Minecraft cheers me up

You certainly have heard of Minecraft. The game is in alpha, it’s made by one main developer with the help of some people.

As a description, it’s a world-building game mixed with a rpg system through a first person view. The world is huge and randomized.

The world is mine

The website is telling us nothing special, the YouTube video just makes you think “what the hell is this shit”.

And yet after about a year of development Minecraft racks up 250 000$-a-day of sales via Paypal. Yeah. I can’t fucking imagine that either but I’m just so happy for him, Markus Persson.

Rock, Paper Shotgun has a Minecraft diary (1 2 3 4 5) and it’s just fascinating. You can see how much a deep gameplay combined with consistent mechanics and freedom to the player is more addictive than crack.

But what really cheers me up with Minecraft’s success is that it kicks off pre-conceived ideas with hard facts:

• The personal computer is awesome. Nothing like that would have been possible on a closed platform like consoles are. And there’s a ton of free PC games out there, there’s billions of free flash games. Minecraft just didn’t care and made it through nonetheless.
• There is no such thing as a target market in games (and overall in the entertainment business, it’s been made up). Build your game with a strong vision and the market will be here, whoever they are, little girls, gay nerds, Irak vets. It doesn’t matter.
• The best Technical mantra: Minecraft works on any PC of the last five years finger in the nose (WoW anyone?). It’s a Java game. Works anywhere and beyond.
• Visually interesting and quite original while being the most rudimentary ever (8bits 3D).
• Single player is important. 
• The only channel of marketing/PR has been word of mouth. Word of mouth made this man with his little team and his Java game millionaire. Read that twice and try to find any product in the world that makes people really wealthy without them spending an insane amount of money to make that happen. I don’t know one.

Lessons learned:

• Indie game developers are concerned about getting attention for their games. But it seems that if your game is original and deep (and really, this is the hardest part here) it will find its way. Remember, Minecraft is not even finished yet! The thing is we see the market the wrong way, we see it as traditional publishing sees it: you need to make a lot of noise so that a large part of people are hearing about your product and eventually a share of them are going to buy the game. With word of mouth over the internet, it doesn’t work this way: it ramps up with people aggregating and buying from anywhere in the world, silently. It’s a discrete process, totally the opposite of what marketing/PR are doing these days: being obnoxiously in your face all the time, screaming. Trying to sell an indie game this way is not going to work. Never.
• The insane amount of resources used in games for visuals and 3D is a waste. Focus on your gameplay, more and more and again. Open your game to people early and build what they want too. Nothing better than real world beta test. I mean, we can’t stress that enough.
• Minecraft’s business model is neat: play for free in your browser, pay for the premium version that makes you able to download a client. It’s kind of scary to go this way but it doesn’t stop people to buy a copy at 10euros. As of today, 27,27% of registered users have bought the game. That’s just insane. On XBLA if the rate of players buying a game goes over 10% developers jizz in their pants. Point is: in a direct relationship like that, trust and don’t screw your users. They will do the same to you. They will buy your game. They will talk about it. They will be more fan of your game than you ever will.
• The power of communities. Reddit, a news website funnier than Digg was in 2005 mixed with an extraordinary powerful community ala 4chan (without the nsfw tag) played a big role in Minecraft’s success. Don’t go to them to sell your stuff you moron! Just focus on your game and if it’s good enough, a community, somewhere, is going to take action and spread the word. It worked well for Minecraft, the one-man Java game from Sweden. And it’s the case with every success with digital distribution and indie games.

So while people are wondering about the 3DS CPU or how the Bioshock Infinite “gameplay-rollercoaster-without-AI-lol” video is amazing, while the mobile market looks like an awful clusterfuck as the Facebook game thing, a dude from Sweden shows us that you can make some “substantial” money today with a solid Java game for browsers and PCs.

Jesus fucking Christ. Now that’s something.