Minecraft Earth

» see minecraft.net/en-us/about-earth as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i did not play this one, and my interest in it was never the blocks. The part i pay attention to professionally is the tracking layer underneath: how a phone works out where it is and how it holds a virtual object still against a real floor while the camera shakes. Minecraft Earth was a large, well-funded, consumer-scale test of exactly that problem, run by a company with the money to do it properly. It is a useful grave for what it proves about the hard part rather than the fun part.

Mojang announced it in May 2019 at Minecraft's tenth anniversary, with Blackbird Interactive co-developing and Xbox Game Studios publishing. A closed beta reached iOS in Seattle and London on 16 July 2019 and Android in five cities that August. Early access opened in Iceland and New Zealand on 17 October, and the game was available worldwide on 11 December 2019. It was free to play, with rubies you could earn or buy and minecoins you could only buy.

The design was location-first in a way that Pokemon Go only half was. You collected tappables that spawned around you on a real map and took them back to buildplates. Then you placed a buildplate on an actual surface in front of you, at either tabletop scale or life scale, where other players could walk into the same build and edit it with you. Adventures dropped combat and puzzle scenarios into public space. Every one of those verbs assumed a person moving through a city.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was actually doing ~

Life-scale mode was the ambitious part and the reason the thing is worth remembering. Rendering a Minecraft structure at full size on a real street and keeping it anchored while you walk around it is one problem. Keeping it in the same place for a second person standing next to you is a shared-coordinate problem that phones in 2019 were only just capable of. It mostly worked. The opening week numbers were healthy, roughly 1.2 million downloads and about 93,000 dollars in the first full week, then about 1.4 million in the first week of American availability.

The catch was that all of it lived on Microsoft's servers. Positions, buildplates, inventory and the shared state between players were server-authoritative, which is what made co-op building possible and also means there is no version of this game left to play. When the servers went off, the app became an icon. Compare that to the rest of Minecraft, which still runs on a laptop in a cave with no internet connection twelve years later.

~ the year it picked ~

Global launch was December 2019. By late March 2020 most of its potential players were legally confined to their homes, and a game whose only input was walking around outside had no fallback position. Mojang announced the end on 5 January 2021 and said so plainly, that the pandemic and its effect on free movement was the reason.

The wind-down was more careful than most. A final update in January 2021 removed real-money purchases and cut the cost of everything in the currency people already had. It also reduced crafting times, so nobody was left waiting on a timer for a game with a countdown on it. Paid ruby balances converted to minecoins usable in the main Minecraft marketplace, anyone who had spent real money got a free copy of Bedrock edition for their phone, and anyone who signed in before 30 June got a character creator set. Then the servers stopped, and Minecraft Earth became the only version of Minecraft that no longer exists anywhere.

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