After only a year since release, Minecraft Legends is now just another example of failed Minecraft spinoffs

Minecraft Legends is the latest of Mojang's attempted spinoffs. It is a real-time strategy game where players need to control groups of overworld mobs, hostile and friendly alike, against invading armies of the Nether. It was released to lukewarm reviews and success, and it seems to have finally joined Minecraft Earth and Minecraft Dungeons in the pile of abandoned spinoffs.

Detailed below is just how bad of a state Minecraft Legends is in as of 2024, as well as what the community thinks it got both right and wrong.

Note: This article is subjective and reflects the writer's opinions.

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Minecraft Legends is "dead"

Legends has only a few dedicated players left (Image via Steamdb)

Minecraft Legends is as dead as a game can be by modern metrics. Support and development officially ended in January 2024, less than a year after its release. This is quite a short shelf life for a project, especially one associated with the single best-selling game of all time.

Not only has support for this title been pulled, it doesn't have much of a community left to talk about either. Player metrics are very hard to find outside of Steam, on which they are freely available.

The game launched on April 18, 2023, with an all-time high player count of 5,322. However, this figure was down to barely 400 by May 1. This means that more than 90% of players had moved on to better things in less than two weeks.

The game now has between 20 and 50 players, depending on the time of day. This is as dead as the game could realistically be. The only thing that could make things worse would be if it were delisted from sale.

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What went wrong?

These negative reviews sum up the general sentiment quite well (Images from Reddit and Steam)

Ultimately, the consensus among most fans is that Minecraft Legends lacks a lot of the same appeal that the base game has. The survival loop that keeps players invested in their survival worlds long enough to build fully featured Minecraft megabases was instead replaced by gameplay that was repetitive and boring.

Comment byu/Open_Cow_9148 from discussion inMinecraftLegends

Reddit user u/TheLunar27 pointed out that the game really failed to do anything particularly exciting or new with its "Overworld vs. Nether" theme. It had a real lack of overworld mobs to use. According to TheLunar27, this includes endermen, spiders, wolves, phantoms, and the deadliest regular mob, the warden.

The title also has none of the amazing multiplayer servers or support the base game offers. This is a huge reason that version has continued to thrive in the modern day. As such, lacking the same rigorous multiplayer systems as regular Minecraft, Minecraft Legends eventually faded into obscurity.

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What Legends did right (talk about good reviews)

Comment byu/Archer_Gaming00 from discussion inMinecraftLegends

By far, the biggest positive sentiment seems to be that the game was made for an incredibly niche market in today's gaming industry: true RTS fans. The genre has inarguably fallen out of the mainstream in recent years, but Legends seems to be the perfect way to scratch that itch for fans.

The game also looks amazing, as Mojang never fails to knock its games' art design out of the park.