Well my anecdotal experience is that my kids saw videos on YouTube about other kids playing it and then they wanted to play it. I have no desire to play any of the games the popular games seem centered around nearly impossible “parkour” maps. But they love it and switch between it and Minecraft. I wonder how much of their playing base is just young kids.
Roblox is overwhelmingly populated with kids. Much more so than Minecraft from what I've seen. The one big advantage it has over Minecraft is that it's easier to play together with friends from school. The kids all exchange their Roblox handles and put them on their seemingly enormous friends lists.
How some simple things cause great progress. Like the whole swipe idea of Tinder. Or the fact that WhatsApp is tied to a phone number (to which a lot of people were used to already, and had them in their contacts).
Seems like this type of brain-dead simple feature -- frictionless joining of gameplay servers from a friends list -- would be something Mojang should consider adding to up their engagement.
Minecraft is interesting because, according to Google Trends, it had finally been slowly dying out in terms of search volume for years.. (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=minecraf...)... until a few weeks ago! It has suddenly been spiking almost up to almost where it was in its peak of popularity in mid 2013. PewDiePie started playing it a bunch recently in his videos, so maybe that is the reason.. or maybe there is some other reason that it's been trending that Pewdiepie just picked up on. As not a regular Minecraft player I can only wonder.
Minecraft as a game has never progressed from where it started. There is nothing new in it (new items, new structures etc don't count, they provide the same experience, just colored differently) while a game like Terreria is done so well with fantastically structured gameplay and progression. After you've gotten to a certain level in Minecraft, the game becomes pointless.
> Minecraft as a game has never progressed from where it started. ... Terreria is done so well with fantastically structured gameplay and progression.
I would say minecraft has progressed much more than Terraria. Minecraft started as a building only game. It then added survival elements and redstone which add two entirely new ways to play.
I didn't play Terraria in its early days, but it seems like the content added is in the form of new items, bosses and areas rather than entirely new concepts.
Don't forget about the equip enchanting system, potion brewing, fishing, The End, treasure hunting maps, village raids, and most recently the villager trading system overhaul. The game is so completely different now than it was ten years ago, it's crazy.
