When Minecraft was first announced, the game was described as a “simple but powerful” sandbox game that you could play with up to five players on your computer or on the phone.
In a recent interview with the Guardian, Mojang founder Markus Persson talked about the challenges of making the game accessible for more people.
“When you start the game, you’re in the sandbox, which means you’re doing it in a different world and you’re not going to see people that are actually playing in your world, you don’t have to interact with them,” he said.
“So the challenge was, how do we make that accessible?
How do we have a game that was not a game you can only play with people you have an idea about, that was actually an experience for people that you know that like the game.”
He also talked about how the game had to be a bit harder to get to.
“I was like, this is a hard game, it’s a really hard game,” he explained.
“And that’s when we had to think, well, what can we do to make it harder?”
Minecraft has since been expanded to include new features, but Persson and Mojang still aren’t entirely satisfied with the current iteration.
In an interview with Gamespot last week, Persson said that Mojang would continue to work on the game to bring it up to speed with the rest of the iOS and OS X ecosystem.
“We are going to be improving Minecraft to make the game as good as it can be for the other platforms,” he told Gamespot.
“But there’s no need to download the whole thing because you’re still playing in a sandbox.”
Mojang has also announced that the game will be available for Android and Windows Phone, which will be powered by the Google Play store.
While Minecraft is a sandbox game, there are a few caveats to its accessibility: You need to be on the same network as your friends.
You can’t play with other people on your phone if they’re online.
You also can’t access any of the online features, like multiplayer or chat.
There are also restrictions on the amount of resources you can store and how many players you can have on a server.
Mojang hasn’t released a release date for the game for Windows Phone yet, but it will likely arrive on the platform later this year.
Minecraft is free to download on the App Store and can be played for free, though some players will need to pay to unlock some of the features.