MARKETING
BRAND PROFILE MINECRAFT
Mojang’s chief word offi cer Owen Hill talks to MCV about the astronomic rise of the Swedish building title
MOJANG was formed in 2009 by Markus ‘Notch’ Persson. After quitting his job at an established games studio,
and gaining inspiration from Zachtronic Industries’ game Infi niminer, Markus created Cave Game, a simple game about placing and breaking blocks in a 3D world. It was a PC and Mac- only title at the time.
A mention on Valve’s Team
Fortress 2 blog, and an article in PC Gamer brought what was then known as Minecraft to a wider audience. Soon afterwards, huge builds got showcased on YouTube - a 1:1 replica of the Starship Enterprise took centre stage. YouTube made it easy to appreciate what Minecraft was, even if viewers didn’t actually play. On December 20th 2010, it
was announced that Minecraft was in beta. Soon the awards started to roll in. An Indie Game of The Year award from IndieDB,
and a smattering of accolades from GDC pushed Minecraft even further into the limelight. At the end of 2011 Minecraft:
Pocket Edition was released for mobile and it’s not left the top of the charts since. In May 2012 4J Studio’s released a port for Xbox 360 and has since handled the PS3, PS4, and Xbox One editions. The huge numbers of players enjoying Minecraft at any one time makes community feedback hard to ignore, and that’s a good thing. Over the course of its development, the company has made decisions,
then tweaked them due to feedback from our players. Our motivation is to create a great experience for fans, whether they’re playing on a commute to work, or on a huge PVP server. Exactly why Minecraft has
proven so popular is still kind-of a mystery to us, but we’ll continue to work on the game, and try to create the best experience for our players as possible, for as long as we have an active community. And if things continue as they have for the past few years, that’s going to be a long time coming.
GAMES ADVERTISING MAY 2014: THE YEAR IN REVIEW This week GameTime compares gaming ad pressure last month with that in May 2013
2013 2500
2000 1500
2094
1000 500 00
1717 1132 496 Jan
TRADITIONALLY a quiet month, ad pressure in May increased by nearly 35 per cent year-on-year in terms of total TVRs. The most notable entrant to the market is Supercell’s Clash of Clans, with ad support recording just shy of 200 individual TVRs in May. This
Feb
equates to a 13 per cent share of total advertising across the month. The three most recent triple-A
releases – Watch Dogs, Wolfenstein and Mario Kart 8 – occupied over a third of TV advertising for May 2014. As has frequently been the case this year, King contributed
MCV GameTime is provided by Generation Media 0207 255 4650 |
www.generationmedia.co.uk
www.mcvuk.com 17 June 20th 2014 Mar Apr
signifi cantly to May’s TV advertising total, with its campaigns for Farm Heroes Saga and Pet Rescue Saga occupying almost 40 per cent of total advertising share. The number of brands on air
in May actually decreased year- on-year, but there has been an
May
increase in heavy-hitting campaigns occupying more market share. With the announcement of a number of triple-A titles at E3, the end of the 2014 is highly likely to show further growth in market ad pressure as more brands enter a very busy pre-Christmas period.
1200 1103 1008 1138 988 1330 2014
Individual TVRs
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56