In case you haven’t heard, A Minecraft Movie is a big hit. It’s been making fat stacks at the box office and inspiring fun memey trends that’ve quickly veered into ‘alright, that’s enough now’ territory when unfunny wankers have tried to get in on the act.
How’s all of that translated to attention for Minecraft the game, though? Well, accoding to data seen by The Game Business, the answer is the usual kind of impressive player number bump these kinds of adaptations tend to lead to nowadays, unless the suits behind them find a way to somehow muck things up.
TGB reports data from Ampere Analysis showing an “over 30%” jump in Minecraft player numbers around the movie’s launch, with the day after the film’s cinema debut on April 4 seeing a 9% week-on-week rise in active users. That was Saturday, April 5, with the Sunday that closed out A Minecraft Movie’s opening weekend seeing 17% week-on-week growth.
What makes that impressive is that it came as part of “two consecutive weeks of double-digit growth for a game that already boasts around 170 million monthly active users”, thanks to the two days of the weekend preceding the movie’s launch doing 25% and 14% week-on-week player number growth respectively.
Those last couple of totals were likely helped out by Mojang putting out some Minecraft Movie-themed DLC that included a Jack Black as Steve skin. As a bit of a peek behind the curtain, that was also the weekend that I -someone who hadn’t played Minecraft in ages – dipped back into the game to build a giant statue of Jack Black out of random materials for this feature. I assume everyone else was doing exactly the same thing.
Minecraft on Nintendo Switch also saw a nice bump in sales. As TGB points out, today’s big adaptations almost always have sizeable positive effect on player numbers and sales for the games they’re bringing to the big screen or TV screen.
Just look at the Fallout show last year – all of a sudden people were playing Fallout 4 again, and not just because they were excited about Fallout: London being about to release.
Have you felt an urge to whip out you diamond sword and take a FLINT AND STEEL-powered journey to THE NETHER to fight some CHICKEN JOCKEYs lately? Let us know below.