Why Vtubers love Minecraft: A Portrait of the Vtuber Landscape

Minecraft is the internet sensation right now, and I think most of you might have already seen it played by someone, or tried it by yourself. As one of the most popular games of all time, Minecraft sees popularity in different sectors of the internet industry, and one of them is the Youtube industry.

As a sub-industry in Youtube, the vtuber industry sees no exception to this cultural phenomenon. One of the most played games of the vtuber scene is indeed Minecraft, which is being played by small or big vtubers. But besides its popularity, there seems to be more to why vtubers appears to be obsessed

With this game. Out of all other games vtubers tried, Minecraft seems to be the most prominent one, they will always go back and play it. Let’s dig deeper into how and why vtubers love playing Minecraft. Since 2011, Minecraft has been one of the most constantly viewed video game content in Youtube.

And in fact, a lot of Youtube big names start their career with Minecraft let’s play videos, such as Pewdiepie, sky (does things) etc. After Minecraft has taken off in Youtube, a lot of Youtubers have tried to do Minecraft content, whether or not they were originally a Minecraft Youtuber, and you can still see

This trend happening in recent Youtube. Since the start of the vtuber industry, Minecraft has been the game to play if you are a vtuber. I can’t exactly trace the first Minecraft let’s play by vtuber, but the first Minecraft

Video to gain major popularity would be Siro’s Minecraft play through at early mid of 2018. Since then, a lot of vtubers have tried and played Minecraft, no matter their channel’s original orientation. However, Minecraft has not always been that popular.

After Minecraft being acquired by Microsoft in 2014, it has ceased major updates for more than a year, and only released a major update at the end of Feb 2016. Since then, Minecraft’s popularity has been dwindling, and it did not see revival until July 2019, when Pewdiepie started playing it again.

One of the vtuber industry’s major breakthroughs on the western market has also been through Minecraft. In Pewdiepie’s 64th episode of you laugh you lose, which is during the renaissance era of Minecraft as Pewdiepie brought back Minecraft from its grave and regaining popularity, he reacted to Siro’s highlight of her playing Minecraft.

This exposure had brought the whole vtuber scene into light, and more people joined the community because of this. More vtubers have been playing Minecraft since then, and it is still one of the most constantly uploaded / streamed games in the whole scene.

Although Minecraft has seen high popularity on different sectors of Youtube, vtubers’ obsession with it is on another level. Vtubers playing Minecraft has been the tradition in the scene for so long, and it’s not going to fade away anytime.

The reason why it stays in the scene and going strong for quite a long time maybe is not because of the popularity, but something more. Something that can help vtubers relate to the public, or rather, help build up their relationships with their viewers. What exactly is Minecraft?

This question might seem redundant as it claims itself to be a sandbox game. But since it is a “sandbox game”, experiences in Minecraft can vastly differ from player to player. If you ask another person the same question, you might get a different answer.

The main point being, what defines a sandbox game is what you experienced as the player. Maybe you don’t like building and like to go on an adventure, then Minecraft can be an adventure game for you. If you like building stuff, then Minecraft can be a building game for you.

Recently the academic circle has been discussing the feasibility of using video games as a medium for teaching, and Minecraft has been proven to be a feasible option. Experiences in Minecraft can change a lot, and what you experienced is what truly matters to you.

What makes Minecraft truly special and unique is its unlimited possibilities that other games can’t compare. That’s why Minecraft is so popular, it’s the creativity that this game brings to the table that truly have ascended gaming into “The 9th art” – comparable to Architecture, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, Performing, Music, and Literature.

With infinite things to do, Minecraft has never stopped amusing people, and to some extent its amusement does not fade away even through videos and streams. I think the reason for Minecraft’s popularity on YouTube can be attributed to its diversity.

The Minecraft community has grown so big because of how the developers allow for community contributions to exist, such as mods and texture packs, which brings in more diversity to the game. Youtubers can choose what type of Minecraft channel they want, and still can have a very substantial amount of followers.

People in different ages can still enjoy your content. For example you can be a redstone focused channel where your videos are solely about redstones, and still have a huge following. This is the true power of Minecraft, where everyone can enjoy the game and its videos from different youtubers.

That’s also why it’s search query are still in the top of the ranking around the world, beating other games to the ground. Another point of why Minecraft is so successful in Youtube can be attributed to its success at capturing the let’s play gaming community.

In a study, it points out that to adequately evaluate a let’s play video session, we can take a look at its 3 prerequisites: the Game, the Let’s Play, and the Comment. We can omit the let’s play and the comment part, and focus on the game part.

The study listed 10 context analysis (for your viewing I have simplified them into 3 parts): Game design and release/sales, age rating and system requirement, and perception by the public (which includes in game controls and media perceptions). Minecraft excels at basically all of these categories: Its game design and releasing

Are phenomenal, it has a large range of target customers , and media/player perceptions are very good. One thing to keep in mind is its available date is coincidentally during the rise of the YouTube let’s play gaming video phenomenon, which probably makes it one of the best candidate

For a gaming video at the time. How to relate to the viewers has been the topic most Youtubers wanted an answer to. Relating is the one of the key factors to be successful in social media, with no exceptions on Youtube.

Videos about stupid 3 a.m. calls, memes, streams of girls reading out names of donors , companies on twitter trying to act like adolescents8 are all born with the need of relating to the viewership. Youtubers that can relate to their target audience the most are obviously the most attracted

Channels to their viewers, at least in most cases. Minecraft can fulfill the need of relating, without the need to completely change your channel’s orientation – it can be a tool to adapt, to create, and to relate to your viewership. This is the same for the vtuber industry.

After all, they are contained in social media, although they might have a different target audience then the vast majority (namely japanese, and recently weebs in other countries), they still face the same problem. They still need to makes themselves prominent from the vast majority of ordinary vtubers.

Moreover, another thing vtubers like to do is collabing. Collabing plays an essential role in the vtuber culture (or the whole video / streaming industry in general), as it often shows a vtuber’s willingness to join a bigger community, and

Vtubers in the collab can help drive other’s fan base, as audiences are introduced to both (or more) sides. Minecraft’s multiplayer options allow such things to happen without adding the extra risk factor of playing a different game than they normally would and risk losing fans because of this.

Improvised collabs and incidents can happen in the Minecraft server at any moment the vtuber like, giving it more rooms to play with. Further more, Minecraft’s multiplayer function gave vtubers a way to communicate or even interact with its fans.

These makes Minecraft like a virtual community, where people in it are more than just a video game character, but like a slice of the better side of society, the one where people likes to interact with others and is having fun.

But like many other things, this shows more than just how vtubers are trying to connect themselves to the audience. It reflects a bigger scope, a portrait of the current vtuber landscape. As I mentioned before, vtubers are obsessed with Minecraft. Some play it hardcore, some play it relaxed.

There’s always a few videos or streams in the channel with the vtuber playing Minecraft. And quite frankly, it’s not going to stop. Minecraft has been the go to game, and for a very long time they aren’t going to give it up.

Minecraft have such a distinct trait that no other games can compare to, which makes it very much the golden standard game in the gaming industry. But this brings out a bigger problem: repetitiveness kills the audience, whether you truly likes it or not.

The viewers will get bored and seek for something new to watch, therefore losing viewership. As stated in the wikipedia, “It has been suggested that boredom has an evolutionary basis that encourages humans to seek out new challenges.” There’s just better entertainment for viewers to watch, they are not here to see the same

Game every goddamn day. In my previous video, I mentioned that the vtuber scene changes a lot, and partly the reason to it is caused by avoiding repetitive actions induced boredom. We can see that the trend for vtuber minecraft saw a drop at the end of 2019, where during

The same time you can basically saw Minecraft content flooded the whole scene. Moreover, the vtuber search trend also plummeted at the same time. The deterioration of the popularity of the scene might not all be associated with the sheer amounts of minecraft videos at the moment, but it definitely plays an important role

In the fall of viewer engaging power. Minecraft is a diverse game, but playing it for an extreme amount of time without changing to some other games or change the game play tactics for a moment is not a good practice.

I think a lot of vtubers know this, and they are trying to find the new diverse game for their audience, which is why we see a resurgence of other games such as Apex and PUBG. However the whole vtuber scene is still very obsessed with Minecraft, as there are regular

Minecraft sections with different vtubers. This and horror games have indirectly reflected a deep-seated problem of the vtuber landscape: they are contained to those few genres of games and videos and believe them are the sole reason be successful, which is really not the case.

This happens a lot in other industries, where the industry can’t keep up the pace of the constantly changing scene. Some of the industries might have tried to revolutionize their whole scene, but some of them are either died trying (too short-lived for the the majority of the public to notice),

Or there’s too much of a change they can’t be identified as their original sectors in the industry anymore. Unfortunately, the latter has always been the way to go. By changing yourself to differentiate yourself from the rest of the sector, viewers can find

Freshness when compared to the other competitors in the sector, therefore attracting viewership. The main problem of the current vtuber scene is, they are too afraid to change. More precisely, not yet ready to have a change, and probably don’t have the ability to.

Apex, PUBG etc. are good games to watch, don’t get me wrong. However, the current vtuber scene are still confined in the box where they still call themselves the “traditional vtubers”, where they rely on pumping out large quantities of streams or videos to fish for target audience, much like what other YouTube channels do.

The vtuber scene had already experienced an earthquake before, which changed them from mostly video-tubers to streamers, and they might not be willing to take another risk. Now is probably the peak of vtubers, where there are diversity and creativity from left and right.

But as more and more vtubers join the scene, the market has become more saturated. The vtuber scene might enter a stage where nothing more exciting can happen, and that will be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

This may seem horrible and would never happen, but I think a lot of vtubers have noticed this already and are actively trying to avoid it. In my previous video about (Kiryu) Coco, I have shown how Coco has manipulated the whole scene to a new level of diversity.

This is a good example of how vtubers should react to the constantly changing scene of Youtube, not just keep on doing the one or two good practices that they think can bring themselves new viewership. It’s only a few months into this year, but many things happened and we are seeing the

Vtuber industry as a whole is already being more and more diverse. However, I believe now should not be the peak of the scene. With new markets being discovered, and companies and vtubers being more and more aggressive

At trying to find what’s the next best trend for the scene, what we are seeing is the birth of a new era, an era where vtubers become mainstream in the anime sector of social media. Some say the take over of Minecraft and game streams might be the end of the old vtuber

Giants, but I disagree. This is not the fall of anything , but the rise of a completely new vtuber landscape. I hope in the future not too long after, the vtuber scene can gain its deserving attention from the public, and transcend from merely anime girls doing videos, into a completely

New sub-genre of itself that is being publicly recognized.