I had quite a lot of work to do last week. And guess what? I spent waaay to much time in this silly little game called Minecraft just mining and crafting. When I should have been on the phone digging up work, I was hiding from the dark digging for iron, gold, diamonds, and firestone. When I should have been building software, I was building deep vaults and air pyramids. When I should have been fearing incoming bills, I was being scared out of my wits by creepy noises coming from somewhere beyond the wall.
Notch. It’s all your faults I tells ya!
Minecraft is an interesting little game with an interesting business model, both of which a somewhat counter-intuitive. Especially to conventional thinking.
First, the graphics and gameplay.
Minecraft uses a really basic graphical style which does run counter to conventional wisdom. Fortunes are sunk into giving games the best graphics possible. Even some casual games gave million dollar budgets these days. Minecraft on the other hand doesn’t obsess over state of the art graphics, in fact it uses the low end graphics consistently to give itself something of a retro look.
And I’m not sure if ‘better’ graphics would do anything to enhance the gameplay, which is also really simple. But in that simplicity, there are a large number of choices.
Crafting is simply a matter of putting resources or blocks into a crafting panel in a certain order and shape to get a tool or item out. Put a couple of sticks and three diamonds and you get a diamond pickaxe, or a diamond axe depending on where the diamonds go. Put some metal and sticks and you get rails. It’s really simple, and intuitive once you get the hang of it.
Similarly, dig up some stone and you get a block of cobblestone. Drop that block along with others, and you can create a building, statue, column, stairs, whatever. On my last game, I built a spiral staircase on top of a hill up 10 squares into the sky. Then built some dirt scaffolding and created a base on top of that, 28×28 squares, and then built a pyramid on top of that. Then I followed the spiral down through the earth until the bedrock to start mining diamonds.
That, I think is the addictive nature of Minecraft. It’s a sandbox, but there’s always a bit more to do. When i thought I was about ready to quit for a while I’d come across a blue block. Aha! Diamonds. The quest continues. Even my coffee got cold. (Very rare.)
The other counter-intuitive thing about the game is the business model.
Minecraft is in alpha. That’s right, the game hasn’t even reached beta and the developer is taking pre-orders in order to fund the development. This strategy has been so successful that in the days following the Paypal lockout, over 60,000 customers paid 10 Euro each to download and ‘test’ the game. You don’t hear of that kind of thing happening very often. In fact, with MMORPGs it’s often the opposite complaint made after release, “I don’t want to pay to beta test this game!” (Said in a rather cranky fashion.)
So, my recommendation?
Give it a go. It’s only 10 Euros, which is about $14 Australian. (Not sure what it is in US these days.) It’s not a bank buster so even if you don’t care for the graphics or gameplay it’s no big deal, and you get to support an indie developer.
But whatever you do, don’t try it if you have other stuff to get done.
One of the sillier concepts that goes around the MMORPG blog rounds from time to time is the idea that the virtual currency that someone can earn in a game might one day attract the icy gaze of the tax monster man who then decides that the 150 gold I earned last year in WoW, or the 200 plat I made in EQ2 by questing and selling a few rares should be added to my taxable income.
Tobold, once again, has put this spin on a recent incident in Eve Online where a bunch of players were scammed out billions of the games currency, Isk. Apparently the Isk scammed, if bought using CCPs official means of buying currency called Plesk, amounted to around 45000 US dollars if it could be transfered out of the game.
Now even though I think taxing game currency is a silly concept, and something of a stupid thing… well, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. After all, if I had an Isk for every time a government did something nonsensical, I’d have the equivalent of US$45000.
But I don’t think, in reality, that this could happen. Here’s why.
If a goverment decided that the gold you made in WoW was income, then in many countries the activities and costs associated with making that income are tax deductable. This means:
Your subscription costs become deductable. If you’re playing a Free To Play, then item shop costs become deductable. Make sure you keep your receipts.
Your in-game costs become deductable if you spend gold. Let’s say you buy copper to make a dagger, the cost of that copper can be deducted from your gross revenue before tax is applied.
The in-game costs of buying abilities, respeccing talents, and buying mounts is deductable.
Mounts may be considered vehicles, and may require depreciation schedules to be created.
Most players don’t make fortunes in in-game currency. Most don’t make all that much at all.
The thing is, if a government decided to tax World of Warcraft gold (for example) it’s more likely that the majority of players would spend more in real world costs than they would earn in-game in equivalent currency. That is, they’d make a loss. Raising crafting skills in WoW costs a fortune in gold before you make any real profit, so someone who loves crafting may actually make huge in-game losses.
These losses would then offset against real world income. You subscription for instance would become a tax deduction.
It’s highly unlikely a government would make any money taxing in-game currency earnings. In fact, they’d probably make a loss.
And in anycase, if the scammer does transfer that $45K out of Eve into real money, that does become taxable income. They’d have to pay tax anyway so there is no need for the government to implement any tax rules for MMORPGs.
It’s winter here in the land of Oz, and in my part of the country it’s been quite cold (at least cold in Australian terms, it rarely gets below 3 or 4 celsius.) But I suspect, even though it’s heading into spring, the temperature is about to get a whole lot colder, what with Hell freezing over and everything.
With the increasingly colder temperatures there will soon be flocks of pigs flying north to warmer climates and it becomes vitally important to use an umbrella at all times when outdoors.
Despite the recent fuss about some of the systems that were being used in Final Fantasy XIV, and the rather large system requirements, I’ve been kind of interested in having a look at this game since it came to my attention a while back.
But the latest tidbit of info to come across my browser has me seeing red. (See video below.)
It’s inexcusable in this day and age of borderless Internet to completely cut entire chunks of the world out of accessing your product. It’s one thing to have different distribution agreements with various companies and restrict access based on those, at least a player can still access the game just in their own region, and in any case I think that is bad business too. However, it’s a whole other thing to deny access because a player doesn’t live in Japan, North America, or Europe.
For one thing, you’ve just spent millions creating a product and you don’t want to take my money just because I’m in Oz? Huh. Dumb.
Then of course there is the region lock-in. Will this mean that when I can play your game, I won’t be able to choose the region to play in? I kinda like playing with folks across the world, and the fact is I belong to two multi-national guilds. The Halasian Empire in EQ2, and the multi-game Casualties of War. Not being allowed to play with friends because you live somewhere else sucks.
So Square Enix, when you do eventually allow ‘other’ regions to play your game, guess what, I won’t be interested. I’ll be playing a game where the developers don’t lock players out based on regions.
