Mojang just announced a new episode of Minecraft: Story Mode to come next week. The 6the episode of the series is going to be called “A Portal to Mystery,” and it will arrive on June 7th to PC, Xbox One and Xbox 360.
The new episode will follow events from the previous one, but it will also be the very first Minecraft: Story Mode game developed by Telltale Games to be centered around the original title, developed by Mojang. The company released a new blog post announcing the new episode, and here’s what it says:
“In Episode 6: ‘A Portal to Mystery’, continuing their journey through the portal hallway, Jesse and crew land themselves in another strange new world – one completely overrun by zombies. With a timely invitation to take refuge in a spooky mansion, they find themselves thrown into a thrilling mystery alongside famous members of the Minecraft community. Fresh perils await them in an unfamiliar land, as does the sinister figure known as The Host. What can this pumpkin-headed hostelier have in mind for his new guests? Who are the strangers invited to attend The Host’s mansion party?! Can anyone be trusted?!! Who will survive?!!! Will Owen tell me off for using excessive punctuation?!!!! Who knows?!!!!!
Several special guest stars from the Minecraft community join the cast in this new episode, all playing characters from their own YouTube videos. Players will get to interact with Joseph Garrett as Stampy Cat, Stacy Hinojosa as Stacy Plays, Dan Middleton as DanTDM (The Diamond Minecart), Lizzie as LDShadowLady, and Jordan Maron as CaptainSparklez!”
As you can see, Jesse is still the main character of the story. He and his friends fight zombies in a world behind the portal hallway, but they’re going to have support for some known characters for the first time ever. Namely, some stars of the Minecraft community will play as their own characters, including Joseph Garrett, Stacy Hinojosa, Dan Middleton, Lizzie, and others.
The new episode will be available for the price of $4.99, but also as a part of the new Adventure Pass, which will contain episodes 6, 7, and 8. The Adventure Pass will cost $14.99. Also, keep in mind that you need to have at least episode 1, or the previous Season Pass to be able to purchase episodes 6, 7, and 8.
Tell us in the comments, what do you think about the new Minecraft: Story Mode episode? Will you buy it, or you’ll buy the Adventure Pass, and make sure you don’t miss anything?
Microsoft’s simply offering too much value in its console and mobile versions for the average consumer to wrestle with the PC edition.
If you still think Minecraft is a PC game—well, you’re flat wrong. According to new numbers released by Mojang and Microsoft, the original version for the PC is the least popular platform, in almost every region worldwide.
Microsoft said Thursday that Minecraft has sold more than 106,859,714 copies to date across all platforms—which would represent the twelfth most populous nation in the world, right behind Japan. Four copies have even been sold into Antarctica.
But if you dig into Microsoft’s numbers, they reveal that far, far more users are buying Minecraft on platforms other than the PC. In fact, in the United States, the number of traditional copies of Minecraft sold on the PC is just 19 percent. Console sales represent 41 percent, just topping the 40 percent of users who have bought the Pocket Edition for mobile and the UWP version of the game. That’s much the same worldwide, too.
MojangMinecraft simply isn’t a PC game any more, according to Microsoft’s latest numbers.
Why this matters: For many years, Minecraft offered elements of the game on the PC that simply weren’t available elsewhere, with mods and shared servers being the chief appeal. Mojang and Microsoft also prioritized the PC, launching new features (special “redstone” blocks, potions, new enemies and skins) on the PC first, and then later porting them over to other platforms. Over time, some of these key PC-centric features have been pushed to other platforms. Today, Minecraft’s console and mobile versions might not offer quite the same flexibility, but they’re a good compromise.
The PC as just another device
This all might come as a surprise to PC gamers, given that Minecraft was one of the games that, for a while, was synonymous with the PC. From 2009 to 2011, Minecraft existed solely on the PC as pre-release software, gaining an audience by word of mouth. Creator Markus “Notch” Persson also committed to offering the full version of the game to those who purchased it while in its beta state.
In 2011, however, Persson released an early alpha of the game to the Google Play app store, and in 2012 he ported the game to the Microsoft Xbox 360. Today, you can find Minecraft everywhere: as a PC game written in Java, but also for OS X and Linux; for Android and iOS; the PlayStation 3, 4, and PlayStation Vita; and the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Microsoft also has rewritten Minecraft in C++ as a so-called UWP app, capable of being run on the PC as well as Windows phones. (Minecraft for the PC exists in two versions: the traditional Win32 Java app, and the more limited beta of the Pocket Edition UWP app.)
When you think about how Microsoft now pushes apps and services like Outlook or Cortana across multiple platforms, Microsoft’s purchase of Mojang for $2.5 billion in 2014 makes much more sense. But it also highlights the rocky road that Microsoft’s business will bump over as it tries to make its UWP vision a reality.
Take pricing, for one. Microsoft charges $26.95 for the traditional PC version of Minecraft, $19.99 for the Xbox One version, and just $6.99 for the Pocket Edition app and similar versions on mobile platforms. (Microsoft charges $9.99 for the Windows 10 Pocket Edition.) That itself is helping to drive gamers to the other platforms.
Microsoft’s cheaper Pocket Edition offers much of the same Minecraft experience for far less.
Microsoft has justified the relatively high price of its legacy Win32 app by highlighting its flexibility, which allow users and designers to do practically anything they want with the platform (except sell stuff) via software modifications. But over time, Microsoft has cherry-picked some of the most popular content and ported it to its other, cheaper platforms, including “redstone” to the Pocket Edition and shared servers. (Fans still complain that Mojang still has yet to add the “Ender Dragon” and other legacy gameplay elements to the Pocket Edition, however.)
Mojang also added cross-platform play to Minecraft via a 2015 update, allowing Pocket Edition players on PC, iOS, Android, or Windows Phone to play together on a local network or five PC players to play together over Xbox Live. But so far that cross-play capability has eluded the original Java-based version of the game, and saved games still can’t be shared among platforms. There are now essentially three major, incompatible versions of Minecraft: the legacy PC edition, the console versions, and the new UWP/mobile apps.
In many ways, that’s evidence of the messy, messy legacy that Microsoft must deal with as it tries to unify decades worth of apps under its new Windows 10 banner, especially with initiatives like Project Centennial.
While Win32 apps like Minecraft were written during a more freewheeling time when they could be modified at will, Microsoft’s UWP apps under Windows 10 sacrifice that flexibility for compatibility across as many platforms as possible. Now Microsoft is working to bridge the gap between old and new with pledges to allow some mods, frame rate counters, and the like in UWP apps. But the only recent modifications to UWP apps like Quantum Break have been tweaks to allow them to work with GSync and FreeSync monitors.
Eventually, Microsoft may be able to strike a balance between the flexibility of modifications and allowing a consistent Minecraft experience across multiple platforms. But for now, gamers appear to be simply throwing up their hands and moving on.
Minecraft is taking over the world as we know it one piston at a time and soon these magical blocks will finally be making their way to Minecraft: Pocket Edition and the Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta.
“The Friendly Update” as it’s titled will bring the top-requested piston block to the Minecraft Community on these platforms. This will add draw bridges and trap doors to your repertoire of building blocks for use. Be sure to check out the video below to see how advanced your creations can get when you add a little steam action into the game.
The update doesn’t yet have a release date but it will include the Rube Goldberg machine from the trailer.
Control the Real World with an Arduino-Enabled Minecraft Mod
Minecraft modding has become almost as popular as the block-based game itself, with tons of editors and tools available to create new kinds of blocks, mobs, and weapons. And now, with this mod framework that can talk to an Arduino, modders can build blocks that break out of the Minecraft world to control the real world.
While turning on a light from Minecraft is not exactly new, the way that MCreator for Arduino goes about it is pretty neat. MCreator is a no-code framework for building Minecraft mods, which allows modders to build new game capabilities with a drag and drop interface. The MCreator Arduino toolkit allows modders to build custom Minecraft blocks that can respond to in-game events and communicate with an Arduino over USB. Whatever an Arduino can do – light an LED, sense a button press – can be brought into the game. It’s all open-source and free for non-commercial use, which is perfect for the upcoming STEM-based summer camp season. We can think of some great projects that would really jazz up young hackers when presented through a Minecraft interface.
Minecraft is very popular. So popular in fact that its total global all-format sales have now exceeded 106 million copies – and the most popular format for the game is mobile.
In a blog update, Minecraft developer Mojang has broken down some of the more impressive stats surrounding the game. Accounting for sales on PC, console, and the Pocket Edition, the game has sold 106,859,714 copies.
Most surprisingly, given the game originated on PC in 2009, the desktop version of the game is now the least popular in all regions except Asia and Asia-Pacific. Minecraft Pocket Edition tops the charts for most users overall, and for most users by region, with the exception of South America.
Europe has the most even spread of Minecraft players across formats though – 36 per cent on mobile, 35 per cent on consoles, and 29 per cent on PC. Globally, console figures combine the game’s release on all platforms, so actual users across Xbox One, PS4, Wii U, and other formats fragment the numbers further. Credit Mojang
Sales haven’t slowed down, either, despite the fact roughly 1.5 per cent of Earth’s 7 billion-strong population has already bought the game. Minecraft has averaged around 53,000 copies sold each day through 2016 so far.
Mojang puts the player base numbers into perspective by contrasting against actual population figures. If every person who’d bought the game formed one brick-loving country, it would be the 12th most populous on Earth, coming just behind Japan.
“We’d like to offer our heartfelt thanks to every one of you who’s bought Minecraft over the past few years, no matter which platform you play on,” wrote Mojang’s Owen Hill. “We’re constantly in awe of our community and the amazing things you achieve together. You really are the best. <3”
Given Minecraft Pocket Edition is the reigning champ of all things mining and crafty, it’s only fitting that Mojang has announced a wave of improvements coming to the game in its next update. The upcoming 0.15 release (a beta version of which can be signed up for now) upgrades both Pocket and Windows 10 editions of the game, and will integrate Xbox Live achievements on iOS and Android, use less bandwidth for online play, and introduce a whole new user interface for the main menu.
Known as ‘The Friendly Update’ – Mojang promises “mysterious, as-yet-unspecified friendliness” – it will also introduce new block types, more villages, and ridable pigs, while fixing almost a dozen bugs.
Specifically, game maker Mojang has sold more than 106,859,714 copies of its game to date, as of June 2, or approximately 53,000 copies sold per day.
“We’d like to offer our heartfelt thanks to every one of you who’s bought Minecraft over the past few years, no matter which platform you play on,” Mojang Creative Communications Director Owen Hill wrote in a blog entry. “We’re constantly in awe of our community and the amazing things you achieve together. You really are the best.”
Mojang created an infographic to mark the occasion (below), in which it revealed that people from every country and territory have tried out Minecraft, including four sold to crafters in Antarctica.
Inspired by roguelike role-playing titles, Minecraft was created by Markus “Notch” Persson and released to the public as a developmental version in May 2009. More than two years later, it shed its beta skin and launched a full PC version in November 2011.
It quickly caught on, topping 3 million Xbox 360 sales by July 2012; the game later hit PlayStation 3, PS4, and Xbox One, before Microsoft acquired Mojang for $2.5 billion in the fall of 2014. Minecraft finally reached the Wii U in December
Last summer, fans also got a taste of the exploration game in augmented reality when Microsoft demoed Minecraft on its futuristic HoloLens headset.
This isn’t the first milestone for the fast-selling title: In April 2015, Mojang introduced its first female character, a red-haired woman known as Alex, companion to blue-shirted man Steve—the game’s only other pre-loaded figure.
Just don’t hold your breath for Minecraft 2: Mojang recently revealed that it has never even discussed the possibility of a second-gen title; the company is content to continue developing the existing game.
