I’m not quite sure what to think about that, if it’s a good thing, a bad thing, or somewhere in between.
Minecraft is one of the most iconic games ever, with difficulty ranging from no sweat (Peaceful) to unbelievably nightmarish (not Peaceful), meaning that literally anyone at all can play it. It has a Creative mode where it’s possible to create awe-inspiring works of art and truly ingenious machines. Every bit and block can be created, altered, or changed. There’s an entire encyclopedia’s worth of tools, items, enemies, animals, effects, terrain types, biomes, and weapons. There’s tons of cool stuff that can be done, from massive mob grinders to ludicrous TNT stacks. It’s probably the most modded game ever (I’ve seen everything from tornadoes to blind-luck blocks to superweapons). And _there is new stuff all the time (and some of it actually makes gameplay more convenient!).
So…yeah. Kinda what I expected.
Good thing? Bad thing? It’s a thing. Don’t gotta be no more than that.
My son leaned how to speak English from Minecraft videos. You’d think he’d learn English from me, or maybe from school, but nope. It was the videos.
Minecraft is pretty fun. If you ever liked playing with Legos, it’s like doing that but in a way that you are using them to build shelter and tools as you fight and explore. It’s fun and it’s amazing what you can do if you use your imagination or learn tricks. Like building an indoor hydroponic farm in a cave using torches for light and your own irrigation system. Or building a moat outside your door as a downhill stream that sweeps enemies into a pit where they’ll be stuck until you or the sun kills them. I even once built a functioning elevator using red stone switches and pistons (it took many hours but when I finished I felt like I’d performed a miracle). I get the appeal big time.
I don’t get watching videos about it. I will watch now and then for tips but I don’t understand watching some chatty rando play a game for two hours when I can just go play it myself. Yet my daughter watches them obsessively. To be fair, she’s 7 and struggles to play it herself (at least in Survival mode) but older kids and adults watch them too. I just can’t see what’s entertaining about that.
From what I understand, Minecraft was built to be social, to need to talk with others to learn how to play. And one of the ways that is accomplished is through YouTube. Plus then you add on the people who just enjoy watching people play games, just like we did when we were kids.
It thus does not surprise me at all that is has so many views, given Minecraft’s popularity and the amount of view YouTube gets as a whole.
I’m not sure if it’s a good thing, but I can’t really think of a way it could be a bad thing.
Fortnite can’t be far behind.
It probably is way behind. Yes it was popular but not for the time Minecraft is. Also Minecraft is unique in it’s category with only copycats, fortnight is just one of many FPS’s.
Yes, but ironically if playing single player, it can be one of the loneliest games ever made that people (and myself) have reported feeling while playing at times. It’s an entire world - larger than the earth + 2 other dimensions (equally as large), where there is no one like you that you will ever know.
A trillion is a big number. 100 million people watched 10,000 videos each? Or a billion people each watched a thousand videos? That seems high.
43 Minecraft videos have been posted in the last hour.
That means over a 1,000 will likely be posted today.
That’s around 365,000 videos per year.
And MInecraft has been available for over a decade. So we’re looking at at least 3,650,000 videos.
It’s very possible, and if not for Fortnite, probably would have happened sooner.
There are 140million user accounts. But you can’t really assume all of them have watched video. But then again I’ve watched a few and I’ve never played minecraft.
So maybe something like 200 million unique people have watched a Minecraft video and the average viewer has watched 5,000 of them over the last decade? Probably low on the number of viewers and high on the average number of videos.
Also remember that to count as a view on Youtube I don’t think you have to actually watch the whole video. I know my boys “surf” through Minecraft videos very quickly, watching maybe a minute of each one until one catches their attention. Maybe somebody can correct me on what it takes to count as a “view”.
My daughter may well have accounted for about half of them. Ok, I exaggerate, but she used to watch these things a lot. The videos were someone playing Minecraft, and talking about what she was doing. I don’t see the appeal, but I don’t play the game either.
Youtube is secretive about what constitutes a ‘view’ to prevent presenters from gaming their counts.
I think that sharing information and being social are quite different. Watching video and/or reading the wiki are basically required to play Minecraft, true, but I wouldn’t say that’s a social activity. You can play multi-player but I think it’s probably more common to play alone.
How long have you been on this message board?
You interact on a message board. You don’t interact by reading wikipedia.
No, but you do interact on YouTube. That’s why they have comments and chat.
My kids watch untold numbers of Minecraft videos. There’s a large variety of them. Builders that show you how to do something. Builders that show you how to glitch the game. Speed runs to do this or that. Death matches. Soap operas. Even more stuff that I don’t know enough to categorize.
And that’s all for baseline vanilla Minecraft. It’s trivially easy to switch your Minecraft to any previous version. So multiply the videos by number of versions. And there’s lot of mods, so multiply again by non-standard versions.
You get spend your whole life watching only Minecraft videos on youtube.
Don’t forget flyby views of large, 3D works of art.