Last weekend at Minecon Earth, Microsoft and Mojang announcedMinecraft: Dungeons,a dungeon crawling spin-off to one of the most successful games of all time. Minecraftenjoys around 91 million active monthly users right now and doesn’t show any signs of stopping. That being said,Business Insiderstill asked Microsoft’s Head ofMinecraftHelen Chiang how they plan to build upon such a successful property.
They initially ask about an official sequel, aMinecraft 2of sorts. Helen Chiang quickly shot that down though, saying that it would just fracture the community, which is the lifeblood ofMinecraft:
“I really don’t think that makes sense forMinecraft, given the community. It’s something that always fractures the community…That’s why our updates our free. We don’t want to ask [players] to move fromMinecraft 1toMinecraft 2.We want them to just enjoyMinecraft.”
The topic then shifted over to the recently revealedMinecraft: Dungeons, and it was made fairly clear that spin-offs like these are where the future of theMinecraftfranchise lies. The small development team at Mojang is really working to flesh out the dungeon-crawling aspect of the game, creating an experience more focused on adventuring and story than mining and crafting. This was reflected upon by Mojan Creative Lead Jens Bergentsen:
“I would say that it’s a distilled version ofMinecraftin the sense that we wanted to focus on making sure that we made the dungeon crawler part as good as possible. Building in the game is something that we’ve talked about a lot, but we were concerned that it would distract from what the game was about. So inMinecraft: Dungeons, it’s strictly an adventure game with a story attached to it.”
Helen Chiang also thinks expanding like this will keep the community together and allow them to not just be iterative in theMinecrafttitles they create:
“The way that we’ve decided to expand — and I thinkDungeonsis the first example of that — is a way that we’re trying to keep our community together…And there’s other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do.”
At this point,Minecraftis on pretty much every platform out there, whileMinecraft: Dungeonswill arrive on PC sometime in 2019.
