Mojang Studios Seeks New Revenue Sources Amidst Slow Game Industry Growth
TapTechNews July 4th news, as the growth of the game industry slows down, the globally popular Minecraft studio, Mojang Studios, is seeking new sources of income beyond players.
Mojang Studios' CEO Åsa Bredin said that they are exploring cooperation opportunities in peripheral products, education, and content streaming media and other fields. In addition, a film adaptation work distributed by Warner Bros. and scheduled to premiere in April and a Netflix series that is being produced are also planned.
Bredin said in an interview in Tokyo on Thursday that among the fans of this game series that has existed for 15 years, there are even some people who don't play games, but they still want to be a part of the entire Minecraft world, We hope to meet the needs of more people through a series of experiences.
Belonging to Microsoft, Mojang has turned Minecraft from a single-person project into a global service with more than 100 million monthly active users. Bredin revealed that the revenue of the studio's consumer goods business (including clothing, plush toys in the claw machines, etc.) has doubled in the past two years.
TapTechNews noticed that Mojang's move is similar to the attempts made by Nintendo and Sony Interactive Entertainment in recent years to expand the attractiveness of the game IP, as the spending in the entire game industry is in a stagnation period. After the great success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Nintendo is developing a live-action movie based on the The Legend of Zelda series; while Sony has adapted The Last of Us into an HBO series and created games based on the Spider-Man movie.
Minecraft is one of the few Western games that has achieved mainstream status in Japan and is also one of the favorite games among primary school students in the country.
By contrast, Microsoft's Xbox game console has struggled in Japan, the world's third-largest game market. Last year, Microsoft hired a PlayStation veteran in the hope of winning market share in Sony and Nintendo's home turf.
Bredin said that Mojang has already adopted artificial intelligence to help review chat content and game content as the game is for players of different ages. But she also added that the wider impact of artificial intelligence on the game industry remains to be seen.
We believe in artificial intelligence, and I think in the long run, we will see a lot in this area, Bredin said, adding that game production will still be an art that requires creativity, Although artificial intelligence is integrated into the tools, we still value talents very much.