My name is Max Schramp. I’m an architecture student from Canada, moonlighting as a musician, designer photographer, and most importantly, I am part of the virtual events company Open Pit. We’ve been organizing virtual events in the game Minecraft since mid-2018. Our larger festivals had over 80 acts and the audiences reached into the hundreds of thousands with coverage from Vice, Washington Post, and the New York Times. Find out more here: https://openpit.net
I’ll be here to answer your questions live on 2020-05-12T15:00:00Z → 2020-05-12T16:00:00Z
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How easy is it convincing people to go to Minecraft to access the festival? And how easy is it to set yourself up to attend if you’ve never used Minecraft before?
It’s not actually as complicated as you would think. The minimum requirements are being able to play minecraft (build a world) and book the artists. It gets more complicated as the audience scales, because Minecraft doesn’t support more than ~200 consecutive players out of the box. For perspective, we started doing these events with no formal event planning experience beyond DIY house shows.
Minecraft is currently the best-selling game in the world with over 180M copies sold, and we include clear instructions on our event sites to be able to connect. We always have a significant amount of Minecraft players, but with Open Pit we have multiple channels to experience our events. In addition to the game, we have always had a seperate audio stream and a discord server for the community to chat. Recently we started to do a twitch livestream of the events, and those have been hugely successful with 100,000+ unique viewers.
We have all artists pre-record their sets ahead of each event. Although this takes the “live” novelty away, there isn’t really any significant difference for the audience. We’ve found that with pre-recorded sets, artists have gone above and beyond what would be possible in a live setting, creating unique remixes and voiceovers for these events. We stream all of the audio through our website.
We originally chose Minecraft because many people in our online music scene had spent thousands of hours playing throughout middle school/high school. It’s also a sandbox game, which gives us the opportunity to build whatever we want- which is essential when you want to build wild stages and festival worlds.
Minecraft is also the best game for these type of events, as we can host them without any assistance from the developer. For the Fortnite music events that have been taking place, those wouldn’t be possible without intervention from Epic Games.
My advice would be, especially with the saturation of events these days, craft the acts and experience towards your expected audience. Our events wouldn’t be possible without the community we’ve established, so we spend a lot of time on things we know they will enjoy. In Minecraft, people love exploring and finding in-game merch, so we build huge worlds with lots of interactive experiences. We also book many acts from within the community itself. If your event is going to be on a livestream, think about what you can do to bring another level of interactivity to it- Porter Robinson’s Secret Sky event from last weekend is a perfect example of that.
We’re actually taking a break! We pushed out three events in a relatively short timeline and are taking a minute to recalibrate. We haven’t received any formal requests from large festivals, but we are still planning a larger event similar to our past ones for later this year.
I think that Twitter is the best platform for this. A lot of our exposure came from the artists we booked sharing the event online, and then the entire timeline being taken over by them during the event. We usually plan our marketing rollouts to include a couple posters, a teaser video, some memes, etc. If you have fun with it the audience will too!
We use an internet radio service called Mixlr, and embed it on our site. Our web developer Eden usually creates a site for the poster, and updates it with set times and audio players for the event.
Definitely going to look into it though!