FOXBOROUGH–Local gamers will get the chance to play Minecraft on the big screen this weekend at Showcase Cinema de Lux at Patriot Place.
Beginning on April 29, Showcase Cinema de Lux is teaming up with Super League to host the tournament, Boston Revolt City Champs: Minecraft.
Instead of playing the popular 3-D online game at home, participants are given the chance to come to the theatre, team up and compete in a series of three head-to-head sessions for a chance to enter the Grand Final championship, taking place on Saturday, May 20.
“The idea is to take Minecraft and make it a more communal environment where kids can play together,” said Showcase Vice President, Mark Malinowski.
The event is geared towards pre-teens, he said.
Tickets for the event cost $60 per player. Tickets include admission to the three events, an official club jersey, 90 minutes of gameplay per event, access to seven unique games modes and exclusive heroes, and a chance to qualifty for the grand final. Parents accompanying their child are free.
The first event is this Saturday, April 29 from 10:15a.m.-12p.m. The second and third events are scheduled for Saturday, May 6 (10:15a.m.-12p.m.) and Saturday May 13 (10:15a.m-12p.m.). The grand final is slated for Saturday, May 20 from 1:15-3p.m. Players are asked to arrive 15 minutes prior to the start time.
Showcase Cinema de Lux is located at 24 Patriot Place, Foxborough.
The Minecraft Marketplace is set to open later this spring with nine businesses that will sell feature packs inside the game. Some of those feature packs will include storylines, landscapes and in-game activities and will sell for between $1 and $10 per creation. Microsoft is allowing other companies to apply to be part of the marketplace in the coming months, noted Bloomberg in a report. “For the first time we are going to enable creators to come in and put content into our store alongside the same content that Minecraft makes,” said John Thornton, the game’s executive producer at Microsoft, in an interview with Bloomberg. “The real impetus is to let creators connect to players and help them make a living on top of Minecraft.” (See also: Minecraft Has Sold 100 Million Units Worldwide.)
Virtual Revenue
For Microsoft, Minecraft has been a huge success. Since acquiring the game, it has sold more than 121 million copies around the globe, according to Bloomberg, and counts 55 million unique monthly players. Bloomberg cited data provided by Microsoft for the Minecraft figures. The marketplace is aimed at the mobile and tablet markets and as a result won’t be found on Microsoft’s Xbox One or Sony PlayStation’s game consoles. It will only be available on Windows, iOS, Android, Apple TV, Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR virtual reality platforms and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Microsoft will share in the revenue from the Minecraft marketplace, giving creators 50% of the sales. Thorton told Bloomberg the creators are happy the revenue will be split 50/50. In order to purchase the feature packs, users will have to use the virtual currency, which can be purchased with an device that has an app store whether its Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android or Microsoft’s Windows.
The move to launch a marketplace in which users have to make in-app purchases was made popular last summer by the popular Pokémon Go augmented reality game. Pokémon Go is free to download but requires users to make in-app purchases, which generated close to $1 billion in revenue last year, says Bloomberg.
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Xbox boss Phil Spencer spent a part of his day today with the team at Minecraft developer Mojang, he said on Twitter. While he didn’t get into specifics about what he saw, Spencer said it was a “Great day with the team [at] Mojang seeing the future work on Minecraft.”
He added: “Very cool to see the new ideas the team has come to life.”
You1 can now explore the St. Kilda archipelago, a tiny collection of islands 40 miles off the Scottish coast, in Minecraft. This is great because it rains less in Minecraft, and the wind won’t shear your face off.
The last islanders left the main island of Hirta in 1930 after life there became unsustainable.
People only now live on Hirta on a temporary basis to work at the military site, or on wildlife conservation projects. …
The map is available for public download to allow gamers all over the world to explore the archipelago’s history, heritage, stories, people and landscapes.
St. Kilda really is perfectly-sized to be a Minecraft map: a main island about 2km long and some smaller outlying ones. I hope they made it so the Minecraft version is fully playable, and not just a vast block of stone under the surface.
1. Can anyone actually find the download? Am I going crazy?
At the end of last year, the Fallout Mash-Up Pack was only available for console versions of Minecraft. However, developer Mojang has just announced that the post-apocalyptic pack will soon be available to play on the Windows 10 and Pocket Edition versions of the game. A small preview of what to expect can be seen in the teaser trailer for the console release of the pack, below:
This is a very interesting combination, as the RPG survival experience offered by Fallout meets the sandbox, block-dominated world of Minecraft.
Many of the characters and visual quirks of the nuclear wasteland game seem to be available, as the pack boasts 44 different skins, and several “mutated” mobs. In addition, it looks like all of the previous Fallout landscapes have been combined into one, so you can hop from Diamond City to elements of the Capitol, for example, something which is not possible in the normal Fallout titles.
As if the latest Fallout game was not already customizable enough, the wasteland is now completely subject to your own imagination and the freedom offered to you by Minecraft’s blocky world.
If you want to buy this pack, you will have to do so via the in-game store. It is priced the same as its console equivalent, at $5.99.
Minecraft Nintendo Switch Edition won’t be quite as expansive as PS4 and Xbox One versions, it has been revealed.
Minecraft was recently given a May 11 release date on Nintendo Switch, although UK fans will have to wait until May 12.
But there’s good news and bad news for Nintendo Switch owners, as Mojang reveals more about world sizes and how they compare to Wii U, Xbox One and PS4.
On the plus side, the Nintendo Switch version will support worlds much that are much larger than the ones featured in the Wii U Edition.
The Wii U edition only supported the Classic world type, which is 864×864 blocks.
The Switch version also supports Classic, as well as Small worlds of 1024×1024 blocks and Medium worlds with 3072×3072 blocks.
Unfortunately, however, it won’t support the Large worlds (5120×5120 blocks) found in Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game.
Ultimately, however, the ability to play it on the go makes the Nintendo Switch version an attractive prospect.
