Minecraft on Xbox 360: Constant Updates, Microsoft Kinect Capabilities

The popular indie video game Minecraft will soon be ported to the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), and the developer of Minecraft's XBLA-port is pushing for the game to be the first ever to receive constant updates on the platform.

Paddy Burns, the chief technology officer at 4J Studios, which is the developer handling the XBLA-port of Minecraft, told Edge that the initial release of the XBLA-version of Minecraft will be a conversion of an early version of the PC beta. More specifically, Minecraft on the Xbox 360 will be version 1.6.6 of the game. Since it won't be the final version, Burns would like to expedite the update process for Minecraft on the Xbox 360, something that typically takes a long time for games on the platform.

Microsoft knows that to do a similar thing that's on PC where they constantly update it, that's a very difficult thing to do on Xbox because you have to go through the full tests, he said in the Edge interview. But they are quite keen to move towards that--they do see it as the future, so I think we might be the first to do constant updates.

Minecraft has received frequent updates since its inception for the PC. The game was originally developed by Markus Persson, known across the Internet by his alias Notch. The game was first released as a developmental alpha release, and it quickly gained traction among gamers. After gaining enough attention from the alpha release, Persson partnered with a friend and created the game developer studio Mojang.

In December 2010, Minecraft reached its beta phase. The beta tag was taken off of the game roughly one year later, in November 2011. This release was considered Minecraft 1.0.0. Though the beta tag was removed from the game's title, Minecraft developers continued to update the game. For instance, just days after the beta tag was taken off of the title, Minecraft was updated to 1.0.1 in order to fix Minecraft server issues. In January 2012, the official version of the game received several updates.

Minecraft for Xbox 360, though being a beta version of the game, will enable users to play the game using Microsoft Kinect, which was unveiled at the Microsoft Press Conference at E3 2011.