The long-dreaded time has come and Microsoft has begun to aggressively shift its Xbox plans, instituting heavy cuts across many of its studios–with more cuts to come over the next year–and various studio closures. One studio that appears to have emerged relatively unscathed is Mojang, makers of Minecraft. But underneath this illusion of safety are signs that Microsoft wants to use Minecraft to turn on the money spigot, which could mean worrying things for the beloved classic.
This “reset” for the Xbox brand comes after the company revealed it has been floundering this generation. Subsequently, new CEO Asha Sharma is attempting to right the ship–either for continued profitability or a possible sell-off. A handful of studios known for smaller or more niche games are being sold off, while larger studios like Bethesda are refocusing their efforts on their biggest, surefire hits. The situation is fluid and we likely won’t know the full impact for some time.
Amid all this, we’ve heard very little about Mojang. However, we now know that the studio is being moved from the Xbox Studios division under Matt Booty, and into the broader Xbox gaming division under direct supervision of Sharma. Game File reports that Sharma believes Minecraft has been underfunded, and that the mega-hit has largely been supporting the rest of the Xbox studios system despite its inadequate support.
Greater funding for Minecraft would surely be welcome at Mojang, and if it goes toward building the next great evolution of Minecraft, this could be very promising. But there are worrying signs that this pivot will not be used to make Minecraft bigger and better; on the contrary, they indicate Microsoft could transform it into something else.
“Sharma considers Minecraft to have been massively underinvested,” Game File reported. “They noted that Roblox, the hugely popular platform for player-made games, and Minecraft, more or less the virtual Legos of gaming, were comparable in size six or so years ago. But they estimated that Roblox has been investing more than five times as much in its business as Microsoft has on Minecraft.”
Invoking Minecraft alongside Roblox raises red flags. The two have some level of visual similarity, thanks to their voxel-based engines, but the two games are actually very different. The qualities that make Roblox so profitable–which appears to be Sharma’s primary objective in all of this–would not easily map onto Minecraft. In fact, they may be antithetical to the spirit that has made Minecraft such an enduring hit.
Minecraft is a fundamentally simple game about crafting and survival. In its classic form, you start with nothing and then slowly start to discover resources and crafting recipes to build yourself a shelter, a house, a town, and more. The threats come with regularity, initially presenting a major danger and then becoming more manageable until they are barely any threat at all. Eventually, as you build more complex and industrious machinery, you have to venture out into dangerous realms like the Nether to find your own threats, and bring home even more valuable rewards.
This is complemented by a Creative mode that removes many of the survival barriers and gives you limitless freedom to build with any kind of block you want. The Lego-like nature gives it an astounding level of flexibility and the capacity to make massive sculptures and buildings as well as intricate machinery. At times, Minecraft functions more like a STEM toy than a game–an interpretation accented by its various collaborations to recreate actual scientific locales like the International Space Station.
Robox, by comparison, is a gaming platform. The creative element here is not about building a world of your dreams, but building your own games. That shapeshifting complexity has its own usefulness, but it’s not the same utility as Minecraft’s building-blocks simplicity.
Roblox has become wildly popular–and lucrative–because it’s a breeding ground for play and, more broadly, for silliness and memes. Some of its most popular applications are games like Grow A Garden, a farming sim; Adopt Me, a pet-adoption game; and Blox Fruits, an adventure RPG. These games are not particularly similar aside from the engine that runs them. While the creative tools are open to anyone, Roblox is not fundamentally about creativity. The vast majority of kids don’t go to Roblox to create their own games, but to play games that other people have created.
This is especially striking as a parent whose kids have started to obsess over Minecraft. Even doing this professionally, I’m careful with my kids’ screentime and I don’t want them to spend too much of their time playing video games. But I’m a little more lenient with Minecraft because its STEM-like applications have always felt a little more, well, if not educational, at least adjacent to it. Its flexibility crosses age boundaries. My youngest enjoys toying with cause-and-effect, seeing how different NPCs react to each other in Creative Mode. We also use it as a tool to work on his spelling, as he asks us how to spell out words in the Search function to spawn certain characters and items. Meanwhile, my oldest can take on more complex projects and was thrilled to give me a tour of her custom-made mansion.
The building-block nature of Minecraft also means that even very small changes can have a huge impact. Just this week, Mojang announced an upcoming update would add (drumroll please) sitting. Sitting down! The ability to sit. Players have been hacking together solutions to sit in Minecraft for years, but soon you can properly sit with the addition of new wool slabs, aka cushions. At first glance, this appears to be a very minor change, but it has big implications for Minecraft going forward.
“Now there is finally this straightforward way of just putting down a cushion and sitting down,” Mojang’s Gustav Höglund said in the announcement. “I think the cushion opens up so many new possibilities for building. I won’t even try to guess what the players are going to end up doing with them.”
This may sound fanciful, but for those who know Minecraft, he’s right! The ability to sit in Minecraft–as well as to “stick” your character onto a new wooden slab tool in a very particular position–could actually carry major implications for expert builders. That’s a testament to what Minecraft is: a simple but remarkably malleable set of creative tools that spurs creative problem-solving. That’s the kind of game I want my kids to enjoy.
This is all putting aside, for the moment, the very real safety concerns with Roblox, another reason I’m hesitant to let my kids near it. Presumably Microsoft would have better tools in place if it pursued a Roblox strategy, but it’s worth noting in the context of how I want my own children to approach these competing games.
It’s not clear exactly what Microsoft wants from Minecraft. Even this implication that it is jealously eyeing Roblox is coming from secondhand accounts, so it’s hard to tell exactly what Asha Sharma has in mind. But Sharma was brought in from enterprise, not gaming. She is looking for ways to make Xbox profitable, and Roblox is very profitable. That makes the comparison unnerving.
If Microsoft simply means that it should invest more in Minecraft–to shore up the brand with additional spin-offs or modes–that’s one thing. Mojang should welcome the investment after spending years as a dutiful workhorse for its parent company. But in the context of Microsoft making drastic and painful moves to reverse its underperforming gaming business, the comparison is alarming and suggests that Sharma might be looking to turn Minecraft into something that it’s not.
