Mineplex is dead… but why?

5 years ago, Mineplex was on top of the universe, setting records as the largest Minecraft server in history and pulling in hundreds of thousands of players per day. Today, there’s more cobwebs on the floor of Mineplex HQ than players on their server. So… what happened?

Well, it’s a long story filled with mistakes, dying games, and drama, but today, we’re diving into the fall of Mineplex’s empire. Before we get into the fall, we need to briefly cover the rise of Mineplex and see how it came to be so big in the first place.

Mineplex was first announced back at the very start of 2013 and it released in May of the same year with Castle Siege, a sort of KitPvP/Capture-The-Flag crossover and one of the earliest Minecraft PvP minigames. Over the next few years, Mineplex would introduce many more gamemodes both PvP and otherwise

To take the place of their predecessors like the MCPVP network, and through consistent updates along with fun and innovative games, Mineplex rose to the top. By 2015, they had set a Guinness world record for the largest Minecraft server with over

34,000 players on at once, and they continued to grow from that point forward, but things started to slow down. By 2017, they had peaked at just over 40,000 and began a steady decline to the bottom, and despite a few small spikes in activity, today the server sits practically dead, with

Less than 100 players on at any given moment, all of which sit in the lobbies due to dead or broken gamemodes littering the hub. Mineplex’s fall from glory might be the biggest in Minecraft history; It’s essentially been abandoned, but… why? That’s a question with many answers, but I’ll try to cover them all.

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Thank you to Yahaha for sponsoring the video, now, back to the failure of Mineplex. The first reason Mineplex fell off is competition. Something that every server has, of course, but when the concept of your server is just

A bunch of minigames in one place, it isn’t too difficult for others to do the same, and others did. Now, Mineplex has had competitors since the beginning; early on, names like Shotbow and UberMC dominated, then came HiveMC’s lead for about a year before Mineplex rose to the

Very top, with Hypixel right on their tail along with foreign empires like GommeHD and UniversoCraft. There was never going to be a clear winner of the server wars but it seemed like it would go to either Hypixel or Mineplex, both of which fought for the top spot over the course of 2015.

By the end of the year, one of them pulled ahead; but it was Hypixel. See, Mineplex was great, one of the OGs with plenty of original and innovative gamemodes, but that was years ago. They added new modes, yes, but that innovation they had at the start was never really seen

Again, and their biggest gamemodes were what kept them afloat while many of their smaller ones dropped off, only to be replaced with new modes that rarely gained a following. On the other hand, Hypixel took the ideas every other server already had and perfected

Them along with the introduction of original modes that were a bit more successful, so why stay on Mineplex or HiveMC or anywhere else when you could just go to Hypixel and get the same games but better, and with cooler cosmetics and less pesky hackers to boot.

Mineplex could’ve prevented this, just as every other server could have, and trust me, they tried; for years, Mineplex had tried to copy what made Hypixel special, but they could never do it quite as well, and in the end, we all know what happened.

Hypixel rose to impossibly high numbers, peaking at over 200,000 players last year, and Mineplex dropped into the abyss of Minecraft multiplayer, never to return. But that was just on Java Edition, so next is maybe the most obvious answer: they left Java behind for Bedrock.

In July of 2015, which was around their peak, Mineplex announced their brand new bedrock server, and it generated a ton of hype in a community where servers typically were owned by just some guy, with very little organization and innovation. When a Bedrock server took things seriously… well, look at Lifeboat.

At their peak, they were the biggest server in all of Minecraft, even surpassing the Java giants like Hypixel and Mineplex. From a business perspective, moving to Bedrock was a great move; for starters, it was a community of players far larger than Java Edition. Today, Java has just over 40,000,000 registered Minecraft accounts.

Bedrock Edition, on the other hand, had over 100,000,000 over the Windows 10 version, mobile devices and game consoles, and they were probably more active too considering Java Edition released way before all the other versions. So if you had a community of probably 3 times as many active players, potentially you could

Grow a server 3 times as big, and lots of the empires of Java Edition realized this which is why basically all of them jumped ship besides Hypixel, and even they tried their best. On top of the huge community, Minecraft Bedrock Edition was on mobile and consoles where things

Like DLC and cosmetics and buying coins or gems or skins and so on was pretty popular, whereas PC players look down on the idea of microtransactions; that meant that even with a smaller Bedrock server, you could be making tons more money than you would on Java Edition,

And these servers were businesses; anything to bring up profits, they would try, and if their 7-year presence on Bedrock Edition is anything to go by, they succeeded. Today, Mineplex PE is still successful with about 5,000 players average, but this still

Places them in last among the Bedrock server giants, and their numbers are dropping; before long, Mineplex PE seems like it’ll suffer the same fate. So clearly, the problems go deeper than just a move to Bedrock, and that takes us to an issue that’s plagued us all. Minecraft 1.9.

For those that don’t know – hi Grandma – Minecraft 1.9 brought a lot of things, but it’s mostly infamous for its changes to the combat system which were not received warmly by most of the community. I could make an entire video about why this update was terrible for most players – oh

Wait, I did – but for servers it was twice as bad. They had to make a choice: do they stick with 1.8, or do they move on to the newest update of Minecraft? Both sides had pretty compelling arguments; on one hand, sticking with 1.8 would appease

The sizeable chunk of the community that also refused to update, and on top of that it meant they wouldn’t have to worry about revamping any of their PvP modes that now would be neutered or outright dead in the water because of the combat overhaul; however, on the other hand

It meant potentially alienating newer Minecraft players that weren’t used to such a combat-heavy community, or veteran players that didn’t PvP, or PvPers that didn’t care about or even preferred 1.9. They’d also have to go without all the new blocks, items, and dimensions that appeared

From 1.9 onwards, some of which were pretty alluring like the elytra. Mineplex ended up going with the same solution that many other servers of the time did, which was to keep their server 1.8 but to support all the newer versions. The only problem is, they weren’t quite as successful at it.

Certain gamemodes were practically unplayable due to bugs on newer versions, and other gamemodes were literally unplayable unless you were on a specific version of the game, meaning that no party was entirely happy. But that leads us to the next issue, which is that Mineplex is just broken.

For years, and now more than ever, Mineplex’s games themselves have had some issues. Although it wasn’t a huge problem at first, over time, gamemodes have disappeared from the network, bled players, been overrun by hackers, become riddled with bugs, or simply

Were left behind by the staff to rot with their communities slowly drying out like Spongebob and Patrick on that really hot table. Today, even if you wanted to play Mineplex you couldn’t, and trust me, I’ve tried! I’ve been an on and off player since maybe 2019, and many things just don’t work.

I’d try and hop onto Microbattles for some nostalgia of what used to be my favorite Minecraft minigame, and nearly every game ended in either a bhopper winning or some weird knockback either rubberbanding me or refusing to move my opponent so that lava and void kills were practically impossible.

Then I’d go to Super Smash Mobs where they forgot to program the double jump right so it’d just fail half the time, and any projectile I used would just phase through the enemies without them taking damage. And then I’d try Master Builders, where the winner was always a pixel art of a Pokemon

Or something inappropriate regardless of the theme, I don’t get it, it doesn’t make sense, why does a Sunflora with a penis get 1st place for a Piano build, I hate it here. And now after all those bugs and exploits and everything, even if they were fixed, nobody’s around to see it.

Filling a lobby is practically impossible nowadays, even if you bring your friends since there’s like 10 different glitches that either kick you out of parties, don’t let you join parties, send you to different games, don’t let you join games, keep you stuck inside of games and so on.

Overall, it’s a mess, but why is it so bad? I mean, it wasn’t always like this. There’s no way a server like this could’ve lasted more than a month from launch if it was this buggy, much less grow to the very top with the endorsement of basically every

Youtuber on the planet, so… what happened? Drama. Lots of drama. Now I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert on this; yes, I played Mineplex, but I was never super involved in the community, so all I can go off of are the stories and evidence of those who were.

And it seems that things weren’t doing too great over there. TheMisterEpic made a great video covering this, and though a lot of it has to do with what I’ve already mentioned about focusing on Bedrock, it turns out that in many ways Bedrock was just as bad.

And when the Bedrock staff complained about it… they were gone. Demoted, banned, insulted or some combination of the three, even with some of the most active, respected and experienced members of the team. And drama like this and others, and yes, there’s more that I won’t get into here, also ended

Up turning away some of Mineplex’s most important team members, including one of the owners, AppleG, and a big chunk of their already struggling developer team. On top of that, Mineplex management ignored pleas from the players, censored criticism, and just overall sort of played their cards horribly.

And now, we can see where that leads. A goliath of Minecraft multiplayer reduced to rubble. A once record-breaking and tight-knit community of millions reduced to drama and fighting amongst the few hundred that still remain. An empire reduced to nothing. Thank you for watching, and have a good one. Peace.