What you need to know
- After years of rocking the same artwork across social media, marketing, box art, and the games, Minecraft is getting an artwork redesign.
- Mojang Studios has announced a new official Minecraft key art in a new colorful, bright, and lighthearted style.
- The new artwork will begin to replace the old across the entire Minecraft franchise, including box art and logos.
- This is just a franchise update, it doesn't include any updates or new content for Minecraft itself.
After years of the same style, Minecraft is finally getting a visual update! Oh, wait, never mind. This redesign is for Minecraft's artwork, not for the game. Still, Mojang Studios is shaking up the well-established formula with a new official Minecraft artwork that will represent the franchise moving forward with an updated art design that is more bold, colorful, and flat.
This isn't an update to Minecraft as a game, especially not so soon after the release of the Minecraft 1.21 'Tricky Trials' update, and is more of an update to Minecraft as a brand. This new artwork will become Minecraft's game box art, icons on digital storefronts, headers and images for the Minecraft Launcher, mainstays for social media and marketing, and more.
Above, you can see various parts of this very detailed key art highlighted, showing how this new artwork does a better job representing modern Minecraft and how much it has grown. That includes appearances from the seven new default characters Mojang introduced as part of the Minecraft 1.20 update cycle in addition to the Steve and Alex we all know and love.
Ultimately, though, this is obviously a very minor update to the Minecraft brand, and won't give players any new reasons to jump into a new world with their friends. Still, I do feel that this new key art does a much better job representing what Minecraft has become in the last few years as one of the best Xbox games, and should help to strengthen the franchise moving forward as it expands into shows, movies, and more.
In other recent news, Mojang Studios has begun testing a native PS5 version of Minecraft, but don't get your hopes up too high — it's nothing more than a native version for better hardware support, and won't bring ray tracing or any other visual enhancements to the game.
