It was all celebrations in the office.

  The atmosphere was slightly depressing when the statistics for the first day was released. Although the sold quite a few copies and was considered a great success, it wasn’t explosively popular as they were completely outclassed by Thousand Hells which happened to be outside of their expectation.

  But what happened later was also completely outside of their expectation and completely surprised them.

  From the first week to the first month, Minecraft’s sales and revenue kept going up as it gained more and more popularity on various video streaming, live streaming, and video game forums. At the end of the first month, Thousand Hells was almost completely defeated by Minecraft.

  This also wiped out the somewhat depressed atmosphere of the entire studio!

  —


  Qian Kun was putting a lot of effort into building houses in Minecraft on PC.

  He had a blueprint on hand and carefully placed down each and every block according to the blueprint.

  Su Jinyu was behind him, “You sure are patient.”


  Qian Kun said while having his full concentration on building, “It’s alright. After realising the fun in building, I’m completely addicted to the game. Time goes by in a blink of an eye when you’re having fun.”


  Zheng Hongxi said, “I think compared to patience, the bigger challenge is the pressure from the manager.”


  Su Jinyu couldn’t help but laugh, “Yeah, Qian Kun. You spent days building this building whereas the manager would probably spend ten minutes on this.”


  “Can you guys stop attacking me like this?” pleaded Qian Kun, “The manager…… He’s not normal. There’s no competition between me and him in any game.”


  Su Jinyu nodded, “Fair point…… Anyways, where’s the manager?”


  —


  Chen Mo was making a video on the second floor of the experience store.

  This was a special video, not a building video like the Forbidden City or Old Summer Palace.

  The building videos were stunning at the start, but as the players’ building prowess are continually being challenged, more and more professional groups appeared, and with that more and more incredible builds.

  Players slowly getting used to these types of insane builds after seeing them again and again in “Somebody else’s world”.

  And the video Chen Mo was making one was something that would allow others to feel the charms of Minecraft even better than building videos.

  Chen Mo did all the recording, editing, and post-production all by himself as it wasn’t anything difficult and it was something most video makers could do, and was of course even simpler for Chen Mo.

  The video making process wasn’t difficult, the difficult part was collecting data capturing the correct point of views in game, something only Chen Mo could do.

  After looking through it one last time, Chen Mo felt that it was good enough and uploaded it onto the internet via Weibo.

  Chen Mo’s Webio was now the best place for players to get news about new games. Many of them would check Chen Mo’s Webio everyday when they have nothing to do to see if Chen Mo had posted anything.

  The post attracted many reposts once it was released.

  “Minecraft Big Data! Take a look at what these players built!”


  The players were all confused, Big Data?

  Big Data was a high level term commonly used in the IT industry, referring to the cleaning and summarising of a large amount of data to gain some insight.

  Of course, this term is sometimes misused to describe some shocking statistics.

  But normally, the video game industry rarely touched the term Big Data. Although there are various sources of data in video games, the designers usually kept it for their own eyes and would rarely release them.

  What was this Big Data Chen Mo was referring to?

  They played the video.

  There was nothing special about the video as it featured some Minecraft gameplay. The important point was the information revealed in the video.

  “Over three million Minecraft players a month after it’s release.

  “There are thirty Minecraft world servers thus far, totalling three million square kilometres, equivalent to the area China occupies on land and on sea.

  “Every server has one hundred thousand square kilometres in area, comparable to a province in real life.

  “So far, players have built on 158038 square kilometres across thirty servers, meaning players have terraformed 5267.9 square kilometres per server, about half of the starting planet.

  “Each player has modified (dug or placed) five hundred and twenty thousand blocks.”


  “The player who modified most blocks is Lin Zhan in server one, modifying 1.483 million blocks. If these blocks were placed in a single layer, it would cover one hundred and forty football fields.

  “The guild that modified the most blocks goes to Huaxia Geographical Society, with a total of 783 million blocks modified. In a single layer, it would be similar in area to Magic City.

  “These players who are so good at the game, do your families know about this?

  “Nxet is some interesting stats about the servers.

  “The first server is the oldest server and is said to contain the most real life architects. These architects have given it their all to show us the best advanced building techniques in the game.

  “For example, a city in the sky built entirely with glass, or a underground dungeon below magma, or an ever growing pyramid in the desert…… Apparently someone plans to dig through the planet and build a train through the centre of the planet. I sincerely advise against that.”


  —


  “The biggest guild in server three is Huaxia Geographical Society, they have tasked themselves as the guild to terraform an entire planet to look like Huaxia[1].

  “Of course, this is an incredibly ambitious task. So far they have built Hengduan Mountains, and Chengdu, Chengdu Plains, and Sichuan Basin[2], as well as other famous locations. And because of this, the tech levels of this server are quite far behind and still remain in the era of cold weapons.

  —


  “Server seven is where battlehungry players gather, as the servers are filled with chaos and explosions every day. Thirteen guilds are constantly fighting one another, putting every inch of the planet in war.”


  “Of course, server seven also happens to be the most advanced in terms of military technology. All investments in the tech tree went to warfare, and there had already been four large airports.”


  “Server eight is the server for love and peace. They focus on progressing through the tech tree with the aim of having manned spaceflight. They have been progressing steadily, searching for various rare materials to craft various parts that are required for rockets.

  “Let’s hope they’ll eventually achieve manned space flights and achieve a history leap in online Minecraft!

  —


  “Server fourteen has the most whales. The entire server has spent over 1.94 million RMB on blueprints although most of them haven’t been crafted.”


  “Moreover, players Seraph and MilkBread are the two whales who have spent the most money on blueprints. The former bought out the entire central city, while the later bought out the entire western fantasy area including Stormwind City and Lordaeron Ruins.

  —


  “That was how each server was doing. There are more exciting things to be done in Minecraft’s online mode! PS: Don’t forget to go shopping in Chen Mo’s World.

  TL note:[1] like an old name for China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaxia

  [2] The author used a collective word for these places