Timed essay Q1

 

Timed essay 1

In this essay, I’m going to discuss how audience interaction influences the production of video games. I’m going to use Minecraft for my answer.

 

Minecraft was made for a very niche audience of gamers who like to explore their creativity and for the programmers who love to mess with game physics and world generation. These gamers and programmers were only playing and using it for its core functionality for entrainment (users and gratifications theory).  These players eventually realised Minecraft’s full potential and started to share the game around with people on the internet and their friends (Social interaction). This helped the developers at the time save money as this acted as free advertisement for the game increase the growth of popularity almost overnight.

With new platforms to share content on from Instagram to Facebook, google then created YouTube and this is what Minecraft absolutely blew up on and causing the game to go almost global. Youtubers are people who record videos and upload them on the platform found out about the game and started to upload videos on Minecraft and these videos would be used to interact with other people who watch their videos and talk about game. This audience for Minecraft would spark loads of talk and feedback for the developers on how to improve the game and what should/ could be the future of the game. Developers would use platforms like YouTube or reddit to get in direct contact with their newly grown audience and experience the game together and enjoy what they have created. This would create an active an active that are involved I the development of the game. Players also wanted to play the game with their friends on other play forms so Mojang (Minecraft’s studio) partnered up Microsoft to develop a new feature called cross platform and this allowed players to pay with each other on PlayStation, Xbox, mobile and PCs.

Microsoft saw Minecraft’s popularity and purchased Minecraft from ‘Notch’ or Markus Peerson for $2.5 billion and this led onto Microsoft and Mojang investing into making events or mech for the community. Minecraft and Microsoft have come up with new ways to monetize the game by having events, merch, such as clothing and toys, and add-ons which are only purchasable in game. Minecon has changed over the years by having an actual physical event that you would have to purchase a ticket and maybe even fly out to allowing the audience to interact more with each other. Merch was another additional source of income for the game and was targeted at mostly kids between &-12 years but all this money they made was almost decently put back into the game for further improvements.