Author's note - Since I wrote this, a lot has happened in Minecraft over the years. I think my point here still stands, but the data might not back up my points as much as it once did lol.

For years, overall opinion of Minecraft and its development has been fairly positive. But recently, attitudes have started to shift. It seems like Mojang keeps digging deeper into their own grave, with the last few updates proving quite controversial. Why?

A Brief History of Minecraft

As many of you probably know, Minecraft was originally released as a small tech demo in May 2009, known as “Minecraft Classic.” The game had a very open development cycle, eventually releasing into a paid alpha in June 2010, and began to skyrocket in popularity in 2011 before reaching its peak in mid-2013.

After 2013, the game’s popularity slowly crawled downwards, as new trends overtook the video game industry. By October 2018, the game had, according to Google Trends, fell to an interest level of 18% its peak, a value that had not been seen since 2010. It seemed like this game’s time in the spotlight was over.

But then, something happened.

I don’t think anyone knows for certain what caused the Minecraft resurgence of 2019. It might’ve been the 10-year anniversary of the game, and the first sale it ever had in its long history. It might’ve been the release of the Village & Pillage Update, one of the largest patches the game had ever had. Perhaps it might’ve been YouTube behemoth PewDiePie starting a playthrough of the game on his channel. Most likely, it was a combination of all of these. But regardless, interest in the game suddenly skyrocketed to a point it hadn’t been since 2015.

Over the last 3 years, Minecraft has enjoyed its time in the spotlight. It’s been relatively consistent in its popularity, peaking with every new update released. And it’s been getting great updates too – between 2020’s Nether Update and 2021’s Caves & Cliffs Part 1, the game seemed to be on the fast track to return to legendary status.

But then 2022 happened.

The Collapse

Minecraft’s two latest updates have gathered significantly less attention than usual.

The only concrete data I have on this is that 1.18 and 1.19 have peaked at around 40% interest, rather than 1.14-1.17’s 60% interest. But I’ve got a few theories about why that’s happening.

Caves & Cliffs had a very troubled development. Mojang bit off significantly more than they could chew, especially while in the midst of a global pandemic, so they ended up having to delay the worldgen portions of the update half a year. The result of this is that we got a version of Minecraft with a bunch of half-baked features, and a later update that just fully implemented those features, rather than adding actual new content.

(Before you correct me on that and say that 1.18 added new music, that doesn’t really count – that’s not something that would renew interest in the game.)

Now if you know me, you know I absolutely love cool world generation. I think it’s really cool to see an algorithm pump out a gorgeous landscape. But changes to world generation are exactly that – changes. Changes don’t make the general public interested in an update. Additions do.

So when the Deep Dark biome got delayed yet again to 1.19, and 1.18 released with little to no actual new content, it’s pretty clear to see why 1.18 failed to garner the attention previous updates did. But that’s understandable, right? It’s just a symptom of Mojang underestimating the deadlines they needed, right?

Right. But none of the 1.18 stuff could compare to the shitstorm that is 1.19.

The Mild Update

A common community nickname for 1.19, the Wild Update, is “the Mild Update.” And it’s not too hard to see why.

At Minecon 2021 (yes I know it’s called Minecraft Live now, it’s still Minecon to me dammit) Mojang announced their new update. It was planned to add the long-awaited Deep Dark, as well as overhauling the wilderness of the overworld, with a new Mangrove Swamp biome and a gorgeous overhaul to the Birch Forests.

The snapshot cycle went normally for a little while. We got the Deep Dark, the Mangrove Swamp, frogs, etc. But then snapshots started focusing on bugfixes.

Now, of course, this would be completely normal. Mojang always goes into bugfix mode for a few weeks before releasing an update. But we hadn’t even gotten all the features promised at Minecon, and the update was already considered “feature-complete.”

There was no clarification on whether planned features such as fireflies or birch forest stuff would be added. But then Mojang released a Q&A video on YouTube and we finally got some answers.

A Disaster Response

Fireflies were scrapped because “some varieties of frogs can’t eat them.” The immediate community reaction was something along the lines of “what the fuck?” A similar situation had happened before when parrots were first added. They were originally bred with cookies, which are poisonous to parrots. Upon learning of this fact, Mojang did not remove cookies from the game – no, they changed the parrot breeding item to seeds and made parrots instantly die when fed a cookie.

Between this and Mojang’s claim that “concept art was not confirmed content” with regards to the birch forest update, it seemed like Mojang was giving cop-out answers. They clearly were trying very hard to not say “scope cuts.” And more importantly, it felt like they were being dishonest with their playerbase.

But wait! It gets worse.

The death of server autonomy

In early 2021, Mojang added global bans to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition.

In most games this would be fairly reasonable. It makes sense to prevent problematic players from causing further issues. But Minecraft’s multiplayer is played on a variety of independently hosted servers. So completely blocking access to all of them for something done on one seemed a bit…concerning, to say the least.

Even more concerning was that the bans were non-reversible and did not have an appeal system. They were like a VAC ban, but worse, as they could be issued for “negatively affecting another person’s experience.” Piss off a bunch of 12-year-olds on Mineplex? It’s mass reporting and no more multiplayer for you, buddy.

No more singleplayer, too, on some platforms. For whatever eldritch reason, on a few platforms, getting banned by doing something in multiplayer would restrict your access to your own singleplayer worlds. DRM at its logical, most concerning end – you don’t own Minecraft anymore.

Now, obviously, they wouldn’t bring this to Java Edition, the version with a much more technical, mature playerbase, that wants to be more in control of the game they bought, right?

Oh shit.

The moment this snapshot dropped, it caused a massive shitstorm in the community. Did Mojang listen and redo the system to make the players happy? Hahahaha, no.

Instead, they swept it under the rug. Minecraft 1.19.1 will be releasing next week and has already been nicknamed “Minecraft 1.19.84.”

Bonus round: Overwolf breaks the modding community

This section’s a little bit of a detour from the previous conversation, as it’s not something Mojang has done wrong, but it directly affects the popularity of Java Edition as well.

A really popular way to play Minecraft is with mods installed. The game’s vibrant modding community played no small part in helping make the game as popular as it is. And as a former modder myself it was pretty painful to see things begin to collapse in the way that they are right now.

CurseForge is the primary repository for sharing mods for Minecraft. For a good while it was owned by Twitch, but last year it was purchased by Overwolf, who promised better ad revenue rates for mod developers.

Sounds great, right? That’s what we all thought until CurseForge killed their API.

The official CurseForge app is the primary way to download mods from the site. It’s got ads in it to help support mod developers. That’s reasonable enough, but if you don’t like the ads you can always use a third-party mod launcher.

Or at least you could, until CurseForge deprecated their old API and gave mod developers the option to disable third-party launcher downloads on the new one. Now most modpacks straight-up don’t work on other launchers. This isn’t helped by some spiteful mod developers disabling third-party downloads just to be asses. When launchers try to circumvent this (such as with MultiMC) Overwolf asks them to remove CurseForge support.

Overwolf threatens Modrinth

There’s been some community dissatisfaction with CurseForge for a while now. A year or two ago some modders decided to start an open-source alternative called Modrinth. Recently Modrinth added modpack support to their platform.

A really cool thing about Modrinth’s modpacks was that they could use mods that were hosted on either Modrinth or CurseForge. So even if your favorite mod wasn’t on Modrinth yet, you could still put it in a pack. It worked great while it lasted.

However, everyone’s favorite corporation decided to shoot Modrinth’s team a message. Overwolf told them to remove CurseForge support ASAP, potentially threating legal action otherwise. Additionally, Overwolf contacted launcher developers about Modrinth, lying about their competitor’s actions to make them look bad.

This is a very bad look for CurseForge and has generally soured most of the modding community’s opinion towards the platform. However, many creators still rely on CF’s ad revenue as income, so they can’t move to Modrinth yet until they get a monetization system in place. So everything’s kinda stuck in this split between two platforms.

It seems overwhelmingly likely that we’ll soon be regressing to the days of early modding where modpacks illegally redistributed mod jar files. Definitely a shame.

Conclusion

So there we go. That’s my comprehensive list of all the reasons why I think Minecraft’s second golden age is coming to a close. Hope you all enjoyed.

I’d like to remind y’all that all the thoughts presented here are my opinions. I harbor no ill will towards the folks at Mojang – I’d imagine the higher-ups at Microsoft are the real cause for these issues. But I’m concerned that Minecraft is stagnating, and the game is doomed to fall back out of the spotlight. This game quite literally changed the course of my life (without it I would’ve never gotten into gamedev) so that’s kinda sad to see.

Regardless, I think it’s about time someone else came in to carry the torch of the voxel survival-sandbox genre. I started my own attempt last week but who knows what game will ascend to the top next? I just know that whatever it is, I’ll be very excited to check it out.