Minecraft remains a giant on all platforms, with around 91 million monthly active users as of mid-2018 only helped by the game’s 2017 cross-platform Bedrock Edition and Better Together update. And at least for mobile, it looks like last year was the game’s best year yet.
According to intelligence platform Sensor Tower, Minecraft’s mobile versions on iOS and Android alone brought in over $110 million in 2018, up 7% year-over-year from 2017’s mobile revenue. That means 2018 was the game’s best year yet on mobile.
2018’s strength was kicked off by the game’s best quarter ever on mobile, with Minecraft bringing in an estimated $30 million in Q1 of 2018 – up 22% year-over-year.
US users were the largest contributors of spending on Minecraft mobile, accounting for 48% of the year’s total revenue.
In total, Sensor Tower estimates Minecraft on iOS and Android has grossed about $500 million globally since 2014.
The latest update Mjoang pushed to Minecraft has allowed players to create animated paintings, which pretty much means players immediately found a way to watch TV in-game.
Because the update breaks paintings into different textures, players have been able to mod the game so that the textures show video footage. Some players have managed to get smoother quality than others in their videos, but the process is essentially like creating a flip-book style animation.
You can replicate it yourself by downloading the files in the post. Basically you just place the paintings and apply a resource pack. A word of warning: it’s 500MB, and having multiple animated paintings on a server will certainly cause a bit of lag.
Another user, ShaneH7646, put the entire Bee Movie into the game, because why not? It’s a bit like watching one of those picture flip books—it’s about 1600 frames, and another user calculated the entire Bee Movie at 30 FPS is 171,000 frames (which could be the answer to a very niche pub quiz question), but you get the idea.
Now, Bee Movie may not be the height of entertainment, but it is the height of meme culture for a certain group of humans. We’ve got so many versions of Bee Moviefloating around that putting it in Minecraft is possibly the least insane way we’ve screwed around with it.
That said, you’ve got to admire how fast gamers were able to turn the update into a really complicated way to watch a bad movie.
Yakuza 6’s demo, made available on the PlayStation Store earlier today, clocked in at over 30GB. There was a good reason for that: the download actually contains the full game, with only the opening stages made playable. The idea was that if you later decide to buy it, you’d be purchasing an unlock code. That was the idea, anyway.
In practice, for at least some lucky downloaders, they left out the lockout restrictions. Fans quickly discovered this while playing through; where the demo was supposed to end at a certain point early in the game, some players found they could just…keep going, and earn trophies as they went. They’d basically downloaded, and were playing through, the full game.Outstream Video
00:0000:00
Sega quickly noticed this and pulled the demo from the North American store. The European and Australian versions of the demo appear to have been the correct versions, so they’re still up.
We’ve contacted Sega for comment on what happens to players who have already got past the initial cut-off point, since an original promise from the demo was that players would retain their progress made in the demo if they purchased the full game.
The latest snapshot update for the Java version of Minecraft added some new things, like a stone cutter and new ways to modify stone blocks. But the new update also added the ability for players to wall run.
This new ability isn’t mentioned anywhere in the blog post announcing what the latest snapshot is adding and changing. This had led most fans to assume that the wall running is the result of a bug. Though some fans want the feature to stay. “This would be a cool feature though,” said Reddit user JamesBeYeezy. Outstream Video
Just for context, this isn’t a trick or a prank or anything. In the recent snapshot, you can’t jump while pressing against a block. And apparently not being able to raise your elevation also means you can’t lower it either. Try it for yourself: All you need to do is stay sprinting into the wall and you can move along it.
So most likely players won’t be running around the walls of Minecraft worlds for long. But don’t worry, even if wall running is officially removed from Minecraft, you can always download mods that add even more advanced wall running and climbing abilities into the game.
Think back to 2012, chances are you had heard of the Minecraft craze that overtook the youth of America. Looking back now, the community that rose up around this extremely simple game is similar to the one that has risen up round Fortnite in the past year or so, full of 12-year-olds and YouTube who think screaming is equal to comedy.
Initially released in 2009, Minecraft is a fairly simple game that revolves the player exploring and building in a randomized world of cubes. Eventually, the game released on Xbox 360 in 2012, which is where many more people found the game. Around this time as well on YouTube Minecraft “Let’s Play” channels began to pop up, thus sparking the explosion of the community.
From song parodies by CaptainSparklez to “Hunger Games” and “Prison Break” gameplays by SkydoesMinecraft to just relaxing playthroughs of the game by ChimneySwift, the community had so much to offer for everyone. You were unable to look at your homepage without seeing at least one Minecraft video. There was an excitement seeing something blow up to this insane magnitude.
Yet as with every community there was an eventual downfall, one that make it so the community and everyone who participated in it would become the laughing stock the internet. While it’s hard to point to one exact moment that began this downfall, I would say that the incident that pushed it to the edge was the creator LionMaker using the game to prey upon minors using his popularity in 2015.
While most people will think back and remember Minecraft for the community it created, there is also the aspect that I most remember playing Minecraft for, and that’s friends. I didn’t play the game because i thought i could eventually become some massive Youtube personality, though i will admit i did make several videos trying to become one, I didn’t play because of all the wacky things there were to do or find in this massive game, I played Minecraft because as a kid, there was nothing better than going over to a friends house and staying up and playing Minecraft on the weekends, I played it because I met some of my best friends to this day while playing, I met my current roommate in 6th grade while playing the Minecraft version of DayZ. When I think of Minecraft I think back to the memories I have of playing this game, and the more I’ve made even just this year, playing in my friends dorm with 6 other people from our hall.
To some Minecraft is a dead game that people stopped playing years ago, to others it’s a monument to our innocence and childhoods, but to me Minecraft is more than both of these, Minecraft is beginning of many friendships and is a game that will always be in my heart.
Logan Carr is a freshman studying political science at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Did you see the movie? Let Logan know by emailing him atlc300918@ohio.edu.
