A Minecraft Moviehad a gigantic start at the box office, and that is massively understating it. Director Jared Hess' adaptation ofMojang’s beloved game hadthe best opening weekend ever for a video game movie(beatingThe Super Mario Bros. Movie) and the third-best ever for Warner Bros. (beatingBarbie).
I wrote recently abouthow impressive it is that the Minecraft brand has achieved that kind of dominance in just 14 years. What other IPs can boast a cultural cache that rivals Mario, who has been beloved since the ’80s? As impressive as that is on its own, the most impressive thing is that Minecraft achieved it with a single game.
Minecraft Is A Strange Video Game Franchise…
That isn’t to say that there has only ever been one Minecraft game. That’s obviously not the case. You’ve gotMinecraft: Story Mode, the Telltale Games adventure that ran for two seasons. You’ve gotMinecraft Dungeons, the pretty solid Diablo-like RPG. You’ve gotMinecraft Legends, the 2023 real-time strategy game. And you’ve got (well, youhad)Minecraft Earth, the now-defunct AR game that hit in late 2019, precisely the wrong time for a game about going out and exploring the real world with your friends.
Mojang evencited COVID as the primary reason it was shut down in 2021.
So, if there are all those Minecraft games, why am I saying that Minecraft owes its dominance to a single game? Well, all of those games are solidly in spin-off territory. They borrow the aesthetics and lore of Minecraft but place it in a world with entirely different mechanics. Minecraft is, well, about mining and crafting. None of its spin-offs are — except Earth, but, sorry, an AR game you play on your phone is definitely a spin-off.
…But Minecraft Is The Future Of Video Game Franchises
These spin-offs have mostly been successful — especially Dungeons, which has been played by 25 million people — but none are getting anywhere near Minecraft’s 350 million units sold. And none are attempting to sequel-ize Minecraft, either. None are working to take its mechanics and evolve them because, thanks to its constant official support and endless mods, those evolutions are already available in the original game. Like many developers behind live-service games, Mojang saw that it was wise to keep its player base focused on one game. It’s the same philosophy that has keptWorld of Warcraftrunning for 21 years, that’s keptLeague of Legendswildly successful for 16, and that’s keptStardew ValleyandFortnitemega-popular for the last decade.
Overwatch 2is an example of the frustrations that bubble up when a developer of a live-service game makes a sequel (especially one thatThanos snaps the original out of existence).
Single-player games with fixed endpoints need sequels. Open-ended multiplayer games? Eh, not so much. The weird side effect of this, though, is that our biggest franchises are increasingly likely to only have one mainline game. It took Grand Theft Auto seven mainline entries to reach the sales heights 5 achieved. Mario Kart, Red Dead, The Witcher, and Animal Crossing similarly took multiple games to reach the best-ever charts.ConcernedApe is working on a follow-up to Stardew Valley, Haunted Chocolatier, but it’s completely different from Stardew. Epic hasn’t followed Fortnite up at all (unless you count that Unreal Engine 5 Matrix demo). League of Legends, like Minecraft, has spin-offs but no sequels.
This is the world we’re living in, and Minecraft helped build it. Now, let’ssee how long the movie lasts without a sequel.
