Microsoft acquired Minecraft maker Mojang nearly two years ago, and at the time it had sold more than 50 million copies across PC, Xbox 360, PS3, and other platforms. Microsoft is revealing today that Minecraft has now reached the 100 million sale milestone, having sold 53,000 copies per day during the course of 2016. It’s a phenomenal achievement for a game that started off as a bedroom project, distributed initially as a Java applet on a web forum.
Minecraft quickly captured the imagination of thousands of gamers who loved the indie game’s concept of allowing players to shape an environment by crafting and building constructions out of blocks. It has spawned a giant community that creates replica objects and YouTube tips on how to play Minecraft that are regularly shared with millions of viewers.
Alongside the 100 million milestone, Microsoft is also sharing a break down of exactly how Minecraft players engage with the game across the world. There are Minecraft players in every country and every territory on the planet, and Microsoft says four copies have even been sold to people in Antarctica. There are now an average of more than 40 million unique Minecraft players each month across all the various platforms the game is available on. The split of PC / console / pocket edition usage across Europe is roughly even, while in North America the pocket edition and console versions are the most popular.
Microsoft’s acquisitions haven’t always worked out (Nokia’s phone business), but it’s clear Minecraft is a big success. Microsoft’s video games revenue has been climbing steadily since the Minecraft acquisition, and it increased by $367 million in the 2015 financial year “mainly due to sales of Minecraft.” Microsoft is now turning the game into an education business, launching a special Education Edition that’s customized for schools. Microsoft researchers are even allowing computer scientists to use the game to train up AI programs, and the software maker is also developing a holographic version of Minecraft for its HoloLens headset.
Minecraft To Let Players Fight One Another To The Death
The new battle mode will change the nature of the game
Starting in June, Minecraft will get a lot more violent. — REUTERS
Minecraft, the world-building game which has captured the hearts and minds of young people (and plenty of older people) everywhere, is finally getting into the fighting business. According to Minecraft’s owner, Microsoft, whichbought the franchisefor $2.5 billion in 2014,has announcedthat it is releasing a new mini-game for consoles called Battle.
Jaime Limon, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Minecraft, describes it as a “competitive multiplayer fight for survival, where speed, strategy—and sometimes just pure luck—will make you the winner.” Players rely on resources placed around the maps to fight each other. Once they’ve fallen victim to another player, they’re free to hang around—literally, because they’ll be flying around as a bat—and watch the death match until it’s over.
The mini game, which is coming in June, marksa turning pointfor Minecraft, which became such a sensation precisely because, unlike so many other hit games, itwasn’tabout violence or killing opponents. Instead, players thrived on the open-ended creativity encouraged by Minecraft’s world. Now that there’s an officially sanctioned forum for battle, it’s bound to change the nature of the game.
Overwatch is great and all, but I’ve got Trails of Cold Steel to catch up on.
See, I’m only up to Chapter 4 of Falcom’s excellent (but slow-paced) JRPG, and I’ve gotta crank through the rest of the game in time for E3. There’s apparently a big twist at the end, and there’s no way to avoid being spoiled if I want to play the demo of Cold Steel 2 at the convention. That gives me about two weeks to get it done, which seems doable.
I’ll also be playing Final Fantasy XIV, poking around in Wild Arms 3, and continuing my quest to win MVP in NBA 2K16.
And, OK, fine, I’ll probably slip in some Overwatch too. What about you guys?
“As we approached our final deadlines, we realized that some key moments needed extra polish to bring them up to our standards,” director Sean Murray wrote on the PlayStation Blog this evening. “I have had to make the tough choice to delay the game for a few weeks to allow us to deliver something special.”
It’s been a wild past few days in the No Man’s Sky community, filled with everything from nonsensical speculation to social media witch hunts to death threats sent my way for reporting on the delay. Now it’s finally official.
Some people had hoped, after months of hype and the pedigree of director Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code), that Warcraft might break the long and storied Curse Of Bad Video Game Movies. I have some sad news for those people. Maybe video game adaptations were just never meant to be.
Warcraft, which comes out June 10, is a whirlwind of CGI effects and snazzy costumes that never quite coalesces into a watchable film. Longtime fans of the series might get a kick out of seeing the likes of Medivh (Ben Foster) and Durotan (Toby Kebbell) played by Hollywood actors, but it’s tough to get invested in a movie that feels so soulless. Warcraft has very few redeeming qualities. The performances are mediocre, the writing is full of cliches, and the editing is confusing when it’s trying to be clever. (Both the orcs and humans speak real-life English, but the movie attempts to persuade us, by means of a clumsy transition halfway through the film, that the orcs are actually speaking their own language. It’s not very good.)
The fundamental flaw in Warcraft is the same flaw we find in most video game movies: It takes itself too seriously. These games are set in a world full of in-jokes and surreal humor, one that’s inhabited by a race of giant panda bears because the developers at Blizzard really liked one of their own April Fool’s jokes. Even when the Warcraft games get dark, and they do get dark, they’ve always been adept at having fun with their players. The film does no such thing. If only this movie had the charm of a Warcraft unit who’s been clicked too many times.
In case you’re curious: I’ve played through all three main Warcraft games and went on a WoW kick back in 2005. I was the guy at the screening who knew who Thrall was and who most certainly recognized that the creature who popped up for a second in that one swamp was a murloc. I could tell you the difference between a Death Knight and a Lich King and I have many fond memories of destroying fools with my Night Elf army. So I should be the ideal target audience for a movie like Warcraft, one that tries to turn the story of the First War between orcs and humans into a summer blockbuster.
Yet I just couldn’t buy in. Maybe the premise was flawed from the start. Warcraft opens with a shot of the vicious orc Horde, all teeth and screams, as it introduces us to Durotan and his pregnant wife. In just a few minutes we’re zipping through so many cities—Ironforge, Stormwind, Dalaran—that even for a Warcraft buff it might be tough to keep things straight. Rather than give some breathing room to Durotan and his human counterpart, Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel), Warcraft insists on introducing character after character, none of them pleasant. There’s Callan (Burkely Duffield), Lothar’s plot device of a son. There’s the bumbling mage Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer), who is far more interesting in the games. There’s the Guardian Medivh, whose motives and actions are never quite clear. There’s a king, a queen, some knights. There are a bunch of orcs who get a lot of screen time that could’ve gone toward actual character development. There are too many characters, too many subplots, and not nearly enough reasons to care about them all.
And then there’s Garona (Paula Patton), whose fangs are so utterly silly that they often distract from her performance, which is just as ridiculous. Warcraft devotes many minutes to Garona: her enslavement at the hands of her own people; her snarling threats; her unconvincing romantic trist with the main character. Her character, a half-orc, half-human* warrior who seems destined to bring peace to the two races, is poorly crafted and kind of a drag to watch. A stronger actress could have helped made Garona more compelling, but with so many factors working against her, even that might not have worked. She is unabashedly dull.
Even the nasty warlock Gul’dan (Daniel Wu), easily the most compelling character in the film, never quite lives up to his video game pedigree. He spends most of his time draining the souls out of his prisoners’ bodies, which is fun to watch, but he never feels threatening. The stakes are never really there. Warcraft spends very little time trying to convince the audience why anyone should care that Gul’dan and his orcs are invading the world of humans, or why it even matters.
Rather than tapping into the goofy core that makes a game like World of Warcraft interesting, the Warcraft movie aims for grittiness, missing the mark quite a bit. It just doesn’t work. The lore is too campy. This is a world where a mage’s most popular spell transforms his enemies into sheep, yet Warcraft acts as if it’s a green-screen version of Game of Thrones. At my theater, the biggest laughs came not from the occasional bouts of slapstick comedy but from the miserable archmages of Dalaran, whose CGI-enhanced eyes look especially absurd when you’re supposed to take them seriously.
I had hoped Warcraft would at a minimum be entertaining, but really, I’ve had more enjoyable two-hour sessions wiping on Molten Core. At least the armor looks good.
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