The Same Game, Written Three Times
On the twentieth of September, 2017, Mojang stopped selling its own console version of Minecraft, and put a different version in its place.
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The Same Game, Written Three Times
On the twentieth of September, 2017, Mojang stopped selling its own console version of Minecraft and put a different one in its place. The version that won was not the PC game that started it all: it was a phone experiment one coder built in about three months, six years earlier. This episode follows how one game became three programs under a single name, and what it cost to fit them back together.
The story in short
Minecraft arrived on phones as a reduced product, not a port. Pocket Edition went on sale in August 2011 at $6.99 for one handset, with creative building, thirty-six block types and local multiplayer — no crafting, no monsters, no survival. Mojang's birthday post five years later calls it an experiment by coder Aron Nieminen, hammered together in three months. It was written on a different foundation from the PC game, a codebase that later took the name Bedrock.
The consoles were built by somebody else. 4J Studios, a Scottish studio, made the Xbox 360 version with Microsoft Studios publishing it, and it broke every Xbox Live Arcade first-day record when it launched in May 2012. It also shipped as a build about a year behind the PC game, in worlds that were a fixed square, 864 blocks on a side. By 2014 a single name covered three distinct programs — Java on PC, Bedrock on phones, and the 4J console codebase — sold across five platforms.
The 2017 Better Together update was the attempt to end that. Mojang chose the phone engine as the base, moved Xbox One, mobile, VR and Windows 10 onto it, withdrew the old Xbox One Edition and gave it away free to anyone who owned it. Switch followed in June 2018, PlayStation 4 in December 2019. The original PC game was renamed Minecraft: Java Edition — an Edition of its own name — and stayed outside the group. The bill showed up in smaller ways too: a graphics upgrade announced alongside the update, which promised 4K and realistic light, was cancelled two years later because Mojang was not happy with how it performed across devices. 1
The timeline you hear
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| August 16, 2011 | Pocket Edition goes on sale for $6.99, exclusive to the Xperia Play; Alpha 0.1 is creative-only, with 36 block types and local wireless multiplayer. 2 |
| October 7, 2011 | The game reaches other Android devices, after a delay from late September. 3 |
| November 17, 2011 | Pocket Edition arrives on iOS. 3 |
| May 9, 2012 | Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, built by 4J Studios, launches. 4 |
| May 10, 2012 | Microsoft reports it broke every previous Xbox Live Arcade first-day sales record, with more than 400,000 people playing. 5 |
| May 14, 2012 | More than one million copies sold worldwide in under a week. 5 |
| September 4–5, 2014 | The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One editions go on sale, eleven days before the acquisition is announced. 4 |
| September 15, 2014 | Microsoft announces it is buying Mojang for $2.5 billion and promises to keep Minecraft on PC, iOS, Android, Xbox and PlayStation. 6 |
| December 2, 2016 | Mojang marks Pocket Edition's fifth birthday: more than 40 million players, with the Ender Update due to take the phone version to 1.0. 7 |
| June 11, 2017 | The Better Together update is announced at E3, to unify the console, mobile and Windows 10 versions. 8 |
| September 20, 2017 | Better Together ships on Xbox One, mobile, VR and Windows 10; the Xbox One Edition is withdrawn from sale the same day. 49 |
| May 3, 2018 | Mojang says the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Vita and Wii U editions will receive the Update Aquatic and no further feature updates. 4 |
| June 21, 2018 | The Bedrock version launches on Nintendo Switch. 10 |
| August 12, 2019 | Mojang ends development of the Super Duper Graphics Pack, saying it was not happy with how the pack performed across devices. 1 |
| December 10, 2019 | Bedrock arrives on PlayStation 4 as a free update, with cross-play and the Marketplace. 11 |
| June 7, 2022 | Java & Bedrock Edition for PC goes on sale as one purchase; Mojang says the two remain separate games. 12 |
The numbers behind the episode
The first phone build had thirty-six block types and no crafting, and cost $6.99. Mojang's own account is that it took three months. 27
The Xbox 360 version sold more than a million copies in under a week, and players logged 5.2 million online hours in that first stretch. Its worlds were a maximum of 864 by 864 blocks, against a PC game with no such edge. 45
Microsoft's September 2014 announcement put the scale in one paragraph: more than 100 million downloads of Minecraft on PC alone, the most popular online game on Xbox, the top paid app for iOS and Android in the United States, and more than two billion hours played on the Xbox 360 version in the previous two years. 6
By December 2016 Mojang reported more than 40 million players on the phone version. The Minecraft Wiki's tally at that date puts the Java Edition at more than 24 million copies. 37
The migration had its own arithmetic. Disc owners of the Xbox One Edition had to have played five hours in the previous twelve months, or bought downloadable content, to claim the free upgrade — a rule Mojang said existed to separate real accounts from fake ones, with a window that ran to November 30, 2019. 13
Quotes you hear
"The first version (Alpha 0.1) will focus on the creative aspects of Minecraft." — Carl Manneh, Mojang, 16 August 2011 2
"At its inception, Pocket Edition was little more than an experiment by mega-brained Mojang coder, Aron Nieminen. It was pretty bare bones — just the most minimal Minecrafty features in mobile form, hammered together in a mere three months." — Marsh Davies, Mojang, 2 December 2016 7
"It wasn't even supposed to have multiplayer at first, and the first internal version only had an ASCII renderer!" — Aron Nieminen, quoted by Mojang 7
"Microsoft plans to continue to make 'Minecraft' available across all the platforms on which it is available today: PC, iOS, Android, Xbox and PlayStation." — Microsoft, 15 September 2014 6
"The Better Together Update we announced at E3 2017 is designed to unify the console, mobile and Windows 10 PC versions of the game under one single Minecraft edition." — Microsoft, 31 July 2017 8
"Our general rule of thumb is that if a version can play together with the others, it's called Minecraft. The original Java PC version and all other isolated versions will have 'Edition' names, like Minecraft: Wii U Edition and Minecraft: Java Edition." — Mojang, Better Together FAQ, 20 September 2017 13
"We plan on actively supporting the Java Edition going forward with updates as we always have and have also welcomed several new members to the development team in Stockholm." — Mojang, Better Together FAQ 13
"We realise this is disappointing to some of you — there was a lot of enthusiasm for Super Duper from inside and outside the studio — but unfortunately, we aren't happy with how the pack performed across devices." — Mojang, on ending the Super Duper Graphics Pack, August 2019 1
"All that glorious, unified code means that you'll be playing the same game as your pals on Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Windows 10, and mobile!" — Kelsey Howard, Mojang, writing on PlayStation.Blog, 9 December 2019 11
"To be clear, Java and Bedrock will remain separate games with their own distinctive features." — Cristina Anderca, Mojang, 4 June 2022 12
One claim the episode does not make
You will hear that Minecraft became one game in 2017. What the record supports is narrower: it became one game on most platforms, and the version most PC players owned was left outside. Mojang's own naming rule says a version is called Minecraft only if it can play with the others, and the original carries an Edition name — so by the company's own definition it is not in the group. PlayStation 4 did not join for another two years and three months, and when Mojang began selling the two PC versions together in 2022 it said outright that Java and Bedrock remain separate games. 111213
The episode also does not claim that Mojang rewrote the game from scratch for phones. Its own word for the result is that the phone version was written on a different foundation, and Mojang's five-year post calls it an experiment hammered together in three months. Whether that was a clean rewrite or a port that grew, the sources I read do not settle, so the episode says "a different program" and leaves it there.
References
- 1BBC News
bbc.com
- 2Mojang, archived\
web.archive.org
- 3Minecraft Wiki — Pocket Edition\
minecraft.fandom.com
- 4Minecraft Wiki — Legacy Console Edition\
minecraft.wiki
- 5Xbox Wire\
news.xbox.com
- 6Microsoft Newsroom\
news.microsoft.com
- 7Minecraft.net\
minecraft.net
- 8Windows Experience Blog\
blogs.windows.com
- 9Minecraft.net\
minecraft.net
- 10Xbox Wire\
news.xbox.com
- 11PlayStation.Blog\
blog.playstation.com
- 12Minecraft.net\
minecraft.net
- 13Better Together FAQ
minecraft.net
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