Even years later, other developers are still keenly trying to capture the lightning in a bottle that marked the appearance of Pokemon Go on the mobile market. Its use of AR and the outdoor world captured imaginations and became an enormous hit.

Minecraft World has only been on the scene a short while, and is one of the more ambitious games to have taken the core formula and imitated it. It sees players walk around the real world, happening across events and constructions made from Minecraft's signature blocks, with which they can interact.

The game looks like it probably hasn't found the audience it was hoping for, though - with the central issue being the global pandemic keeping everyone at home, rather than being able to walk around freely.

Minecraft Earth is therefore being discontinued, with a bit of a wind-down period starting now to ease people into the change. A new update makes some immediate tweaks, to make progress quicker while it's still available, and to remove the in-app purchases that were previously available.

Then, on June 30th, it'll shut down entirely, even for existing installs, before July 1st sees a wipe of all player data to compound the deletion. To soften the blow, though, anyone who's spent money in the game will be given the Bedrock edition of Minecraft for free, and existing stores of premium in-game currency will be converted to work on the Minecraft marketplace.