhile…
Pewdiepie, aka Felix Kjellberg, one of the most prominent content creators in the world had inexplicably started a 38-part Youtube series of himself playing Minecraft in June.
Why?
Who knows.
But, Pewdiepie’s influence can’t be overstated. He is in his own echelon, with over 100 Million subscribers on Youtube. Ninja has 1/5th of the Youtube subscribers as Pewdiepie…
But, when Pewdiepie does something, others soon follow. It’s sort of trickle down economics, but for streamers.
So, once the popular Fortnite streamers like Ninja started to get fed up with the mechs in Fortnite, they began to capitalize off of Pewdie’s popular series, and began doing their own Minecraft streams.
This my friends, is called “The Pewdie Effect”.
Making Sense of the Summer of 2019
Here’s the google trends chart again, but this time with the timing of the Mech backlash and the start of The Pewdiepie Effect.
This time I threw in Roblox as a search term. I did this as a reference for the relative volatility of a popular game. The shift between Fortnite and Minecraft in the summer of 2019 shows that Fortnite and Minecraft actually share significant portion of users. That usually would seem odd, since one is a First Person Shooter, and one is a Sandbox game. But, Minecraft and Fortnite have a lot more in common than you’d think.
As you can see from the google trends chart though, Fortnite figured out how to grab consumer attention back after their messy summer with one of the most unique marketing events in recent memory; The Black Hole.
That leads me to my next article, which will obviously be about Fortnite.