Grab Minecraft by the Long Tail

Earlier today my kids wanted me to watch a live event in the game Fortnite, which ended “Season 7” in spectacular fashion. So, a live event in a massively multiplayer game which morphs on a half-year or so schedule quaintly called a “season.” They found the event, involving a mass abduction by an alien spaceship, to be “awesome,” which might not have been what they said about it but that’s my equivalent for what they said about it.

I thought it was a cool happening, although I privately felt the action was not a meaningful part of the game, since it was very on-rails (by necessity), and reminded me more of a dark ride from an amusement park. Nevertheless, it brings me back to a passing thread these days: thinking about the future of entertainment and the long tail. We don’t talk about the long tail as much as we did in the aughts. This is likely because so much of that notion of the 21st century marketplace has been borne out that it’s no longer interesting. It’s simply the market.

A recent example. Podcasts, which came about more or less downstream of the release of the Apple iPod in 2001, have become a huge part of the attention economy today. They are great examples of the long tail at work because there are an incomprehensible number of podcasts on every imaginable topic; and the top examples within a given subject area can be incredibly popular, lucrative and influential; but the depth and breadth are beyond the capability of a traditional top-down media giant.

My friend, Andy, wanted to take some action on the climate crisis that also brought something new and beautiful into the world. He’s just one person, so he decided to commission some incredible poster artists to make designs promoting drawdown; he’d sell them and give the profits to a world-class environmental charity. Great thought; and I helped with some of the early ideation (alongside a team of smarter people) about what these designs might represent, ideation being pretty much the only thing I’m good at. The designs were made, the posters printed, to glorious effect. But how to get the word out?

Luck would have it that a dear old friend of his hosts one of the top science podcasts. (She was also one of those smarter ideators.) But still, the results hang the jaw—a few days after appearing on the podcast, sales of the posters skyrocketed; tens of thousands of dollars flowed to the charity. The influencer impact was so palpable and obvious, yet totally grassroots and independent. Long tail.

I mention this really just as prelude for some other observations. Going back to video games, my older son has long been obsessed with Minecraft (which is one of the greatest—possibly the greatest—video game ever). Of course, he’s not the only person who loves it—there are something like 130 million “monthly active users” around the world (MAU is always controversial, but that’s still a big fucking number). As with many popular games, there are professional Minecraft gamers who earn money creating gameplay videos on YouTube. Due to the nature of Minecraft, though, the YouTuber/Minecraft community is possibly bigger than for most other games. Minecraft is not really just a “game,” it is a wildly extensible multiverse that rewards and celebrates creativity. Players create whole worlds for others to inhabit, design complex structures and machines and create countless games for themselves and their friends to play within Minecraft.

One popular multiplayer server is called Hermitcraft. The “hermits,” as they’re called, are a changing collective of veteran players who build a new world for each “season” of Hermitcraft. There are currently 26 hermits involved in season 8. Many of these players have YouTube channels with, collectively, millions of subscribers. They tend to post personal “episodes” of Hermitcraft weekly. My kids watch a particular hermit, named Grian, an hilarious British man who loves to play silly pranks on his fellow players and create complex games and scavenger hunts for them. They have turned me into a fan—the episodes, once you understand what the hell you’re watching—are wildly entertaining. You can find Grian here.

Each week we watch his episodes, watching him build spectacular structures and explore what his fellow hermits have done. Various interactions with other hermits happen in Grian’s episodes and the incredible thing is that many of those hermits also put out weekly videos which feature those and other interactions but from their point of view. As a group, the hermits put out hours of content each week, for their own audiences. It’s far too much content for anyone to catch it all—and the point is that all of it is just a small corner of the Minecraft world on YouTube.

My kids also like movies and TV shows, books and comics—even podcasts. But I really wonder what the future holds for traditional moving image media when such a big part of their consumption is way down near the tippy tip of the long tail like this. The hermits are just individuals with a set of specific passions who have built a niche audience (numbering in the millions) from the ground up on platforms that didn’t even exist two decades ago. What they do can barely even be comprehended by people just a bit older than myself, let alone traditional media company executives who are actually still trying to parse box office returns during a pandemic.