Can Minecraft Change the Gaming Industry?

An anonymous reader writes "Is Minecraft really changing the gaming industry fundamentally? This author certainly thinks so, and even goes so far as to consider Minecraft's world manipulation a paradigm shift along the lines of 3D-gaming during the early '90s. 'Every block in the game is available to pick up and reallocate. We can tear down and build up. The neat thing is that future games does not need to be as liberal, but they will need to consider how they can make the environment a hell of a lot more manipulable. Now, this is quite a bit too simplified and the vast majority of games must not feature a shovel worthy of digging to the center of the earth, but giving the user power over everyday things (still in game worlds) will be a worthy challenge to consider.'" Minecraft may give us power over everyday things in the real world, too.

Comments

Re:Every block in the game is available to pick up

[zippthorne]

p>All we need now is $100 3D printers for home printing!

Why? How much do you really want to print? At least, right now, how much stuff do you really want to print? is a pretty good workaround to actual ownership of a 3D printer. I suspect it's a lot like photo printing: it will turn out to be a fair bit cheaper not to have the printer at home and just shop out the print jobs to a specialist. At least, for the time being, anyway.

For instance, if the materials are the larger part of the expense, then the equipment that can produce the thinnest walls will be able to print your 3D art for the least money. But that equipment may cost far in excess of what a $100 printer is capable of, for a long time.

Regardless, you can be printing stuff right now with one of the many only 3D print jobbers. Shapeways being one which seems to specialize in one-off's which is what hobbyists would be most interested in.

Stuff that needs to be more durable probably won't be printed on the kinds of materials you can feed into a 3D printer anyway. The machines that handle more durable materials are also going to be more expensive than a RepRap-level 3D printer for a while as well.