Minecraft devs say no to Generative AI, Free-to-Play, and Minecraft 2

Minecraft is one of the most successful games ever made, and it shows no signs of slowing down soon. When a game gets that popular, there’s always a danger that things will take a turn for the worse, and fans might be concerned that controversial features will creep their way into the game at some point. According to the Minecraft Vanilla team at Mojang, fans should rest assured that they’re sticking to what works.

During a recent interview, IGN had the chance to speak with Ingela Garneij, the executive producer of Minecraft Vanilla, as well as game director Agnes Larsson. When asked about the possibility of altering Minecraft to adopt current trends such as AI, or a free-to-play model, they said there were no such plans. They also indicated that there’s no official Minecraft sequel in the works, and probably won’t be any time soon. Below, read the team’s full responses and thoughts on each subject.

On Generative AI:

Garneij: “Here for us, just like Minecraft is about creativity and creating. I think it’s important that it makes us feel happy to create as humans. That’s a purpose, [it] makes life look beautiful. So for us, we really want it to be our teams that make our games.”

Larsson: “For me, it’s the thinking outside of the box part. This specific touch of: what is Minecraft? How does it look? That extra quality is really tricky to create through AI. We even try to have remote teams sometimes and guide them in building things for us, which has never worked, because you have to be here working together face-to-face. I mean creativity is… you need to meet like this as a person, as a human to really truly understand the values and principles and the ecosystem, the lore, everything. It’s so massive Minecraft, it’s a planet, it’s massive.”

[Mojang, IGN]

Garneij: “Yeah, it doesn’t really work with the way we built it. I mean we built the game for a different purpose. So monetization doesn’t work in that way for us. It’s a purchase of the game and then that’s it. For us it’s important that our game is available for as many people as possible. And so I think that’s a very core value that it should be accessible for everyone. It’s the best deal in the world.”

Larsson: ”I mean for me, it’s part of the important values of Minecraft. I think it’s become such an important thing of what Minecraft is and the perfect culture and values, and I think we all here can agree on that. It’s a thing for the game and it’s one part of what makes the game strong. It has strong values.”

[Mojang, IGN]