Outside of quest-driven modded minecraft I agree with you. When I play MC it either has to be with an explicit creative building goal or a hands-held progress-through-this-tech-modpack (I still fool around with GT:NH regularly).
I've also accepted that maybe my interests are just not the target market for the survival genre and there's something there that I'm never going to "get."
I also think the pokemon aesthetics are enough to take a generally non-mainstream genre (survival-crafting) and blast it to a broader audience. If I had to guess the recent popularity of Lego Fortnite introducing younger gamers to the survival genre was probably also instrumental in prepping them for a game like this mechanically- now it's just got the aesthetics of another franchise that younger players have current interest in (pokemon) and older players have nostalgia for.
When I play MC it either has to be with an explicit creative building goal or a hands-held progress-through-this-tech-modpack (I still fool around with GT:NH regularly).
I've also accepted that maybe my interests are just not the target market for the survival genre and there's something there that I'm never going to "get."
Oh, preach comrade, I completely agree!
I also think the pokemon aesthetics are enough to take a generally non-mainstream genre (survival-crafting) and blast it to a broader audience.
I wouldn't say this genre is not mainstream. These types of survival games always explode in popularity, gets featured incessantly on twitch and afterwards it usually retains quite a chunky commited playerbase. But I completely agree with the rest of what you wrote.
Outside of quest-driven modded minecraft I agree with you. When I play MC it either has to be with an explicit creative building goal or a hands-held progress-through-this-tech-modpack (I still fool around with GT:NH regularly).
I've also accepted that maybe my interests are just not the target market for the survival genre and there's something there that I'm never going to "get."
I also think the pokemon aesthetics are enough to take a generally non-mainstream genre (survival-crafting) and blast it to a broader audience. If I had to guess the recent popularity of Lego Fortnite introducing younger gamers to the survival genre was probably also instrumental in prepping them for a game like this mechanically- now it's just got the aesthetics of another franchise that younger players have current interest in (pokemon) and older players have nostalgia for.
Oh, preach comrade, I completely agree!
I wouldn't say this genre is not mainstream. These types of survival games always explode in popularity, gets featured incessantly on twitch and afterwards it usually retains quite a chunky commited playerbase. But I completely agree with the rest of what you wrote.
I guess I should have said mainstream appeal in the Minecraft sort of way.
Valheim/Terraria are large, but Palworld is looking at its current trajectory to be fighting with the giants.