We’d never treated the hub as a game, and as such hadn’t included it on the list of favorite game options. Nearly 30% of our players answered the favorite game question with a write in: “The Hub”. Players would often hang out on this hub to chat, find others to play with and just generally socialize. From the hub server you could form parties, chat with other players, and join into any of our games to start playing. In order to play games on The Chunk you first had to join a ‘hub’ server. Now a bit of a sidebar before I reveal what the answer was. We had fairly good metrics on which games players spent their time on, so we figured we roughly knew how that question would be answered. One of the core questions in the survey was “What is your favorite game on The Chunk?”.

We wanted to collect feedback from our players, find out what they liked and how we could improve. It wasn’t until the start of our second year that it really hit me – The Chunk was a community business that just happened to be a gaming community.īy the end of our first year, we had a variety custom games, tons of micro content, and we held our first big ‘state of The Chunk’ survey. We were, after all, creating games, had players, and measured our success and metrics in much the same way that larger video game companies do. Yes, we recreated a first person shooter game with mechs, rocket launchers and more in Minecraft.įor the first year of building The Chunk, I thought we were building a gaming company.

This content ranged from simple capture the flag style games, like BlockWars, to more complex recreations of AAA titles like Titanfall. Minecraft was becoming a sort of game engine, and I was one of thousands of people that saw potential in building custom content on top of such a world wide phenomenon.Īnd so The Chunk was born, a Minecraft server network made up of a hub world connected to various smaller game servers where players could play a variety of custom content we’d create for them.

The Minecraft multiplayer ecosystem exploded, quickly growing from small, classic survival servers to custom games built within the game. This meant that the entire multiplayer experience was left up to independent server hosts. Unlike Triple A games like Call of Duty, Minecraft didn’t provide centralized multiplayer servers (Realms being the exception, but that service launched far too late to have a major impact). Most of you have probably heard of Minecraft, but I’d bet that most of you aren’t aware that Minecraft used to support an entire ecosystem of startups (and still does, to a lesser extent) in the form of Minecraft hosting and servers. Strap in for story time!īefore starting Commsor, I started and ran a business called The Chunk. I set out to write a fairly quick overview, but as you can see below I ended up with something a big longer. After reading an excellent post by Eugene Wei about Status as a Service earlier this week, I found myself thinking about my past experiences with community and status, and how those experiences could be applied to the communities I was working with today.

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