The other day, I purchased and played Minecraft for the first time. I was somewhat surprised to discover that this game has taken a similar approach that I do to my BYOND games: it's mostly just an open world of tiles that the players are free to change.

Notch, the maker of Minecraft, does have a big advantage over anything I've made in that he has a really cool Java engine that lets him display tiles as blocks with a really far clipping distance. They're still just tiles, but this 3D perspective gives them a lot more significance. His map generator is also quite cool, capable of rendering some rather nice looking landscapes. As a Java-based app, Minecraft has great cross compatibility with most platforms and browsers.

This likely took the player months to build. There's was no real point to it, Minecraft has yet to add an in-game reason to do this, he simply rode the natural human desire to build. The result was, nonetheless, awesome. This is the magic of Minecraft.

Aside from these innovations, however, Minecraft is actually a very simple game concept. Most of what it has going for it is that the blocks can be freely assembled to represent something of greater significance. You can do this in the free version, which is also where the best functioning multiplayer can be found.

While it is in development, you can purchase Minecraft half-off and get all future upgrades to it free. This unlocks a survival mode which includes a death/respawn mechanic, about a dozen NPCs with lousy pathfinding, and a rudimentary crafting system to create a few tools and devices. That's pretty much all there is to it; purchasing Minecraft is a tantalizing offer not because of what it is so much as what may eventually become.

Despite this, Notch sold about 50,000 copies of Minecraft at 9.99 euros each, partly thanks to mention by Valve on their TF2 blog. The dude has made a clean half-million dollars. This has given me pause.

Producing something of greater significance than the individual blocks the game provides. BYOND sprite rippers have it easy in comparison.

The thing is, the games I've worked on do similar things. My tiles crumble in the same way, I've even got device circuits. I don't have that very cool 3D engine and map generator, and that's pretty major, but I have produced a lot better AI behavior. However, I didn't release what I created because I felt that it was too incomplete, there just wasn't a greater purpose to be found in simply placing blocks.

Minecraft demonstrates that perhaps simply placing blocks is good enough. I may not need to worry overmuch about providing context, it seems players will bring their own. It has me wondering if I aught to relax my standards a bit. It may well be a half-million dollar lesson.