It has been announced that Minecraft Earth, an augmented reality spinoff of the wildly successful survival game, will come to an end on June 30, 2021 as per the official Minecraft Earth Twitter account.
Minecraft Earth will be closing down in June 2021. Please read our full message below for details. We appreciate all the support from the community!
🌍 https://t.co/RqMPIwOSkC pic.twitter.com/Ph2x8isf1g
— Minecraft Earth (@minecraftearth) January 5, 2021
Minecraft Earth is an AR mobile game in the same vein as Pokemon Go, though as evident in today’s announcement, it was unable to capture the same amount of public interest. Players are able to gather the familiar resources they’d usually find in the original Mincraft scattered around real-world environments, create AR structures, and place them on the world map. Nearby players would then be able to view and even modify these creations leading to an interesting cooperative dynamic yet to be seen in other AR-centric mobile games. Despite the interesting premise, the mobile experiment has currently only garnered around 5 million downloads on Android and while official numbers on Apple are unavailable, we can assume they would be comparable.
The app will be removed from digital storefronts on June 30 and players who already have the game downloaded will be restricted access on the same day. On July 1, all player data unrelated to Character Creator and Minecoin entitlements will be officially deleted.
The team has also announced thet they will roll-out the final build of the game today which will include the following:
- Removal of real-money transactions
- Drastically reduced ruby costs
- All completed, unreleased content
- Reduced time requirements for crafting and smelting
- Replacement of unused crafting & smelting boosts with radius boosts of the same level
- Granting a set of Character Creator items to players who sign in between January 5 and June 30
Minecraft Earth was officially released on December 11, 2019 meaning the game will have only lasted a little more than a year by time of its eventual closure.
