Markus Persson is a Swedish game developer, who is most known for creating the sandbox game Minecraft.markus-persson

Since then, he has grown it into a company called Mojang which has now sold Minecraft over 24 million copies on the PC, and over 100 million copies over all platforms, going through Phone, Xbox and Play Station 3. However, these are the current figures with their new main developers, Microsoft. Back in 2014, Markus Persson sold his company, Mojang (which was in charge of Minecraft) to Microsoft for over 2.5 billion dollars. It is no longer considered an Indie Game.

Back when he first began on the game Minecraft, he took inspiration from one of his own personal games, Dwarf Fortress, and his love for Lego. He took many ideas from this game such as the basics of chopping down trees, defeating monsters, and regular survival, and made it his own.

Another game that inspired Minecraft and Markus’ first look into the Indie Game Industry, was the game Infiniminer, by Zach Barth.

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Since the very first release of his game, Minecraft has now evolved into a community, and several other communities featuring various different servers that people play together on, such as Hypixel, Mineplex, mcpvp, and many others throughout the years, most of the servers listed here have normally around 10,000 players daily.

People have even been making their own money from the game, by making videos on YouTube, for example a group known as Mindcrack, who first became famous due to their community on the game, has now grown into a network featuring many other games, some Indie, some not, and are gaining money from it as their jobs.

The game has become a huge success, and is still updating to this day. Although it is no longer consisted an Indie game, when it was first considered, one it was a massive success, and over the 7 years and counting that it has existed for, people still love and pay for it to this day.

Markus Persson has given over leadership of development to fellow Mojang members, notably going by their code-names, Dinnerbone and Jeb. They continue to work on Minecraft now working alongside Microsoft, instead of being a stand-alone Indie Game.

The target audience for this was mainly towards kids, as its a friendly game fairly similar to Lego, but on the computer, and adds a bit of a challenge to it in terms of going down into caves and fighting monsters. However, a lot wider age ranges have picked up the game, from teenagers to even adults. Every age is playing Minecraft, and as shown by the amount of money Microsoft was willing to buy it for, the amount of copies sold, and that the game is still upgrading after 7 years, it shows just how effective the game has been to all age ranges, and the target audience is now endless possibilities.

Minecraft is a sandbox game, an open world game where everything is made out of cubes. Various colours are used on each block in the game so there is no extreme lack of one colour, and your possibilities are endless, you could mine, build, craft, explore, battle creatures, battle other players on servers, play and work together with other people on servers, and even add other modifications to the game to get yourself a brand new experience, including adding new enemies, animals, blocks, items and scenery. You can even download resource packs to change how the game looks and sounds, and create your own to change whatever you like!

So what have I personally got out of this game?

This game has brought me into a brand new community, and has set me up to know so many friends online. I’ve been playing Minecraft since around 2010/2011, and became a lot better friends with some of my current online friends today because of it, as we had a game we could play together. I had already met them through another community before Minecraft, but this just brought us closer together.

In 2013 I joined a side-Minecraft community on Reddit called the Ultra Hardcore subreddit, a mini-game style of gameplay which takes a more competitive side to the game, and have met a lot of amazing people from it, and even have allowed me to join and start up my own Minecraft Series’ on YouTube based on these games that I played, although the community has changed a lot, some for the best, some for the worst, I still consider myself a big part in the community, and hope to stay in it for longer.

However I have had some bad experiences with the game, like in every community you may have some drama or disagreements sometimes, and my time online, especially with Minecraft, came with these bad experiences also. But that’s to be expected, if you have 7000+ people in a community, you’re not all going to get along.

The game of Minecraft has made me a better person, its allowed me to be a lot more social online and offline, and made me a lot more confident, as well as finding a lot new friends. Some of these friends I have met online, I have even met up with in person, as Mojang has this yearly convention called Minecon, and at the London Minecon in 2015, I met up with around 5-6 friends who I had met over the Internet, and we had a great time. The tickets are hard to get though, as due to the popularity of the game, the tickets get sold within not even a minute, sometimes even less, in each batch.

Markus Persson, despite stepping down in Mojang and Minecraft, still sometimes attends these conventions as he is the original developer, and still does attend the conventions occasionally. The convention is all Minecraft related, but has many things you can do such as various panels revolving around different topics, and guests stars there from popular YouTubers and developers in Mojang.

My critical response on the game, is that its a very good game. It mixes many different aspects together that you see in other video games, still keeping the kid-friendly feel by building and the addition of creative mode where you can’t die, and just endlessly build to your heart’s content, and adding in some teenager/adult gamestyles, adding in sometimes more of a competitive aspect to the game on some multiplayer servers.

However, despite this, there are some things I believe that can be improved. One of which is the updates. Getting a lot of new features are great, however I feel as if Mojang are focussing too much on adding new features, and not focussing on the bugs that are in the game already. Bugs have been in Minecraft since the beginning, however instead of adding new things, they should fix things that have been bugs for ages first, and giving the players a much more enjoyable sense with the game and how it works.

Links:

Hazel Sheffield (2015), The man who sold Minecraft to Microsoft for £2.5 billion says its made him miserable. Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-man-who-sold-minecraft-to-microsoft-for-25-billion-says-its-made-him-miserable-10479865.html (Accessed: 13/09/2016)

Minecraft (2009), Availible at: https://minecraft.net/en/stats/ (Accessed: 13/09/2016)

Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larson (2013), The Amazingly Unlikely Story Of How Minecraft Was Born, Available at: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/ (Accessed: 13/09/2016)

Zach Barth (2013), Infiniminer, Available at: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/ (Accessed: 13/09/2016).

Guudeboulderfist (2010), Minecraft Mindcrack – S1E1 – Clausterphobified. Available At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZI_SwHIdiU (Accessed: 13/09/2016)