Minecraft Earth: Will close in June.
Launched barely a year ago, the augmented reality smartphone game, which transposed the universe and the bricks of “Minecraft” into a title inspired by the “Pokemon Go” phenomenon, suffered from the global confinement of a good part of the population in 2020.
Minecraft Earth should have been a tidal wave, mandatory cardboard. Launched at the end of 2019, the smartphone game marked the meeting of two phenomena: the world of Minecraft, the construction game with 200 million sales, and the concept of Pokemon Go. , a game of “hunting” Pokemon in reality.
Augmented, which in 2016 saw hundreds of millions of gamers invade parks worldwide, smartphones in hand, in search of a rare Pikachu or level 30 Reptincel.
The year 2020 and the confinement of a good part of the population due to the Covid-19 pandemic have passed through this. The game developers revealed on Tuesday, January 5, 2021, that their next title update will be the last and announced that the game’s servers would close on June 30.
Like Pokemon Go, Minecraft Earth is played on a smartphone and places the Minecraft universe in reality. The players are encouraged to play outside and to meet to take advantage of all the possibilities of the game: collect the famous “bricks” of the game by walking in the street, make their own buildings, cooperate.
Minecraft Earth will be closing down in June 2021. Please read our full message below for details. We appreciate all the support from the community!
🌍 https://t.co/RqMPIwOSkC pic.twitter.com/Ph2x8isf1g
— Minecraft Earth (@minecraftearth) January 5, 2021
“ Minecraft Earth was designed around two ideas: movement and cooperative play. Two things that are almost impossible given the current global situation,” the developers explain in a blog post. “As a result, we decided to focus our efforts on other projects that are more useful to the community.”
A free game in compensation:
As of June 30, it will no longer be possible to download or launch Minecraft Earth. The next day, player data will be deleted from the Mojang Studios servers. As compensation, the developers explain that players who have already made at least one purchase in the mobile game will receive a free copy of Minecraft, the original game.
In contrast, those who have money left to spend in their virtual wallet will do this by purchasing items or clothes in the base game.
From now until June 30, Minecraft Earth remains playable for free. For the occasion, the developers have removed several of the game’s restrictions: items are now cheaper and are faster to produce.
If the pandemic due to the coronavirus certainly prevented Microsoft’s game from taking off, it does not explain its failure alone. Its competitor Pokemon Go, admittedly much more established, would thus have achieved in 2020 the best year in its history:
According to the estimates of Sensor Tower, a company specializing in the analysis of mobile applications’ economy, the game would thus have reported more than $1 billion at the Niantic studio between January and October 2020 or 30% more than in 2019 over the same period.
In the first months of the pandemic, Pokemon Go had known a series of updates allowing to continue playing without leaving home. Stay tuned for the next update.