Listen now on Apple, Spotify or YouTube
In This Edition,
4J’s Chris van der Kuyl and Joseph Garrett on…
Few video game companies know Minecraft as well as 4J.
The Dundee studio spent years engineering Minecraft’s various console editions, and it still tinkers with the series. Just last month it updated the Super Mario Mash-Up Pack (which it made in 2015 for Wii U) for Nintendo Switch 2.
The developer is also home to famous former Minecraft YouTuber Joseph Garrett (aka Stampy), who joined the company in 2024.
Over the past two years, 4J has been building Reforj, a game that has more than a few things in common with Minecraft. But chairman Chris van der Kuyl tells us that the goal is not to unseat the world’s biggest video game.
“We are one of the first developers to say, ‘this is a genre.’ If you look at any other genre, like an FPS, there are dozens of FPSs and there’s a top tier of maybe ten that people play and move between. That’s not the same in this genre.
“For us, Minecraft is 15-plus years old in terms of its engine, its design, where it’s going. It’s grown into this amazing thing. We’re not trying to unseat or usurp that. We’re trying to say, ‘if you love Minecraft, just wait till you get your hands on this’. It’s for the 2020s. It’s super-fast to build, it’s so much more efficient and it’ll blow your mind.”
To continue the FPS analogy, 4J wants Reforj to be the Battlefield to Minecraft’s Call of Duty. And there are differences. Reforj’s graphics are not pixel art, and its setting is more sci-fi than fantasy. But it’s also very similar. The terminology that it uses to describe the characters and modes are identical to Minecraft.
But van der Kuyl stresses that 4J remains friends with its former paymasters.
“The first people we communicated to about Reforj was Microsoft,” he says. “We’ve had such a tight relationship over the years. We’ve spent the past sort of 10 to 15 years becoming absolutely embedded in this genre and loving it, and we’re like, ‘Okay, there’s room for more.’
“It’s not our job to compete with Minecraft. It’s our job to create something brilliant for players in addition to Minecraft. Minecraft will be here forever. And if we stay involved in the franchise in some way, we’d be delighted.”
Reforj, and the Elements Engine that powers it, have been in development for nearly nine years. This has been a slow process, and there’s clearly patient money behind it. It’s being tested on Xbox, with PC to follow next year. And 4J says there’s no rush on hitting millions of players.
“We can be patient,” van der Kuyl says.
“We believe that if we can bring an audience to this who love this game, it will grow. We don’t need number X on day one. We’re in the fortunate position that we don’t have franchise targets. We’re not a mega-sequel that’s had hundreds of millions spent on it.”
It’s a privileged position. As an investor himself, van der Kuyl knows that most modern backers want to see revenue quickly.
“The investment market is definitely looking for things that are close to revenue or generating revenue. When they look at the big whale investments like an Anthropic… it’s had the fastest growing revenue of any company in history. So, they go, ‘where can we find that in games?’
“There are places in the game industry around mobile user acquisition, server mods, where that flash-to-bang can be compressed. The long-term patience needed to create new games isn’t really compatible with the traditional venture model.
“People in the industry who want to create new things need to think of new ways of getting their ideas out at lower cost, and testing them, and building them. But the industry has changed. We don’t have a place at the moment where there’s super-patient capital prepared to risk millions on new ideas on the back of a beermat.”
However, van der Kuyl says that there still needs to be some risks on behalf of investors. Early testing can only reveal so much.
“If you look at most of the games that have broken through as new IP in the past three or four years, I don’t think any of them were testing well on KPIs until they were,” he says. “[Breakout shooter success] Wardogs was dumped by Tencent six months ago.
“There are leap of faiths everywhere. We’ll see a change, because the only outcome for large-scale publishing entities at the moment is to do things based on previous success. We’ve seen those waves time and time again, and after those waves crash a bit, people start to say, ‘Well, how can we get new IP coming through?’
“The difference this time round is it’s so democratized, almost to a ridiculous extent, in terms of digital distribution. It creates that other problem, there are amazing games in a sea of not-amazing games, and how do you find them? These challenges need to be solved. But I don’t think the coming tidal wave of AI-enabled, very-quick-to-market mosh is going to last very long, because nobody’s going to find games, nobody’s going to play games.”
“No one’s buying a pre-built LEGO set”
Ah yes, AI. Let’s talk about that. Minecraft is a unique game, but there are other platforms that enable players to create their own experiences, most notably Roblox.
These platforms – which include Meta’s Horizon – are increasingly using AI to help players create complex things simply by asking for it. Is this a threat to what 4J is building?
“People think that they want to see a party trick. Like they want to build the Taj Mahal, they say it in natural language, and suddenly the Taj Mahal’s built. But it’s game over at that point,” van der Kuyl says.
“What’s the point of the game? The point is to express your creativity, be inspired by other people’ creativity, to try it yourself, and have these great experiences. If people use AI tools to remove that from the gameplay experience, there’s nothing left. That’s not something that worries me in any way, shape, or form.”
Garrett adds: “No one’s buying a pre-built LEGO set. It’s the process, it’s the work. And a lot of people are just building in survival mode where there’s an extra step of gathering the resources and the materials in order to build it.
“Then it’s a creation that’s truly theirs and unique. They haven’t asked for it. It’s a human-type of creation. It’s that process which is the gameplay, it’s not the result.”
Garrett isn’t some ambassador for Reforj. He’s a fully-fledged game designer. He decided to step away from the daily grind of making YouTube videos, and that coincided with 4J asking for his feedback on Reforj.
Garrett’s feedback was so analytical, that van der Kuyl and 4J CEO Paddy Burns offered him a job.
Of course, Garrett has helped 4J in terms of community, too. And he tells us how there is no buffer between the studio and the players.
“There is a great community team at 4J, but it’s not [a case of] the community team talking to the community and relaying to the developers,” Garrett tells us. “The developers are on the Discord and talking directly. If someone gives feedback about art, often it’s someone from the art team responding. Or if there’s a design question, it’s someone from the design team discussing directly with the community members, rather than it being filtered through a separate team and kept at arm’s length.”
Is that something the developers like to do?
“Obviously you could take it too far and then half of your day is doing that. One of the things you have to be careful of is, we’re not designing by committee. We have the final say. We have the vision for the game, and we’re sticking to that.
“It’s really for very direct, mostly gameplay-related feedback or balancing, and also just gauging what is exciting. What are they actually talking about? We could be internally really excited about one feature, and then it’s released, and no one really talks about that, everyone’s really excited about something else.”
Continues van der Kuyl: “We were doing this on Minecraft: Console Edition, but we were careful that this was Mojang’s game, not 4J’s. Paddy was obsessive about watching, listening and responding to the community, but probably not publicly, because we were not the voice of the franchise.
“This time we’re lurking and watching every comment and encouraging everybody in the studio to do that, but we’ve come out from behind the shadows a bit. That direct connection that Joe’s referred to is utterly invaluable, frightening, and you have to be authentic. Joe’s 100% right, we’re quite clear, we want everyone’s ideas and all ideas are great ideas, but ultimately, we’ll make the decision, otherwise we’ll not end up with a great game.”
Reforj is being tested on PC early next year. But how does 4J see the business model? Is it Minecraft-like with packs and add-ons, or the more, microtransaction-based approach of Roblox? Is Refoj a place for players to make money?
“From our perspective, we want to have growing experiences in the game that we can probably sell as extra downloads and packs, and some of those we’ll do first-party ourselves, some of those we’ll see from the community, but we’ll curate that so we don’t just bombard people,” he says.
“We also imagine there’s going to be people who end up being professional creators who, for whatever reason, we’re not necessarily the right retail place for them to distribute their stuff. They can go and build their own way to share this content. What’s currently known in the world of mods and private servers, that’s going to come to Reforj, but it’ll come in a way that we want to have a certain level of influence on the things.
He concludes: “Things like constant requests for payment and upgrades, that’s not going to be 4J. We don’t have an opinion yet if there are others that will work in the Reforj universe like that, but we’re not trying to create a monetization platform. We’re trying to create amazing experiences, and us and the community will work out how that’s going to be sustainable.”