Last year, Minecraft players who were fed up with the game’s annual mob vote (which lets players pick the next creature added to the game) “unionized,” spreading war propaganda-inspired posters on TikTok and creating a Change.org petition that garnered over 500,000 signatures. Now, Minecraft has revealed that the tradition is coming to an end as part of a new game update structure.
Today, Mojang announced that Minecraft Live, its annual news livestream, is abandoning the mob vote and being split up into several smaller broadcasts via a post on its blog. The new broadcasts, described as “more focused,” will happen twice per year.
Mojang also revealed that it will release free content updates more often, straying away from its larger annual updates and sticking to smaller updates like the smaller Armored Paws update that came earlier this year.
Alongside this update, Mojang announced that it’s “focusing on long-term initiatives to ensure we can continue to evolve Minecraft long into the future.” Currently, this includes working on the native version of the game for PlayStation 5 that was announced this summer, although the blog post also hints at improvements to multiplayer across all platforms.
Mojang talks about Switch support and what to expect from future updates
In a separate interview with IGN, Minecraft’s Ryan Cooper talked about how big fans can expect the updates to be. “Well, we don’t always use size as the measurement for big. And I don’t mean to sound like size of an update doesn’t matter. I mean, some updates will be large in content size, some might be a bit smaller. What we’re really going for is the impact. We want to deliver more features and content to players based on what we’re hearing, what the community’s telling us. And some of those features might appear to be small from a content size perspective, but they will be really, really impactful for players,” he said.
“And I think that if you look at the last six to eight months, we’ve been experimenting with these game drops going all the way back to last December, and we’ve had a really fantastic positive response from our community. Starting with the bats and pots update. We moved into the spring and we had an armored paws update, which included eight new wolves variants with armor. We also included armadillo. And so we found that the response of that was really, really positive. And so those are the kinds of things that we’re looking forward to going forward. Some of them will really large and some of them will be on the smaller size in comparison, but really we’re going after impact. We really want players to be excited about the game drops.”
As for legacy platforms like the Switch, Cooper said that Nintendo’s platform is still relevant. “I wouldn’t consider Switch old or legacy. I would consider the Switch community a very, very important community. We could call it a sub community, if you will, or a platform community. So yes, I mean we’re focused on all platforms, all platforms equal. It’s very important to us that everyone receives the very best experience possible. And when things do pop up on a specific platform that requires our attention, we’re all hands on deck to make sure those experiences are great.
“And we’re also looking ahead to the future always. And so we absolutely want to continue to make Minecraft available on as many platforms as possible because we’re really a platform-agnostic experience. We want as many people on earth to play Minecraft and experience it because of its uniqueness. It is obviously a game that promotes creativity. It’s a game that brings people together. It’s a game that connects people. And that’s why we do what we do is we want as many people as we can playing the game.”
One way or another, it seems like Minecraft fans are in for some big changes. However, as the game celebrates its 15th anniversary, updates aren’t the only thing in store — Netflix also has a Minecraft animated series in the works (and, of course, we couldn’t forget the trailer for the Minecraft movie that’s seemingly divided the internet).
In the meantime, Minecraft’s most recent major update, Tricky Trials, brought trial chambers, a new weapon, and new paintings for the first time since 2012.
Additional reporting by Kat Bailey.
Amelia Zollner is a freelance writer at IGN who loves all things indie and Nintendo. Outside of IGN, they’ve contributed to sites like Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun, and they recently released a game called Garage Sale. Find them on Twitter: @ameliazollner.
