Are Minecraft's new mobs a hedge against Robolox?

Minecraft just has their annual Minecraft Live: their annual showcase of the "big update" of the year. I still play Minecraft occasionally when I’m feeling bored and creative, so I keep attention from time to time.

One thing I noticed from this year’s announcement was the addition of the Sulfur Cube. The sulfur cube is kinda strange, it’s a mob like the existing slime, where it bounces around, but its primary purpose unlike every other mob is to take just take a beating but not to be killed. When you hit it, it just bounces around, and it also can take in an input of any block in the game, and its physics suddenly change.

This pretty cool, but it seems generally a big departure from the typical modern mobs that they make in Minecraft, which is a mob that its utility comes from the resources it generates, not the mob itself.

Minecraft gave a few demos of use cases. Almost all of them were to create mini-games like cube soccer and cube bowling. Because of this, the mob sort of doesn’t fit in the game progression for a typical player of survival. There’s not much use for it beyond building it for entertainment.

Roblox is also another creative-cube young-people-focused game that one could say is in a similar league to Minecraft. They both operate around a similar demographic, though Minecraft seems to skew older from just anecdotes. While numbers aren’t easy to get for Minecraft, Roblox has around 150m DAU and this number has been growing every month for the last decade. It certainly eclipsed Minecraft in revenue generation, as its marketplace and modding is tightly controlled, which I think Microsoft would probably love to have too.

Minecraft for the longest time has been playing catch-up for extracting revenue from users, even when it was clearly ahead of Roblox for much of the last decade. The Minecraft strategy team has been trying harder and harder to move people to Bedrock - which has a revenue-generating marketplace.

I think though for the largest time, Roblox’s edge against Minecraft is that it’s much more open ended, you can even create Minecraft in Roblox; but Minecraft’s edge is that it’s more directed, making it easier to those who just start playing are able to get it; versus Roblox requires at least some network effect to understand its value.

The thing is, with 150DAU, the network effect is strong; and every other kid (source my little cousins) has Roblox and wants to get their friends on Roblox too, and one of those big drivers is the ability to play any game in their game.

This new mob, which basically acts as a ball, hockey puck or whatever that the physics lets you, is as a new entry point for new players that helps create environments that mirror Roblox in a way. Minecraft while still a game primarily about building things, but it also is just an environment for people to do things in; we’ve seen it even in the early ages with people playing minecraft soley to do parkour.

Minecraft is platform to do anything, but it's pretty restrictive in physics, you as the user could jump, swim, build and fight, but you couldn't interface with entities beyond destroying them or toggling a switch. With this cube, you can unlock so many more concepts that will bring new eyes and mindshare to the almost 20 year old game. (it's almost 2029...)

This new sulfur cube is another step in its war against Roblox, Fortnite (to an extent) and other “sandbox platform games”. I know I’ll be trying to build a soccer field in my server with this.