Minecraft has enjoyed runaway growth and success over the last couple of years, but if you don’t have kids, it’s probably completely under your radar. Learn how Minecraft’s quirky, retro looking, and unstructured game play, social dynamics, and meteoric rise to popularity can teach you about the new and emerging rules of marketing.

Minecraft is unflinching in its view that the game is simply “about breaking and placing blocks.” Seems simple enough, and there aren’t really many rules. To understand what it’s all about, a helpful shortcut is to think of it as the game that Lego should have, but sadly didn’t, create.

In-game activities include building, exploring, gathering, crafting, fighting the occasional monster, and for the non-vegetarians punching the odd chicken, pig, or cow. The idea is to conduct these activities to ensure that your physiological needs are met, and that you are safe from harm. Once you’ve got that down, you can move up Maslow’s pyramid to enjoy socialization, limitless creativity, and unlimited grunting.

The hallmark design feature of the game is its decidedly retro commodore 64 world. Its various landscapes, creatures, and structures are all cut from the same low-res block factory that gives the game that quirky, nostalgic aesthetic.

But make no mistake, in four short years Minecraft has sold over 33 million copies, influenced post scarcity economics theory, laid a claim to potentially transform education as we know it and even helped a class of 4th graders stay in touch with a deported child.

But what does any of this have to do with marketing? To answer that question, let’s explore five ways Minecraft can teach us about marketing.

1. The rise of fan marketing

As Joe Pullizzi points out, the most recent Minecon (the Minecraft conference of over 7,500 fans, duh!) has sessions on building your own YouTube channel, developing a musical parody in Minecraft and tips on how to grow your community.

In other words, while Grand Theft Auto spent $120 million on marketing its latest release, Minecraft fans are being taught how to create and market promotional content themselves. One modern day Socrates is Minecraft YouTuber, SkydoesMinecraft. His nearly 7 million strong YouTube army, almost as big as Justin Bieber’s, means his daily videos enjoy a lot of views; 1,419,734,267 to be precise.

No wonder there was a session on creating musical parodies. Think of any popular song, and there will be a Minecraft parody of it. They are the perfect combination of lyrics and game footage typically capturing some mundane aspect of Minecraft that only the players could possibly care about. Searching “minecraft parody” in YouTube yields almost 4 million videos. This Usher parody is at 121 million views and counting (yup, 121
million) and is my son’s favourite. He accounts for probably 1,000 of those views.

Try to translate that into a TV ad buy. In today’s world, savvy marketers are focused on content marketing. This, in and of itself, is a big opportunity that many are only beginning to take advantage of. Minecraft shows us that you can level up exponentially by giving your customer the tools and knowledge required so they can create and publish content that promotes your product, and to ensure you can align your product’s needs with their own. The trick is, ensuring that it’s something they’d actually want to do.

2. Disruption comes in unique ways

Minecraft is plain and utilitarian in nature. When you talk about how it works, it doesn’t sound very exciting or cutting edge. We’ve built our devices for HD and Retina displays for which Minecraft has no need. While most games are focused on leaping over the uncanny valley with true as life graphics and game play, the only thing sexy about this game is whatever exists in the player’s mind. Another “zag” is that the game argues against gamification. Yes, there are some real high level objectives, but the game is not about levelling up, which makes its rise all the more staggering.

The pixels are fat and blocky and players communicate via an old-fashioned command line interface. Taking a cue from coding culture, commands are prefaced by a ‘/’. Minecraft teaches us that it’s okay to go against the grain - to counter intuitively be disruptive by being less advanced. It also gives us license to avoid what is “tried and true.”

3. Open beats closed

Unlike the closed systems of many games, Minecraft is completely open and extensible. People can freely run their own Minecraft servers and there are thousands and thousands of them. I had to stretch the bounds of my own code and IT knowledge to set one up. With a codebase completely open, many enthusiasts create their own mods and custom plugins, adding any features and functionality they want or like. Fans are also free to create their own texture packs (what the various worlds look and sound like) and skins (what your avatar looks like).

Branding experts have long told the world that brand isn’t what the company or agency says it is, but as Marty Neumeier notes in the Brand Gap, “a brand is a gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.” Minecraft has taken this idea of “Minecraft isn’t what we say Minecraft is, but what our community says it is” to a new level - a decentralized brand model where marketing, code, and enjoyment are all left to the users.

4. Play anywhere

Once you’ve got something, make sure it works on and is optimized for multiple channels. Minecraft works on desktops (windows, Mac, and Linux), iOS, Android, and Xbox. Each platform has slightly different game play, emphasizing the features, and taking into account the audience of that platform. For example, the Xbox version offers split screen game play, so two players can play simultaneously. Minecraft also recently announced that it would begin to offer built-in streaming of game play via Twitch. While this is not unique to Minecraft, it’s a big deal, allowing anyone to broadcast his or her Minecraft games live over the Internet.

Yes, they want to share their gaming with each other. While console games are played by more than one person on the same screen, Minecraft is the future of community gaming. Make your content available on as many channels as you can, as long as your target audience is there. And think about who they are and how they behave on that channel.

5. Many ways of being right

While much of this article talks about how simple Minecraft can be, it can also be deceptively complex. Many players interact with it on a basic level; growing food and building simple structures. Others go much deeper, down other unique paths. For example, you can mine something called redstone, which conducts electricity and can be used to build basic and complex circuits. Using this, players have built everything from clocks, to calculators, to fully functioning 16 bit virtual computers.

All of this comes from the game’s inherent lack of rules and structure. There is no right way to accomplish a given task. Rather, the whole point is to be about what you need to do to accomplish a goal. In a world where you can do things many different ways, it doesn’t have to be the best way; it just has to get done. Said like a true software developer. This allows for different user groups, tastes, and preferences allowing your audience to go as deep with your brand as they want.

There are lots of articles out there about how Minecraft has become successful despite its complete disregard for marketing. This isn’t the lesson I take from the game and its quick rise. Minecraft is just a great example of the new way to market and create a community.

Marketers should keep watching closely, lest they become the creeper or the unwitting chicken that gets punched in the face.

 

By Sandy Fleischer, Managing Partner at Pound & Grain. 

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

comments powered by Disqus