In a blog post ominously titled “The future of Minecraft’s development” this week, Mojang laid out the changes we can expect to its update schedule. The big one is that Minecraft is moving away from doing single, major game updates each summer in favor of smaller ones throughout the year and more frequent Minecraft Live presentations to match.
“We know that you want new Minecraft content more often, which is why we’re changing our feature development rhythm,” Mojang says. “These game drops will vary in size and will bring you features to explore more frequently.”
For quite a few years now, we’ve been able to expect a yearly Minecraft Live presentation in the autumn during which Mojang would reveal some of the key features in the next major game update for the following summer—like this year’s Minecraft 1.21 update with its focus on trial chambers and new enemies, which was revealed last October.
Over the past few years, the common refrain from players has been that they feel like Minecraft’s yearly title updates are getting smaller. Uncharitably, I could suggest that the more spread out update approach will mask that being the case. But equally, more frequent updates could result in more requested features getting added to the game more often if they don’t have to get through development and testing in time to hit-or-miss a big yearly content drop.
Mojang points out that it’s already tried these smaller game updates a couple times. Most notably, it added the new armadillo mob and wolf variants in the Armored Paws back in April which was months ahead of the main 1.21 update I had expected them to be in. So that’s one point in favor of getting new features sooner than anticipated.
Mojang also says that Minecraft Live will now happen twice per year and be “more focused” on the latest features it’s working on. It didn’t specify whether the first of those more focused presentations would be happening next month, but I’d be willing to bet on it. Either way, it sounds like that presentation won’t feature some big Minecraft 1.22 reveal and may instead be a small, named update.