Minecraft players start "revolution" against Mojang, demanding bigger Minecraft updates

Hundreds of thousands of Minecraft players are downing pickaxes and revolting against what they feel to be Microsoft and Mojang's stingy approach to updating the decade-old sandbox building sim. The trigger is this year's Minecraft Mob Vote, a community ballot to decide which of three creatures will be added to the game. Many Minecrafters feel the Mob Vote (which has extended to potential new Minecraft biomes in the past) is needlessly parsimonious, and cynically divisive: given Mojang's current headcount and Microsoft's resources, why not add all three mobs to the game, rather than asking players to do battle over scraps? And now, those players are trying to shut the whole thing down.

Minecraft player Holly Mavermorne has started a Change.org petition calling for the Mob Vote to be scrapped, and for Mojang to "keep up the content frequency that made Minecraft famous". At the time of writing, the petition has attracted a little under 350,000 signatures. "The Mob Vote generates engagement by tearing the community apart, leaving fantastic ideas on the cutting room floor, and teasing content that will never be seen in the game," Mavermorne writes on the petition page. "That, mixed with the fact that Mojang somehow releases less content WITH Microsoft's backing than they did without, means players see minimal content to the game they love, and watch as possibly the one thing to get them to play again is ripped from them."

"Many have expressed their discontent with the Mob Vote in the past, with fan favorites like the Moobloom not making it into the game, and with content creators mobilizing their fanbases to vote for the least popular option for the joke of screwing over the other voters," Marvermorne continues. "This shows that the mob vote is inherently flawed.

"Lastly, Minecraft made its popularity due to its regular updates and large amounts of content. This was back as early as 2011. Now, Minecraft is not only the highest selling game ever released, but has the financial backing of the massive corporation Microsoft. Despite this, players only receive a single, very small content update each year. The Mob Vote teases at some of that content, only for a third of what was teased to make it in, further decreasing the content of the update."

Marvermorne's petition has been shared widely on TikTok, and has kicked off a landslide of parodic Minecraft protest art, often mocked up to resemble pieces of Communist revolutionary propaganda. There are so many now that "2023 Minecraft Mob Vote Revolution" has its own page on Know Your Meme. It's an amusing show, if worryingly reminiscent of Epic's efforts to style themselves Champions of the People in their openly astroturfed #FreeFortnite legal battle with various storefronts over the right to sell things within their games.

All this comes during the build-up to Minecraft Live this weekend, when Mojang will share details of Minecraft update 1.21. If the latter update is meaty, I suspect it will put many of the complaints to bed. But there is definitely a longer-term grievance at stake here between Mojang and their community.

Personally, I would very much like to see larger Minecraft updates - to be specific, I really, really want some kind of proper maze generator to be added to the game's terrain algorithms, with options such as number of routes, shapes and so forth. I would agree, as a player, that today's Mojang should be prioritising chunkier additions to the game, rather than the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach of doling out individual new mobs, skins and the like. Marvermorne's point about fomenting dissension is fair, too, though I imagine Microsoft are even now looking at the traction this year's Mob Vote is getting and thinking "our work here is done".

But I also think that the argument that Mojang's greater headcount and resources today should convert straightforwardly into bigger, more frequent updates is a touch disingenuous. It sabotages itself by reducing things to the ratio between some arbitrary numbers on paper. It's often complained that modders add things to Minecraft faster, but modders do not have to worry about evolving and maintaining a vast corporate platform with tens of millions of players in many countries, split across dozens of devices and stores, with teams in every region and department butting heads over the direction of the game. Mojang used to be quicker because they didn't have to worry so much about the bigger picture (some would argue that they should have worried more - many of Minecraft's grander community controversies, like the 2014 EULA fracas, stem from Mojang not having a clear idea of how exactly people were playing Minecraft).

I'm mixed on the version of Minecraft we have today. I much prefer the weirder, indie Minecraft of yesteryear, together with the many, parallel incarnations of Minecraft that are kept going by modders like Direwolf and servers like the amazing Autcraft. I am deeply suspicious of Microsoft's input on the game. I'm sure there's a pitch somewhere within the parent corporation for a Minecraft Metaverse update, boasting crypotocurrency integration and NFTs - all the many demons of web3. But I think the justifiable anger about Minecraft updates needs to dig deeper than simply pointing to Mojang's current team size and saying "give us more".