Why isn't Minetest more popular?

[Jakssoul]

I asked this in the IRC, but nobody cared to respond.

Minecraft, which costs TWENTY DOLLARS, has MILLIONS of registered users. This forum has 3,849 at the time of this post.

How is it that this game, with a wonderful support community, (VanessaE being a great example), being OPEN SOURCE, and having all the mods it does, doesn't have a massive following? I've been playing for a few days, plan to continue playing for a long time, and Minecraft has NOTHING compared to this! Free and Open Source? Come on! This game should have a cult following!

[jojoa1997]

I asked this in the IRC, but nobody cared to respond.

Minecraft, which costs TWENTY DOLLARS, has MILLIONS of registered users. This forum has 3,849 at the time of this post.

How is it that this game, with a wonderful support community, (VanessaE being a great example), being OPEN SOURCE, and having all the mods it does, doesn't have a massive following? I've been playing for a few days, plan to continue playing for a long time, and Minecraft has NOTHING compared to this! Free and Open Source? Come on! This game should have a cult following!

Minecraft has been around longer, has more mods, and is in the 1.8 instead of 0.4. Though minetest is still better.

[Jakssoul]

I don't know about better at the moment (lots of bugs), but it's still INCREDIBLE. For it to be free and open source.. I mean, come on. This is absolutely fantastic.

[jojoa1997]

I don't know about better at the moment (lots of bugs), but it's still INCREDIBLE. For it to be free and open source.. I mean, come on. This is absolutely fantastic.

I agree 100% minetest is like infinity% better than minecraft

[Josh]

The thing thats fishy about the minecraft's website is that the So far (number) of people have bought the game bar
goes up about...every 10 seconds. And minetest is 9999999999999999999999999999999999% better than minecraft
go minetest!

[jojoa1997]

Since you have to pay for it people trust it more and you can also play in browser so you can play anywhere. I am not sure about the in browser art though.

[RAPHAEL]

The word hasn't gotten out yet. Plus you have many who expect certain features that minecrap has but minetest doesn't (yet) or doesn't have implemented well enough. Examples being carts and mobs mostly. If there was a good resource efficient mob and cart setup that both actually worked and used 3d stuff then minetest might take off.

my 2c

[kaeza]

Hi and merry christmas.
Well... this problem is experienced by *any* FLOSS project. The problem is that no one is doing "marketing" bullshit with us. We are just proud cheapstakes (no offense intended, I am included in this group myself). The best we have to do "marketing" is to tell a friend "Hey! You gotta play Minetest! It's an awesome game!", and show him/her the game and try to attract him/her. In contrast, Mojang (the company behind MC) has tons of resources to actually reach a wider audience.
The only solution to this problem IMHO is either make a real company aware of us, and convince them to start "supporting" (read "advertising") Minetest, or do it ourselves.

EDIT: Just to make things more clear (and to not make this post offensive to sensitive people), by "proud cheapstakes" I mean users/programmers who are proud to be writing software for free, just for fun, or whatever ideology you have.

[jojoa1997]

Hi and merry christmas.
Well... this problem is experienced by *any* FLOSS project. The problem is that no one is doing "marketing" bullshit with us. We are just proud cheapstakes (no offense intended, I am included in this group myself). The best we have to do "marketing" is to tell a friend "Hey! You gotta play Minetest! It's an awesome game!", and show him/her the game and try to attract him/her. In contrast, Mojang (the company behind MC) has tons of resources to actually reach a wider audience.
The only solution to this problem IMHO is either make a real company aware of us, and convince them to start "supporting" (read "advertising") Minetest, or do it ourselves.

EDIT: Just to make things more clear (and to not make this post offensive to sensitive people), by "proud cheapstakes" I mean users/programmers who are proud to be writing software for free, just for fun, or whatever ideology you have.

I say forget about a company noticing us because money will be tied in somewhere and the game will cost us.

[NakedFury]

Minecraft at first had word of mouth advertising and even now I don't see any ads or commercials about it, it actually remains a sort of word of mouth advertising move, except massive quantity of youtube videos, iport and xbox game, merchandise, and 2 minecons.

And yes when people find this game i suppose they do expect it to have certain features that for now remain non existant or hard to do unless added by source code, mainly smoother way to do carts[smooth as in racing game smooth] and monsters or creatures or animals.

The fact of the matter is that when people think sandbox games or survival they expect to actually survive from something, be it hunger, some monster in the night, drowning, and other players[and for this and monsters they also expect some combat which even minecraft has a disgustingly bad combat system, nasty].

Minetest has a lot of positive things going for it but people are seeing the missing things first before trying it.

[Aqua]

Not everyone who plays minetest is registered on the forums...There could be alot more...
Not everyone who plays minecra--- bought it, some got it for free...There could be alot more...

Anyway, I don't want minetest to have millions of people playing it like minecra--- otherwise the forum will be crowded with everybody drowning out each other's topics. I like the community the way it is.

Minecra--- has a 2 or 3 year head start and in 2 or 3 years minetest will be just as good as minecra--- if not even better...
Who knows? No one can predict the future...

[Josh]

Minetest is, will and always will be better then minecraft. My freind's say that minetest is crap, but i don't listen to them.
Don't listen to people that say negative things about minetest. Just enjoy playing minetest :)

[0gb.us]

Hi and merry christmas.
Well... this problem is experienced by *any* FLOSS project. The problem is that no one is doing "marketing" bullshit with us. We are just proud cheapstakes (no offense intended, I am included in this group myself). The best we have to do "marketing" is to tell a friend "Hey! You gotta play Minetest! It's an awesome game!", and show him/her the game and try to attract him/her. In contrast, Mojang (the company behind MC) has tons of resources to actually reach a wider audience.
The only solution to this problem IMHO is either make a real company aware of us, and convince them to start "supporting" (read "advertising") Minetest, or do it ourselves.

EDIT: Just to make things more clear (and to not make this post offensive to sensitive people), by "proud cheapstakes" I mean users/programmers who are proud to be writing software for free, just for fun, or whatever ideology you have.

Yeah, it's mainly lack of advertising.

Also, people expect this game to implement stupid features, and the fact that Minetest is too good to implement said features probably gets less people to play it. (Like logging into the game with your forum account? What the heck? That would be highly inconvenient for most people.) Of course, if lousy features were implemented, still others would leave.

Another issue is that the game isn't really complete yet. The client is constantly crashing. It does it almost every time most people hit the F10 key. By the time the game is "finished" (although development will likely continue), our number will likely have grown substantially. Minecraft will likely always be more popular, and many will likely just view this game as a Minecraft ripoff, but Minecraft is just an Infiniminer clone as well, so it's not like Minecraft is original.

The games may have different audiences as well. From what I gather from other player's thoughts, Minetest may be more targeted toward adults as well, while Minecraft is more for children. Because more children have time for games than adults, this could also contribute to Minecraft's higher popularity. This isn't true across the board though, as I have met many children playing Minetest as well. In addition, most Linux users think "oh yay, an open source game", while many non-Linux people feel that you get what you pay for. And for OS X users who don't know how to compile, Minetest isn't even an option.

I have many more thoughts, but I'll end this post before it gets any more rambly. If we want more users, our best chance is to advertise.

[Jakssoul]

Advertise how, exactly?

[kaeza]

Advertise how, exactly?

For example:

• let's flood YouTube with high quality "Let's Play" videos.
• Share some pics/videos with your friends on Google+, Facebook, Reddit, *insert your favorite social platform here*
• Word of mouth: invite your friends to play, and show them that Minetest is a fun game to play despite it's perceived "low quality" graphics.
• Tell your friends that there's almost any imaginable game mode through the use of mods; be it PvP in a FPSish style (with guns and such), RPG-like gameplay (experience points), or just to be plain creative.
• If your friends are on the geek side, tell them it's easy to develop their own mods and share them with the community.

There are more ways of course.

[LorenzoVulcan]

Minecraft has been around longer, has more mods, and is in the 1.8 instead of 0.4. Though minetest is still better.

I think minetest has got more mods than minecraft and they're easier to install.

Minetest is not much better than minecraft because of its raw performances and little bugs.

[Ragnar]

i have an idea for all of you website owners, make an ad on your index.html, if theres more than 1 index.html (like on my site) then do it on all of them =)

[jmf]

Advertise how, exactly?

Minetest T-Shirts!!!
I like the idea of selling minetest t-shirts in internet.
The money earned with this will go to the development
and the t-shirts advertise minetest and are cool.
Idea for a t-shirt theme:
On the front of the shirt:
The dungeon master and the text "Here, have a fireball", or the minetest logo.
On the backside:
The "minetest-c55" label as found in main menu.

[LorenzoVulcan]

Advertise how, exactly?

Minetest T-Shirts!!!
I like the idea of selling minetest t-shirts in internet.
The money earned with this will go to the development
and the t-shirts advertise minetest and are cool.
Idea for a t-shirt theme:
On the front of the shirt:
The dungeon master and the text "Here, have a fireball", or the minetest logo.
On the backside:
The "minetest-c55" label as found in main menu.

+1.Anyway,Pony t-shirts are also a good idea.

[Ragnar]

STFU, NOBODY (except yov) LIKES PONIES, SHEESH...

[Ragnar]

jmf: im working on it, and if i will start it, then i think i will split the money 40-60 (60 to me =P, 40 to celeron maybe...) cause i know a guy -_o

[Ragnar]

or 50-35-15 (50 to me, 35 to celeron, 15 to winners (ill explane later))

[RAPHAEL]

For advertising get creative. For missing features at least get together a group of skilled coders to work on them.

The basics that are missing is efficient mobs, efficient carts that don't lag, efficient boats that don't lag or appear at random places (current carts do this too it seems) and get a good mod repo setup going so mods are easier for new users to find/install/update.

Do the above and minetest will soar.

[ashups]

In my opinion, one of the reasons — bad support for localization. For example, I can not use the Russian language in the game chat or on the signs. Another example: when selected Russian keyboard layout, control keys not working. These issues are relevant to some other languages.

The inability to use the native language reduces popularity of the game.

[Ragnar]

it kinda does, doesnt it =/

[rubenwardy]

i have an idea for all of you website owners, make an ad on your index.html, if theres more than 1 index.html (like on my site) then do it on all of them =)

I shall do this, good idea

[rubenwardy]

Minecraft has been around longer, has more mods, and is in the 1.8 instead of 0.4. Though minetest is still better.

I think minetest has got more mods than minecraft and they're easier to install.

Minetest is not much better than minecraft because of its raw performances and little bugs.

minetest is also a lot easier to mod.

imo, minecraft mods are not real mods because they require decompiling and compiling of the source.

[Ragnar]

thanks rube, but isnt that the easiest way? and i was the first to suggest? lol

[LorenzoVulcan]

imo, minecraft mods are not real mods because they require decompiling and compiling of the source.

I think those are still mods because they're modifications to the game even if they require source modification.

[kaeza]

I like the idea of T-Shirts.
Hmm... I think we should definitely need to invent a new minetest mascot. One that is appealing to people of all ages. Think about it: The green sprite guy is not very appealing, and a dungeon master may be too creepy for some people. I think we should start a new topic for artists to submit their art.
EDIT: The Minetest Icon is nice, but does not convey the idea of a fun game IMHO.