Only a few days left to wait before Minecraft: The Movie hits theaters. The feature film directed by Jared Hess is expected to attract a massive audience of both young and old fans of the Mojang Studios video game. It must be said that Minecraft is quite simply the best-selling title of all time, with 300 million copies sold worldwide.
A phenomenal success for the work of Markus Persson, aka Notch, who sold the rights to Microsoft in September 2014 for $2.5 billion. Nearly 16 years after the game's release, does Minecraft's business model have a chance to evolve? Mojang responds directly to the possibility of the title becoming free-to-play.
Minecraft will not become free-to-play
Many paid games have become free-to-play several years after launch. Fall Guys is a very good example, as are Destiny 2, Rocket League, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Typically, a developer or publisher might choose to move to this business model. Can Minecraft follow the same path? Unfortunately, Mojang doesn't seem keen on this idea.
"It doesn't really fit with how we designed it. We designed the game for a different purpose, so monetization doesn't work that way for us. It's just a matter of buying the game and that's it," Ingela Garneij, executive producer of Minecraft Vanilla, told IGN. "For us, it's important that our game is accessible to as many people as possible. I think it's a fundamental value to be accessible to everyone," she adds, somewhat paradoxically.
New players will therefore have to continue paying to discover Minecraft. At least, major updates like Vibrant Visuals, which is supposed to bring major graphical improvements to the sandbox game, are free. "We've had plans for graphics before and wanted to do this kind of update, but I think this time we really wanted to take the time to build the foundations for this new mode," Ingela Garneij says of the update.
Generally, titles that decide to go free-to-play rely on microtransactions to continue generating revenue. Minecraft, on the other hand, remains a paid game, but still invites players to spend money to obtain Minecoins, the game's virtual currency. Remember that Notch dropped Minecraft 2 to focus on a slightly different project.
0 Comments