On September 17, 2018, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference opened at the West Bund Art Center in Shanghai. Shen Xiangyang, executive vice president of Microsoft worldwide and head of Microsoft artificial intelligence and Microsoft Research Division, said that minecraft education edition will officially hit the Chinese market next year. Minecraft has sold a total of 144 million sandbox games worldwide, and it’s worth noting that the top spot on the Chinese app stores is not Minecraft, but a pixel-like sandbox game called Mini World.
Pixel sandbox games often contain various elements such as action, shooting, fighting, driving and so on. Such games generally have large maps, strong interaction, high degree of freedom, random events and creativity. Players can move freely in the game world, so they are popular among the majority of players. Among them, Mini World is the best pixel sandbox game in China. It has occupied the top spot in the sandbox charts for several months in a row, and its global users have exceeded 100 million. Minitarworld was launched at the end of 2015, and its operation time is shorter than that of its predecessor minecraft. If we can fully analyze the advantages and disadvantages of Minecraft, and then draw on its operation experience, we can promote the healthy and stable development of our own game.
Minecraft has won over 100 million users worldwide with three tricks
Minecraft is known to be one of the best pixelated sandbox games in the world. Since its release in 2009, minecraft has won a number of gaming awards, including GDC2011 Innovation Award, Best Original Game, Best Downloaded Game, and more. Minecraft has more than 144 million registered users worldwide. There are three main reasons why the nine-plus year old game is still alive today.
High degree of freedom of play; Minecraft’s previous maps were large, theoretically the size of the entire earth, and the distance from the boundary of the game map to the center of the game was about 31% of the circumference of the earth. The game has now removed the boundaries of the game, making minecraft’s game map closer to infinity. Within the game map including mountains, plains, snow, desert, forest, river, ocean, such as terrain, also including the sky, the sea and many strange creatures, in addition the game there is no mandatory story missions, players can play a powerful and unconstrained style on the map as imagination, when scenery party, constructor and destructor are determined by the players themselves, the game of the degrees of freedom to an extreme.
The game is interactive; For example, the game provides online services, through which players can create and destroy in the game with their friends; You can communicate with NPCS alone, tame horses and wolves, and do business with NPC villagers. In addition, players can also share their creations in the game community, and find the work experience they like to download in the game community, which greatly enriches the playability of the game.
Games are very creative; Creativity is at the heart of sandbox games, and Minecraft takes that core to heart.
On the one hand, Minecraft not only recreates things from the real world, but it also does things that are impossible in the real world, such as completely suspended castles, rivers of lava, fires and ice, all created by the player. In addition to the creation of the game can also be massively destructive, moving mountains and sea, blast through the game map can be done, is extremely creative.
On the other hand, the minecraft official not only updates the material pack regularly, but also ordinary players in the game community can download and share the game map mods to increase the fun of the game. All of these reflect the strong scalability and creativity of Minecraft.
In Minecraft, it’s still mortally wounded
IGN gave Minecraft the sandbox game a rating of 9.0, citing: excellent crafting system tutorial, excellent creative performance, great multiplayer interaction, huge world, and no obvious flaws except poor graphics. This score is not too high in quality games, and it makes sense that Minecraft is no match for Minitarworld in China, because The Chinese version of Minecraft is different from the original one, and there are major problems in server, optimization and picture quality, which will cause the problem that Minecraft is not adapted to China.
First, the server. The game server has always been the biggest problem facing Minecraft in China, and the practice of shutting down the international server and locking it violates minecraft’s promise of not locking it before launching in China, generating some resistance among the player community. Leasing server at the same time, the player is not stable, “my world” open official after the server service that rent, the game will appear many times the player leasing server can’t login, error and downtime issues such as in the middle of September 2018 appeared in such a situation (test type: millet 8 SE), there is a big game server problem become the biggest failure.
Second, game optimization. Minecraft has been released for nearly ten years. It should be better after years of operation optimization, but due to the lack of long-term operation trial and error of the Chinese version, and the game itself has many bugs, the Chinese version of Minecraft has more bugs.
For example, the Bug that the player will get stuck in the air wall when exiting the super Wall, the Bug that the player can use the diamond pick or diamond axe and some bone powder to brush resources indefinitely, and some small bugs, such as fishing efficiency is more efficient in rainy days than sunny days, using milk on the animals, making the adult animals become young, etc. According to statistics, minecraft has an average of one and a half months, with 3 to 7 bugs fixed each time. It can be estimated that there have been at least more than 20 bugs in Minecraft from the public beta to July 2018, which shows that the game optimization of Minecraft is still not good.
Third, the game picture quality. Minecraft’s biggest flaw is probably the graphics quality of the game, which was mentioned in IGN’s review of Minecraft. Minecraft, without adding any texture packs, has a very jagged image quality compared to Mini World, not to mention light and shadow effects. Minecraft players can download the shadow pack, but only if they have a console-level computer to improve the quality of minecraft’s graphics, which increases not only the size of the game, but also the number of steps the player has to take.
Lessons from the past point to the road, one hundred feet pole head further
Minecraft’s rival Miniworld hit 100 million users and 35 million monthly active users at the end of 2017, topping the APP Store and TapTap sandbox category. However, with the popularity of “Mini World”, the voice of doubt is also endless in the ears, with “My World” in China not acclimated as a precedent, at the moment, the “Mini World” under doubt needs to forge ahead in the wind and rain, but from the following three aspects.
One is to reinvent the game and make it unique through innovation. The biggest problem with Minitards is that they are very similar to Minecraft in terms of content and gameplay, and there is a risk that they will be misunderstood by players, so they need a new look and new features. At present, the game is in the theme of “content is king, gameplay is in charge”. In addition to changing the game painting style, it is more necessary to innovate the game content and gameplay, such as adding more new NPC characters to the game, adding some new gameplay such as hide and seek, tower defense and so on, which is the way to solidify the foundation.
Second, get rid of disadvantages and improve market competitiveness. To stay ahead of Minecraft’s onslaught in The Chinese market, Miniworld must reinvent itself to compete.
One of miniworld’s drawbacks is the collection system. Characters and skin mounts in the game need to be collected and unlocked, but the collection speed is slow, and the only way to increase the collection speed is to recharge, which has been debated by players. Minitards can sell characters, skins, mounts, and so on directly through the mall, avoiding negative feelings about collecting and ensuring that the game makes money.
Third, optimize the game to improve the player experience. The player’s experience is an important criterion to judge the quality of a game. It is vital to the survival of the game. One of the reasons why Minitarworld stands out among Chinese sandbox games is that the game’s graphics are better than minecraft’s without shadow packs, and the art style is more pleasing, which improves the player’s experience. But as more and more sandbox games are created, the graphics advantage is almost gone, and the game should be optimized in terms of smooth game flow, fewer bugs, game startup speed and server stability to improve the player experience.
summary
Micro-innovation does not mean plagiarism, but it is not a shield for plagiarists. Minitarworld and Minecraft are very similar in content and gameplay, but minitarworld needs to add other ideas and improve them on the basis of Minecraft, so that Minitarworld can be recognized by many players and compete with Minecraft.
At present, the competition between Mini World and Minecraft is different. In the international market, Minecraft has advantages over Minecraft in terms of reputation, reputation and revenue, but in the Chinese market, Mini World is no less than Minecraft, and even has slight advantages in some areas. Overall, the competition between them will continue for a long time. Whether Miniworld can go from ugly duckling to swan in the future will depend on whether it is good enough.
Article/Liu Kuang public number, ID: Liukuang110, this article first kuang Venture capital network