The Games Of The Future Aren't Just Games, They're Billion Dollar Ecosystems

What Destiny and Microsoft’s acquisition of Minecraft say about the future of gaming.

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

One is a $500 million dollar blockbuster, a sure-thing atom bomb of hype and polish from one of the gaming industry's most powerful and storied studios. It recouped its budget on its first day of sales.



The other is the definitive indie success story, a quirky Swedish side-project gone supernova, a game that steadily built a massive following—and massive profits—via word of mouth. It's sold more than 80 million copies.



I'm talking, of course, about the two games dominating the conversation about games this week: Destiny, the first new game in seven years by the creators of the mighty Halo franchise, Bungie; and Minecraft, the digital Lego set made by the Stockholm company Mojang, which sold today to Microsoft for 2.5 billion dollars. Superficially, these games don't have much in common, besides success. Destiny is a first-person shooter set in space, that hoariest of game types, and looks like, well, 500 million bucks. It may be one of the most visually beautiful games ever made. Minecraft is, let's say, not a looker, a blocky, pixelated toolkit, the simplicity of which bespeaks its humble origins. And its basic unit of play, building, would seem totally opposed to the basic unit of the guns-and-explosions. Destiny is about destruction.

Bungie

Of course, Microsoft hasn't just bought a company and its game. They've also acquired a vast, organically built, fervently devoted fan culture, one that is dauntingly, beautifully complex. Any given one of the thousands of active Minecraft servers might be best thought of as a kind of social hub, a collaborative science project, or a competitive computer game (and any given one might be all three!). And it's a fan-driven universe that is constantly refining and updating itself, with player created mods, graphics upgrades, and, crucially, for-sale content packs on the big online stores run by Microsoft and Sony. Minecraft is never finished per se; it's an ongoing service, subscribed to by millions, and whoever owns and distributes it can sell (or give) new features to its subscribers in near perpetuity.

(And look for the conversation about the acquisition to turn into a conversation about player fears that there will be a lot more selling than giving. Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson, in a resignation letter released concurrently with the announcement of the sale, seemed to suggest as much, writing, "I'm not an entrepreneur" and "It's not about the money.")

For those inclined to scoff at Mojang's price tag, there's precedent, though not in gaming. Paying top dollar for the native audiences in a coveted social ecosystem is the tech business trend of the last few years. Think of Facebook buying Instagram, or Yahoo buying Tumblr. The latter deal, especially, has shades of Microsoft and Mojang, a legacy tech giant grabbing the eyeballs and credibility of a swelling startup.

While Minecraft is bursting with more sheer stuff than any given player could conceivably see in a playing lifetime, the consensus on Destiny, one week after its release, is that it feels a little empty. Critics have groused that the plot is wanting, that the main story isn't long enough, that the multiplayer parties aren't big enough, that the missions are repetitive and so on, and so forth. All of these criticisms are right. They may also be missing the point.

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