Let’s travel back to 2012 for a moment. One Direction’s “That’s What Makes You Beautiful” is playing over the car radio, Obama and Romney lawn signs are fixed into the grass of every house, and adults are talking about Superstorm Sandy or the Benghazi attack. What is on the mind of the Generation Z kids, though? Minecraft.
I was born in 2002, a Generation Z kid myself, and I personally remember the excitement of going over to a friend’s house, tapping the power button of the Xbox 360, and reclining in a chair as close to the TV as possible so I could create and explore a new world with a friend in Minecraft. However, like most kids my age, my interest in Minecraft didn’t take long to peter out until the game’s only significance was acting as a reminder of the good old days. Although Minecraft disappeared from my life over half a decade ago, it has made a surprise reappearance in 2019, coming out of nowhere like the now-famous Minecraft monster, the creeper. Once again, I’ve pressed the power button of the Xbox and sank into a chair only feet from the TV, and all the feelings of adventure and creativity that I felt in 2012 come back. While many may wonder why Minecraft has returned to its former glory, one must first ask: what made it so popular in the first place, and how did it fall out of the limelight?
Markus Persson, better known as “Notch,” was the original developer of the game. He first released Minecraft in May 2009, but at that time it was just a developmental release. Alongside this early version of the game, Persson founded a video game company to assist him in further development: Mojang. It wasn’t until November 2011 that Mojang released the full, completed game, and it didn’t take long for it to become a cultural phenomenon, with interest levels skyrocketing around the turn of the new year.
What was it about the game that allowed it to gain such a large audience so quickly, though? The answer lays in the blocks, but not just the digital Minecraft ones. Playing with blocks is, in the European tradition, considered to be a wholesome activity for children to be engaged in. It comes as no surprise then, that today’s children playing Minecraft, created by Persson, a Swede, are often compared to older generations playing with Legos, founded by Ole Kirk Christiansen, a Dane. In the same way that a child in an older generation would love to have infinite Lego blocks, modern children wanted to spend time in the playground of infinite building blocks that Persson built with Minecraft. With people under 21 making up about 64% of the player base, it is not a stretch to posit that Minecraft’s appeal to a huge audience of children brought it acclaim.
The gameplay of Minecraft was only half of what made it a sensation; YouTube was the other half. Countless videos of players playing Minecraft with friends, Minecraft “Let’s Plays,” where YouTubers would make a video series by simply recording themselves playing the game, and Minecraft themed parodies of hit songs flooded the site and received millions of views. Newzoo, a market intelligence provider with a focus on video games, claims that, in 2014, “Minecraft [was] by far the most popular game franchise on YouTube.”
It should be noted that Minecraft never slacked in sales despite its loss in popularity, selling 10 million copies or more annually since 2016, even with its interest over that same time frame steadily declining until 2019. This decline seems to begin in late 2014, leading some to attribute the game’s downturn to a landmark event in Minecraft’s life: Microsoft’s purchase of the game for $2.5 billion in September 2014. Interestingly, the purchase was prompted by a single tweet from the aforementioned creator of Minecraft, Markus Persson, when he asked if “Anyone [wanted] to buy [his] share of Mojang so [he] can move on with [his] life.” With heaps of money in their pockets and the game under new management, several influential Minecraft developers left the game behind.
From here, the quality of the game improved at a snail’s pace. Indeed, following the Microsoft buy out in 2014, there weren’t any major updates to Minecraft’s core gameplay until 2018 with “Update Aquatic” which transformed the game’s oceans. This lack of steady, substantial growth in updated content between 2014 and 2018 was responsible for two major problems: the loss in interest of players who got sick of playing the same game, and the decline of the YouTube popularity which had brought Minecraft so much fame.
One of the most fundamental principles of economics is what is known as “diminishing marginal utility.” When analyzing a single, unaltered good or service, it can be assumed that a person using that good or service will get less enjoyment out of it each time they use it. Take marshmallows, for example. The first marshmallow that you pop into your mouth might almost melt away, leaving a sugary taste that warms your body from head to toe. The next one might still taste pretty good, but maybe it doesn’t give you that same warm, happy feeling. Fast forward to twelve marshmallows later. You feel like you’re going to explode. Everything hurts. You’ll never eat a marshmallow again. Now, let’s say a marshmallow was accompanied by a piece of chocolate, roasted over a fire, and squished between two graham crackers. Even though you’d rather eat dirt than a plain marshmallow, you might still eat the s’more. Unfortunately, between 2014 and 2018, Minecraft players were stuck with the plain marshmallows. No major updates meant no chocolate, no fire, and no graham crackers, so players simply stopped playing.
The same logic can be applied to Minecraft’s drop in YouTube popularity after July 2014 but from the business side this time. In the modern world, there are many YouTubers who make a living off of ad revenue from their videos, for they achieve such high view counts that they can make a substantial income. One such person, DanTDM, exclusively posted videos of himself playing Minecraft in 2014, but between then and 2019, he began posting videos of himself playing other games like Fortnite. Ultimately, DanTDM needs to make money by bringing in more viewers. If there are fewer large updates to Minecraft, there is less for him to do in the game and thus less content for him to offer his audience. He knew that they would get bored of the game due to the principle of diminishing marginal utility, so he adapted, playing newer, fresher games. This began to happen on a large scale, and eventually, Minecraft lost its once inescapable presence on YouTube.
Now that it’s been established that Minecraft was popular and lost its popularity, the question can finally be explored: Why is it popular again? Like creepers, video games don’t blow up for no reason. A creeper explosion is dependent on the player; when a player is too close, it explodes. In a similar way, a game’s popularity is dependent on the population of players on the whole; when a large number of individuals choose to play a game, it becomes popular. The choice made by 22 million people to buy Minecraft just from October 2018 to May 2019 is too unusual to be attributed to chance alone. Furthermore, the term “Minecraft” has peaked in YouTube searches for the first time since 2017.
The most logical reasoning for Minecraft’s resurgence is that one YouTuber began posting videos of himself playing it in late June 2019: PewDiePie. The “PewDiePie Effect” is a term that has been used to describe the sort of impact that PewDiePie, the YouTuber with the second most subscribers on the site, had in bringing Minecraft back into the YouTube spotlight. Rob Wilson, a content strategist who analyzes YouTube trends, contends that Minecraft’s surge in popularity on YouTube in June, at the same time as PewDiePie uploaded his new videos, “is not a coincidence. This will… explain why some of your favorite YouTubers have suddenly returned to Minecraft, or started dabbling in it, jumping on the wave of a returning trend in this case.”
Even though I’ve cited Wilson’s theory as the most likely reason behind Minecraft’s revival in 2019, I concede that it is a weak argument. When I choose to watch a YouTube video about Minecraft, or when I choose to grab my controller and generate a new Minecraft world, I’m not doing it because of PewDiePie. I, like everyone else my age who is finding him/herself sucked back into the Minecraft craze, have a separate motive: nostalgia.
Last May, after most of the students in the school had finished taking their AP tests, someone in my AP World History class discovered the AP Minecraft Exam, which comes fully included with multiple choice, free response questions, and score distributions surrounding Minecraft, all formatted exactly like a real AP test. Not only did my history class find this hilarious, but we spent an entire period going through the test, arguing over the answers to different questions and trying to see who really knew the most about Minecraft.
The Generation Z kids who used to play Minecraft in 2012 are now upperclassmen in high school or underclassmen in college. There’s a lot of change and stress surrounding their lives: examples include AP tests, college applications, living away from home, and adjusting to college life. Madelina Messa, a student at Penn State University, summarizes that “there are millions of people who played [Minecraft] in middle school who are now in college. [They] can temporarily forget [their] responsibilities and the pressures of adulthood by visiting [their] favorite childhood game.” To many my age, Minecraft’s charm comes from the fact that it’s a constant. There may be updates to the game, but the main objective is always the same: play with blocks, just like a kid.
That is ultimately why Minecraft made a comeback. The pressures that accompany the lives of modern United States high school and college students are destructive and taxing. The intensity in the way that Minecraft rebounded is representative of the desperation in teens and young adults to find an escape from it all. Whether or not retreating to a video game is a healthy way to cope with modern-day pressures is debatable, but one thing is for certain: today’s teens and young adults have lost too much of their childhood to high school and college; Minecraft’s comeback is their way of saying they wish they could go back.