What's So Great about Minecraft?

With over 300 million copies sold worldwide, Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time across all platforms.

#1. The price-point

In its infancy, Minecraft was only $14.00. Nowadays, after an incredibly generous amount of content-addition and fixes/patches throughout the years, it's still only $30. Getting a game with thousands of hours (Or virtually limitless) of replayability for less than half the price of most AAA titles is a nuclear-level bang for your buck.

#2. The replayability

I can tout the replayability of Diablo II all I want, but even I won't deny that Minecraft has it beat in that department and it's not even close.

Minecraft runs so lean on graphical performance that it can do things other games can't even dream of doing, like create a practically infinite-size (Reaching the "edge" of a world is impossible without modding or glitching the game), randomly-generated, fully-interactive, sandbox world.

I honestly can't even consider trying to estimate of how many hours I have put into Minecraft. It is surely second only to Diablo II, and that is considering that I started playing Minecraft ten years later.

#3. Game-play first, aesthetics second

Minecraft is the epitome of games that prove that the best games put game-play ahead of graphics.

You would think that suits heading AAA companies would take notes from Minecraft's titanic untouchable success, but no. Despite titles like Roblox & Balatro demonstrating the power of this approach, and that Minecraft wasn't just a one-off fluke, they still keep their heads buried in the sand.

I suppose the answer may lie in how much harder it may be to find talent that understand the science of good game-play vs graphic design talent that can just make a bad game look good.

#4. It's a sea of dopamine to tap into

Minecraft's learning curve is smooth & rich perfection. Nearly everything that you learn is immediately applicable in a way that improves your experience, which is how dopamine (One of the "happy chemicals" in our brain) is released, as far as gaming goes.

The first time I started a survival world, I was just planting crops all willy-nilly. Then I discovered that water irrigates farmland blocks and started planting along water sources. Then I learned that the irrigation reaches out 4 blocks from the water, so I put some thought into what, for me, would be the best farm layout for efficiency and convenience. In each instance of putting what I learned to use, I was hit with a dose of dopamine.

In other words, this game has a way of making you happy over and over and over again.

#5. It lets you break it

Although since Microsoft acquired Minecraft, they have patched some of the "methods" of trivializing the game's difficulty (Namely changes to how villagers work), the game is still chock-full of ways to break it.

The most notable and iconic method is that of the infinite water source. Simply fill a 3-wide hole with buckets of water and as long as you pull water from the middle one, it never empties. This is convenient for a number of things, particularly when proximity is needed.

Another example also centered around water: With enough practice, you can negate any fall damage by dropping water from a bucket onto the block you are about to land on.

There are also mechanical blocks and a sort-of "wiring mechanic" via Redstone that allows you to design and build simple or complex machinery. This leads to a vast number of things capable of being automated, including farming, fishing, XP farms called "Grinders", and so on.

Most developers would see these things as unacceptable exploits and be patched immediately. Minecraft developers, however, went

"So long as it is fun, let them eat cake".

It's amazing what a game that merely offers a world of freedom can do.

#6. It does "Lego's" better for way less

There's a reason that Lego has pivoted towards modeling and reproductions (Like Lego Millenium Falcons) rather than sand-boxing. It's because Minecraft stole that market.

With how absurdly expensive assorted finite Lego's are, they can't compete with the infinitum that Minecraft offers for $30.

Minecraft will inevitably be considered the greatest video game of all time for probably a century and despite my devotion to Diablo II, far be it for me to question the merit in that.