Failed Minecraft Brother: Scrolls

Mojang, the study that was valued in $2.5 billion dollars by Microsoft in 2015, the studio responsible for the huge success of Minecraft, which has been sent 70 million copies He is also responsible for another game. That game is Scrolls, one that Mojang would probably rather forget.

Minecraft’s long-lost brother, Scrolls, couldn’t have had a more conventional start to life than its big brother. It was designed with a specific plan in mind, for a specific market, by a well-funded development studio, and with an audience eagerly awaiting any opportunity to play it. Minecraft lacked all of these advantages. So why was Scrolls such a flop?

Announced in early March 2011, the creative minds at Mojang described Scrolls as a mix of ‘trading card games‘ Y ‘traditional board games‘, something they felt was missing from the market. At the beginning of December 2014 it came out of the Beta development phase and was officially launched. Then just six months later, in 2015, Mojang announced defeat. They revealed that active development of Scrolls would stop and that they could not guarantee that the servers would work after july 2016.

So where did Mojang go wrong? On the Surface Scrolls had everything going for it, from a development studio literally awash in money to a massive audience that was excited to try anything Mojang could produce. It should have been a sure hit. However, what we have seen is evidence that, regardless of support, no development project is a guaranteed success.

The development behind Scrolls was scaled up for a game of its size, it’s not an overly ambitious project, spending four years in development or ‘beta’ before it was considered ready for release. The release itself perhaps hinted that the game wasn’t experiencing a perfect start to life. Mojang suddenly announced the release date on December 10, 2015. Disregarding any preparation period, they decided to release it just one day later, on the 11th. At the same time they reduced the price to only $5 dollars. Usually the price would go up, or at least stay the same out of beta…

Then there’s the much-publicized lawsuit with Bethesda over the trademark on the word Scrolls. Obviously, this isn’t necessarily a sign of poor development, but it again demonstrates problems with behind-the-scenes planning and development. It certainly would have been an unnecessary strain on the management team.

Ultimately, the issue that caused Scrolls to fail is a simple one. They didn’t have enough players to sustain the game. As the post describing their decision to stop development says “the game has reached a point where it can no longer sustain continuous developmentThis is a clear indication that their player base, along with any profit generated, was not enough. to justify continued spending on the game.

The sudden decision to release the game reinforces this theory, as their hope would have been to generate interest in the game with the announcement of a change outside of beta. But as seen in the announcement half a year later, it did not provide the result they expected.

We don’t have hard numbers on how Scrolls sold, other than a tweet from developer Henrik Pettersson that it had shipped 100,000 copies on July 21, 2013. This is during the game’s beta period, and we can only assume it grew per release. But is 100,000 copies enough to support what is essentially a multiplayer board/card game?

Assuming a very rough one-week retention rate of 15%, based on PC gaming figures here. we would be looking 15,000 players are still playing after a week. After several months, the figures are described as a 3-5% player retention rate. So hopefully we’d be looking at 5,000 players playing Scrolls for more than a few months. Obviously, this is a percentage taken from a game, very different from Scrolls, so the rates are likely to be very different. Still, it goes to show how 100,000 copies doesn’t necessarily mean a healthy player base.

A multiplayer game requires enough players to facilitate matchmaking throughout the day, and at the time of writing, the online player count is hovering around 25. This is no different from when they announced the cessation of development. The number of copies sold of Scrolls might have been considered a hit for a single player game, but ultimately, for an online game like Scrolls, the number of active players is more important. Unfortunately, this number was too low..

The lack of player retention and overall low player base can be due to a number of things, first of all, while Scrolls received mixed to reasonably positive reviews from critics, it was plagued with issues with balance and missing or missing of aspects that for many turned it into a less than pleasant experience. Released content patches such as ‘Echoes’ were designed to address this issue to some degree, but were either too slow or missing.

Second, a lack of clear communication of the developers and leadership in getting the game going. Minecraft is a very open game, one that thrived with a single player mode and a player-led multiplayer mode that didn’t require developer leadership, it grew organically with players creating mods, creating servers, and creating adventures themselves. However, Scrolls, being a semi-competitive multiplayer strategy game, meant that the developers had to take a different approach, something they may not have had experience with or expected.

Third, he did not receive the extensive marketing was required as a multiplayer strategy board game. Minecraft was a game that went viral, for a long time it was tea game on YouTube, and Mojang never had to market it as a result. On the other hand, Scrolls did not receive this free marketing and Mojang was not prepared for it. They didn’t anticipate that in order to keep a constant supply of new players for an online game, you have to market it. Hearthstone, a very similar game from much more experienced Blizzard, is still heavily marketed with ads, something Scrolls has always lacked.

Finally, Scrolls was a strategy game, a competitive game. Mojang perhaps expected the larger Minecraft community to keep Scrolls marketing-free, but the communities largely disagreed. The initial success of Scrolls came from excited Minecraft players giving it a try, but what they found was a very different kind of game. Scrolls needed a different audience, but Mojang didn’t go for this audience.

Scrolls wasn’t necessarily a bad game, and it has found a small but devoted fan base dedicated to keeping it alive. Maybe they will. In the end, though, what we’ve seen is a studio that doesn’t appreciate the full scope of what needs to be done to produce a successful multiplayer game. Maybe making it free-to-play would have been the way to go…