Minecraft doesn’t need a sequel

If there’s a game that is the very definition of done-in-one, it has to be Minecraft. Sure, it has had plenty of additions since it was launched, but it isn’t the kind of a game where a sequel is necessary. Not at all. And that’s something that Microsoft agrees on now that they’re finalising a deal to acquire Mojang and its properties.

“The community around Minecraft is as strong as any community out there,” Xbox head cheese Phil Spencer explained in an IGN podcast. “We need to meet the needs and the desires of what the community has before we get permission to go off and do something else.”

Spencer doesn’t think that a sequel makes sense, and with the Mojang deal only being finalised later this year, also sees it as unnecessary. That doesn’t mean that Microsoft doesn’t have any plans for the franchise, but they are also aware that they most likely won’t get 100% approval on whatever they do with it.

It doesn’t mean that everything we’re going to do is going to map to 100 percent of their acceptance, because I don’t know if there is any topic where 100 percent of people agree. But we look at job one is to go out and meet the needs of the Minecraft community first, and then we can think about ways that we can actually help grow it.

One such example? Unifying the entire Minecraft experience according to Spencer:

If I’m on PC I get access to the mod servers; if I’m on console or the mobile editions, I don’t. We’re looking at how do we bring that whole system together a little more. Because there are other games out there that let me move from screen to screen fairly seamlessly.

I’m with Spencer on this one: Minecraft doesn’t need a sequel. What I would like to see however, is a Minecraft with the aforementioned platform unity and more support for various servers and whatnot. That’s where the real success lies. And more blocks obviously. This game needs to look blockier than the textures on a mid-90s Doom FPS clone I reckon.

Last Updated: October 27, 2014