Earlier this month, following Sony's surprise invitation to what is surely the debut of its next-generation PlayStation, Penny Arcade's Ben Kuchera observed what he labeled "The Minecraft problem," which he defined thusly:
"I took my son to Math and Science night at his school last night and saw three kids playing Minecraft on tablets or phones. They discuss what’s happening on their respective servers at lunch. It’s a huge hit, and an innovative platform. It also would have been impossible on any existing console."
Minecraft's unique development path, the release of a bare-bones free version followed by endless updates and tweaks that quickly turned it into a robust product for which people will pay substantial money, could not have happened on the closed-off, expensive Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. And that's a big potential problem for the next Xbox and PlayStation (not to mention Wii U), unless they fix it. Because Minecraft is the It Game of the last few years.
Now, it's always been the case that if the It Game isn't on your console, you have something of a problem. But when it would be completely impossible for the It Game to ever have been developed on your platform, that is a problem that is orders of magnitude more terrible.
The Minecraft Problem popped up again today in a fiery blog post from Nat Brown, one of the original members of the Xbox team at Microsoft. (Brown says he named the Xbox, which going by the stylization of his writing seems to originally have been capitalized like iPod.) In the piece, titled "Stupid, Stupid xBox!", Brown took his former company to task for just this flaw:
Anyway, Kuchera's article is one of those things that you read and immediately kick yourself for not writing first; I've been talking about this problem for months now but of course was not smart enough to perfectly encapsulate it into a phrase like "The Minecraft Problem." So I'm sort of stealing it by taking it a little further and introducing The Minecraft Test.
The Minecraft Test asks, broadly: Could your new platform spawn the next Minecraft? What that means, is, can developers:
- Post a bare-bones proof-of-concept game for people to try out?
- Upgrade that game instantly and freely, an unlimited number of times?
- Not have to go through a lengthy approval process?
- Be one guy working out of his house?
- Set whatever price they want, switching it from free to paid, raising or lowering the price at will?
- Start developing for your platform after paying a very low ($100 or less) fee, or no fee at all?
If the answer is "no," then your platform cannot generate the next Minecraft. Your platform might be able to swing a port of the next It Game once it becomes a phenomenon, as the Xbox 360 has managed with Minecraft, a port which required Microsoft to break some of its own rules. Will it break those rules for the next hacker in a garage with a cool idea? Of course they will not. That guy, the guy who's creating the next Minecraft-level sensation right now, couldn't get an Xbox Live Arcade slot if his life depended on it. So he'll put it on iOS or PC.
"Oh, the consoles still generate big hits." Really, disembodied voice in my head representing the comments section? What big franchises have they generated post-App Store? What new game has captured the imagination of the public at large and broken out into a big mainstream phenomenon – after 2008? I'm not saying that it's absolutely impossible for a closed-off console to be home to the Next Big Thing – I'm saying that at this point, the preponderance of the evidence is lined up in that direction, and there's serious reasons to suspect that it might not just be a symptom of the end of the console cycle.
In other words, the release of new consoles might not be the creative and sales panacea that a lot of the traditional game industry seems to assume it will be. And if new consoles do change the game, it won't be because of better graphics, or even better set-top box entertainment-hub feature sets. It'll be whether they take steps to open up their development efforts. I think any console maker that fights against this shift is trying to beat back the tides. You can't do it. The only question is, when do you finally admit defeat and open the floodgates?
Nintendo, contrary to what you might think, may actually be in the strongest position to take advantage of the crowd of indie developers. Now, yes, closed-off traditional Nintendo has been in this regard the epitome of ass-backwardness, having had to be dragged kicking and screaming across each threshold of digital evolution (CDs, online games, online shopping, et cetera).
But the potential countervailing force here is that while big publishers are kicking Wii U in the nuts and barely releasing anything on 3DS, indie developers are goo-goo-eyed in love with Nintendo. The indie developers that are out there making big waves grew up on Super Nintendo, and the teenagers who'll join them were weaned on Pokemon Red. The ones who can manage it love to get their games on Nintendo hardware, even if they know their games might not even make a dime thanks to Nintendo's horrible payment system, because they are tickled by the idea of one of their games being on the same piece of hardware as Super Mario Bros. Brian Provinciano for example is releasing Retro City Rampage on Wii (not Wii U, the freaking Wii) where it will be sent to die, just to have his love letter to 8-bit gaming on a Nintendo platform. If you ask them what game developer they'd most like to meet, they will to a man say Shigeru Miyamoto.
Now imagine if those gates were thrown open, and anybody could just start producing 3DS or Wii U games. Suddenly, Nintendo goes from having to beg and grovel and plead with publishers to put content on their systems to having to fend off an army of indie gamemakers who will freely devote millions of man-hours to put content on its platforms, and they'll work and work and work at it even if they never end up turning a profit, just because the sensation of seeing a game go live on a Nintendo platform would be such a rush.
Again: This will happen eventually. Reality will demand it. The question is, does Nintendo do it while it can still make a difference?
"Can it run Crysis?" was always the familiar refrain about someone's gaming PC, essentially asking if it had enough juice to power the big hit of the time. Today, as Sony gears up to show its next PlayStation, the question on which it and all further pieces of gaming hardware should be judged is, "Can it run Minecraft?"
