Content Droughts & Updates, Why You Don't Want To Play Minecraft
I explain how many games but especially Minecraft suffer from infrequent and often underwhelming updates. And why games like Minecraft and Overwatch are very likely going to need to rethink there update strategies in the future to continue the overall health of the game. While explaining the reason Minecraft is no longer fun to myself and many others.
//Research
https://blog.tebex.io/buycraft-university-how-to-improve-player-retention/
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Somehow found a Minecraft server hosting guide? God knows how google indexed that one but either way it was useful less time but more replayable content is better than less replayable but longer content. Which is why new content needs depth as well as constant releases to retain players.
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167923620301780
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Middle ranked players play games more than high and low level players prior to an update. While low ranked players and high ranked players play the game more after updates. Now inferring likely because mid level players want to practice and get good for the next update while low and high level players are either good enough or indifferent to their skill relative to everyone else and want to enjoy the new content. Which makes a lot of sense.
*/
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Never thought I would see Maslow's hierarchy of needs in researching for a script on games but I guess I just did. Retain a play for a month longer up to 20% of increased value kinda fucked when it's written like that but remember we’re just numbers. Live updates do improve the success of a game in retaining players.
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https://machinations.io/articles/understanding-live-ops-for-video-games
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Keeping new players engaged and coming back is essential and provide multiple methods on how to do this.
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1875952122000301
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The Paper found that major updates brough players back. While useless small updates did nothing. And frequent Minor updates held roughly equal with some games losing and gaining. However from what I can tell the paper was just looking at player numbers following an update and not how long the players were actually playing so while the information presented is not incorrect i am uncertain on how useful it may be.
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//Resources used in creating and the finished graphs I did make use of Google Bard to parse the data for me to make the graphs much easier and a much faster amount of time. I did spend some time checking things and it makes sense.
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Chronology_of_events
https://overwatch.fandom.com/wiki/Heroes
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2009-05-23%202024-01-15&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F09v6kpg&hl=en
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202024-01-15&geo=US&q=Overwatch&hl=en
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We can draw a near one to one correlation between frequency of major content updates and the amount of searches and therefore amount of interest in the games. Whether or not it is causational is not guaranteed but it seems likely. Additionally you can see an exception in Minecraft but when you look at it it makes sense 1.9 was considered of the worst updates of all time followed by the nothing burger that 1.10 is and the update I still am yet to have played it's main headline feature as someone who played a shit ton of minecraft for years of the 1.11 update. So they were closer to minor updates then major outside of 1.9 and 1.9 was poorly received by much of the community even if I view 1.9 as one of the best updates this game received for survival players though I have put 100s probably 1000s of hours into 1.8 combat so I can understand the preference.
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//Additional context to the graphs were generated with the numbers for searches to roughly be in line so they were more legible. The overwatch one was 1/4th and the Minecraft one was 1/10
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojang_Studios#:~:text=As%20of%202021%2C%20the%20company,and%20the%20cancelled%20Minecraft%20Earth. //Employee numbers
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_Beta_1.8 //I know it's the old wiki but it's the first result man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWdkF33Vyls&t=2s //sanity check on caves and cliffs existence
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_1.15
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_1.14
//used for the joke board bit
//Used for sheep in sky joke