I would like to begin this article with a reassurance: This is not an attack on Minecraft. Neither is it an attack on the people who play it, nor is it, for that matter, an attack on the people who hate it. This article is nothing but an observation of a series of decisions, by Mojang, Minecraft’s parent company, and more broadly Microsoft, who own Mojang, that I believe will eventually lead to the game’s death. Not tomorrow, not in a month, not even in a year — but eventually.

Let us begin with the core of any game — the gameplay. Minecraft is not the same game it was, 10 years ago, when I first started playing it. Updates have continually made the game easier, adding in more animals roaming around, more villages to trade with and take shelter in, and beds to skip the night – the most dangerous part of any Minecraft play-through. Now, make no mistake — Minecraft has never been a hard game, and moreover, there is really nothing inherently wrong with making it easier. However, this change is both partly responsible for, and indicative of, two major shifts modern versions of Minecraft have undergone, compared to its older predecessors. First, the shift in tone, and secondly, the failure of recent updates to meaningfully add to the game. Neither of these things are good.

Let us begin with the shift in tone. In the past, Minecraft was a lonely game, one that depicted a world without civilization, without companions. Really, the world of Minecraft, back then, could be compared to a deserted island. Natural beauty a-plenty, strange and wonderful things to see — but no one to share it with. Oh, sure, you might stumble upon a group of natives – but they were different. Unwelcoming. Not quite inhuman, but not too far off, with odd proportions and seemingly no language between them and you. Don’t forget — when villagers first came out, you couldn’t trade with them. And don’t forget the landscape, either — recent updates may have smoothed and naturalized Minecraft’s world generation, but there was a time when it was just as alien as everything else. I remember towering, thin mountains capped by floating islands, snaking, claustrophobic caves, and floating sand just waiting to collapse. It was silly, it was obviously caused less by developer intention and more by jank, but there was still something eerie about it all. It lent itself to a world undiscovered, fantastical and strange. The music is another part of the game that’s different now. Oh, they haven’t removed the old stuff, but take the time to listen to an older track and compare it to the newer ones. There’s a difference there, a shift in tone from the surreal to the peppy and upbeat. If you have the time, and a phone or laptop nearby, I’d highly recommend putting down this article to go and take a listen. “Mice on Venus” is a particular favorite of mine, when it comes to the older tracks. Compare it to something more modern, like “Left to Bloom”, and you can clearly hear the difference. Hell, you don’t even need to hear it, you can see it in the song titles themselves.

But even as recent updates have smoothed over Minecraft’s tone into something simpler and easier, they have failed to actually add anything meaningful. I mean, it’s become somewhat of a meme at this point how lazy Mojang seems to be when it comes to updates — usually adding one new mob and a few new features each time. The last truly major update was the nether update, but even then — what did that actually, meaningfully add? New biomes to the nether, which were admittedly cool and everyone seemed to like. A single new structure. A few new mobs, mostly serving as either trading partners or enemies to defeat. A new tier of tools and armor, netherite, which are just straight upgrades to diamond with no real unique functions or abilities. For about half a year’s work, by one of the wealthiest and most successful game studios on the planet, that’s not very much. Not a pitiful amount, but less than one might hope. And that’s one of the best updates — the previous update, 1.15, added bees. That’s about it. It didn’t even add beekeeping or any serious uses for the honey and honeycomb they produce, just bees (and no, I am not counting candles as a serious use, they are a purely decorative block that is objectively less useful than torches in every way). This took them half a year to do. The changelog on the wiki only has seven entries in the whole thing. And more recently, there was the caves and cliffs update, which took them a full year to do and had to be split into two parts, just to add fairly basic features — a few new mobs (which are almost entirely useless), a few new resources (most notably amethyst and copper, which again, are almost entirely useless), and an overhaul to cave and mountain generation. How did that stuff take this long to make? Obviously, I understand that game development can be time consuming, but as someone who spends a significant portion of his life on video games, I see all around me other games, done by much smaller studios, making much bigger and more meaningful updates than the ones Minecraft gets.

So why am I so insistent in talking about how the game’s tone has shifted, and it’s updates have failed? Why am I talking about how Minecraft has changed? I am saying all this because I want to illustrate how Minecraft hasn’t changed, not really. Or rather — how it hasn’t changed so much as been ground down, smoothed over. I want to show you how, when this game was first released, it was a diamond in the rough, ready to take on any form — and how its developers have failed to polish that diamond, instead sanding it down into a uniform ball designed to fit anywhere, and satisfy noone. Now, I want to talk to you about how the game’s appeal has broadened, and how it spells the death of Minecraft.

We all understand that every game inhabits a niche, a genre. This serves to both set standardized, if informal, bounds on what the game is, and inform players on whether or not they may like said game. We all understand what a First Person Shooter — FPS — is, and many people will immediately be able to tell whether they will enjoy a game or not just based on that title alone. So this brings up the question, what is Minecraft? 10 years ago, I may have responded, a survival game. But then they made the game easier, allowed the opportunity to skip nights, and suddenly there’s no sense of survival — you aren’t building a house to keep out the monsters, you’re building a house because it looks pretty. So a building game, then. But then they added horses, and new dimensions, and new biomes, and a final boss (I’m aware this list isn’t in order) and now it’s… an adventure game? That seems to be the direction it’s been heading. But the building and survival aspects are still there, just muted, in the background. Minecraft currently inhabits the nebulous and ill-defined genre of the “sandbox” game, a game where you can do anything and go anywhere. Now, make no mistake — a broad scope on its own is not a bad thing. Many great games have huge scopes and tons of different systems working together. But Minecraft has not created enough depth in any of its parts to earn the width of systems it has. If it’s a building game, then why is the building still so restrictive? Why can I only place chests in one of four directions, why are there no chest variants to correspond to wood types, why is there no way to create custom blocks or shapes to decorate with? If it’s an adventure game, then why is the combat so shallow, why are the rare resources you find in caves or dungeons often next to useless? If it’s a survival game, then why can anyone set up a farm and a bed — the only two things you need to survive — on day one with no difficulty? In short, Minecraft is struggling with an identity problem. It’s trying to be so many things at once that it’s failing at many of them, and instead of building on the systems they already have — doing stuff like adding a use for copper — all the developers have done is keep tacking on more things that it’s increasingly hard to find the energy to care about. So why is all of this happening?

At the risk of sounding conceited, I believe I have the answer. According to a site called Priori Data, as of 2023, Minecraft had over 500,000 daily players. This is a huge number of people, because Minecraft has managed to become a game pretty much everyone likes. And so, any attempt to expand what systems it already has would naturally shift its genre — if you added in more survival systems that players need to pay attention to, it would become a survival game. If you added stuff you need to build on a larger scale than just single block crafting stations (i.e crafting tables, furnaces, anvils), it would become a building game. But doing any of this would narrow the scope of what Minecaft is, and therefore — in the short term — lose them players. Mojang likely knows this, and I believe this is the reason they keep the game so broad yet so shallow. I believe, personally, that such a narrowing of scope would be beneficial in the long term, earning them a more loyal fanbase than the current situation, where many people will just play a few weeks at a time every once in a long while.

This is the biggest problem with Minecraft — and one that will, eventually, inevitably, kill it. It appeals to practically everyone, yes. It’s incredibly popular, yes. But when was the last time you played Minecraft for more than a week or two at a time? I know I haven’t since I was seven or eight. It’s an easy game to like, sure, but a hard one to love — I can’t speak for everyone, obviously, but I find it just too shallow to really keep my interest these days for any amount of time.

And all of this isn’t even touching on the legitimately bad practices of Mojang. Despite its age, simplicity, and how many resources its developers have access to, Minecraft continues to be one of the worst optimized games I’ve ever seen. This 15 year old game strains my computer just as much as large, triple A games that came out a few years ago. The new launcher system requires an internet connection to log in, even if you don’t plan on playing multiplayer. Not to mention the various anti-modding practices the Bedrock edition of Minecraft have recently taken up, instituting paid mods while at the same time removing vital infrastructure that independent modders need to do their work.

And so, we come to the question — why is all of this happening, and what can be done about it? Well, the why is something I have already addressed in part, but allow me to elaborate here. Mojang no doubt understands that a shift in Minecraft’s genre would result in a short-term reduction in the player-base, yes, but I don’t think it’s just short-sightedness that is pushing them down this path. Take a moment to think about it from Microsoft and Mojang’s perspective — Minecraft is an incredibly lucrative game, one that makes huge amounts of money with what seems to be very little investment put into updating and maintaining it. They could change this, yes. They could take Minecraft beyond what it is and make something truly unique — but it would be costly, and there’s no guarantee anyone would like it. So, the best, safest thing to do is what they have been doing. Let the game sit, and be exactly what it has always been with no truly meaningful changes, and people will buy it. Eventually, people will stop buying it, sure, But Microsoft is a huge company — there is no reason for them to gamble it all on a risky investment when they can play it safe and make billions anyway. Now, as for what we can do about all this… Well, I’m not going to sit here and preach activism to you. I will propose no petitions, or email campaigns or marches. But, I will tell you one thing, one power we as consumers hold — the ability to vote with our wallet. At the end of the day, every company is beholden to money, and therefore, to you, the people who spend money. If you don’t like stagnant games, if you want something new and interesting — then go buy those things. If you love Minecraft just the way it is, and think I’ve been spouting nothing but baloney this whole article — then go buy some of Bedrock’s paid mods, because you probably already own the game.

I will leave you with this — at the end of the day, the future of Minecraft, of every game, is in all of our hands. Or more accurately, in our wallets.