Timed Essay Question 1

 

In this essay, I’m going to investigate how audience interaction influences the production of video games. I am going to use evidence from Minecraft in my answer.

Minecraft first began with a very niche audience that was mainly made for programmers to mess around with. These players were then playing it for entertainment and had fun playing the game (uses and gratifications theory). They would then be likely to share this with their friends and encourage them to start playing it as social interaction. This then acts as free advertisement for the game to get more players and in turn make them more profit from sales which then leads to it getting more popular and thus more players.

With an increase in platforms such as YouTube, players then began to become prosumers by uploading their creations for other people to try to copy or just watch for entertainment. They may then discuss what they think could be improved in the game and the developers can then take this into consideration as if they improve the game to what people want, they are more likely to get new players as the game is being improved to suit the players. This creates an active audience who are involved in the development of the game and the decisions as to what needs adding etc. People also wanted to play with their friends that play on other consoles, so they introduced cross-platform to enable more people to share ideas and play together etc. This is also a way for the developers to make more money by also making the pocket edition for phones and tablets. The players then feel as though they are getting more out of the money they spent on the game.

There is now merch you can buy with Minecraft on it such as T-shirts, mugs, posters etc, which has helped the developers to make more money so that they can invest more money back into their game to improve it further. This is more likely to appeal to the younger target audience as they are more social at that age and are more likely to show their friends what they got (uses and gratifications theory). This then means that the game can be spread to other children who could play this game as they may not see it advertised etc, like an older audience would. 

Due to the increase in popularity of the game, Microsoft bought them out for $2.5 billion and are able to invest more money into the game which will encourage more players to play the game as more can be done as they aren’t restricted by money or number of developers because they can hire more people.