MINECRAFT ESSAY

MineCraft is an open-world, sandbox RPG game created and designed by Marcus 'Notch' Perrson in May 2009 which was fully, further developed by Mojang who also was responsible for the publication of the product, until it was bought by Microsoft in 2014. The game knows no boundaries and is only limited by your own imagination, with infinite replay-ability which is a vital reason for the game making such success, selling over 150,000,000 copies worldwide.

The game has been made even more popular and has become a commercial success through famous Youtubers such as Ali-A (famous for playing games on his channel) who has 16M subscribers playing it and people then watching him play it and wanting it for themselves. In addition, the game itself was new to the market when it came out as it is the infinite, sand-box, multi-genre and child-friendly game that had created such a strong community of players, who all would talk about it and so word-of-mouth spread. The community that came as a result of the popularity of MineCraft also helped create the company's marketing campaign - by using the players' creations from their account, this allowed MineCraft to advertise it in this way eg. the Game Of Thrones world someone had created was used to show the detail that can be had and how creative it is which attracted more customers.

Minecraft was first played by Notch and he uploaded his gameplay to youtube for some feedback yet it didn't have a name at this point, then less than a week later, he released the free, classic version. With which, Notch started charging for downloads of the game at £8 and would update it and add features every Friday where also, the sales were rising. From September 2009 to December Mojang developed the game and added gradually, a survival mode, bigger terrains and larger maps. This gradual release of more and more exciting new features of the game kept consumers excited for the releases and they wanted to be a part of it. It is now a commercial success with over 150 million copies sold (4th quarter of 2018 statistics) and an estimated 55 million people playing the game every month. It is known to be the second best-selling game of all time. With the purchase Microsoft made from Mojang in 2014 for $2.5 billion to buy the game, Microsoft has now allowed the game to be platform agnostic and the digital distribution has allowed the game to be accessible through almost any device, as opposed to just PC where it started.

Also, due to the success, it has been able to create 'spin-off' games to further increase revenue such as 'Story-Mode', 'Education Edition', the education edition was created by Microsoft to be used for educational purposes which was very beneficial because there was no age limit, young children were playing the game already, so releasing as game for education was perfect as they would enjoy the activities on a game they love.