Comment by MrFoof | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrFoof | Hacker News Reader

Having picked it up a few weeks ago, the game is an odd blend of open-ended creative sandbox, epic-scale exploration and survival horror. It taps into that feeling of opening up a bin of Lego and not having a specific model instruction booklet. Its feature-set is still very fluid. Yet it seems to out-do Civilization's "one more turn". This is a game where if you picked it up tonight at 7PM and started out, you'd hear your alarm clock going off in another room as morning rolls in.

The game has essentially gone viral at this point. Multiple webcomics are covering it. There's decent coverage on social news sites. Industry rags have picked it up. Industry veterans (I have a friend at Disney Interactive, and another at BioWare) have absolutely taken notice, Valve in particular. Some review sites are seriously considering it as their "game of the year" candidate. This weekend the website (and authentication service) collapsed under load. With some outside help it's up and fine after some refactoring and offloading things to S3. Today he cracked 25,000 unit sales for the day, or about $340K USD in gross revenue.

Yes, he. Until very recently, it was basically a one-man show. There's a few dedicated folks coming on board now, but that's what's humbling. Today, Markus eclipsed my day's compensation in just 88 seconds.

What I think is interesting about the free-to-play period (due to website collapse) is that it may actually be a massive boost, because it gets the game client onto a lot of machines. That doesn't sound like much, but here's where it gets interesting: the client auto-updates itself, bringing in new content and features as they are built. To continue to get updates (AFAIK) you must log in with your paid credentials. You can continue to play the 'free weekend' version without doing so, but you won't get any updates. Thus people can continue to play and be addicted, and that 'Register' link is there waiting on the main menu when the urge for the new hotness overcomes them.

Also, kudos to Notch for supporting Mac and Linux. I guess we're getting to a point where, for indie games at least, a very compelling experience can be built using a less-than-optimal platform (in this case being Java, which heretofore hasn't been used for games a whole lot).

By the way, it has even had TV coverage here in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?pres=201...

The free weekend was horrific for the community.

I run the (I think) main public server in Australia: the server ended up being a war ground, with impersonators causing havoc. Only now is the normal community of users reappearing, the normal fun state of affairs being restored: the "free" users wouldn't have had a fun experience :/

Link to server plz!

simplicity.classexception.com

To be fair, I think this is also a reflection on the state of the multiplayer, which is obviously still in relatively early days in terms of both design and balance (compared to the SP game).

A lot of public SMP servers I've been on had anti-griefing mods that seem prone to breaking on updates. Combine that with removal of the paywall and (from what I hear) username validation, and there is a lot more potential for disaster.

Username validation was down.

I loved it. I actually got to try the alpha, and see what it contained. Major sales point, though I haven't nabbed it yet (for fear of it consuming time I should be spending on my capstone essay).

Would love to see Mac performance improve, though. It suffers quite a bit. Methinks Notch is not a graphics wiz, though maybe a closet genius in emergent gameplay. I suppose I can hope, one day, for an OpenGL (ES?) implementation.

Minecraft uses a Java-wrapper for OpenGL. On all platforms. I say this primarily using OS X day to day. I've been running it on a Mid-2010 Mac Mini without issue. Most of the slowdown for the FAR render distance is I/O related.

The performance issues (and any graphics shortcomings) are due to the engine design, and probably a minimum of effort being expended on optimizing the game for performance, especially when the feature set is still amorphous.

Interesting, thanks. For me on normal + fast, fullscreening on a pre-unibody macbook pro intermittently stutters something awful. Though that was on a snow world, and I booted to Windows before experimenting further. Might I be missing something?

The major performance killer is the view distance. If I set that to FAR, I get occasional hangups and even crashes, on my MacBook Pro.

The about page says:

Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL, nor do I believe the other licenses have much merit other than to boost the egos of the original authors, so I might just possibly release it all as public domain.

I think this advantage is further leveraged by the constant stream of updates he's putting out.. every week there are substantial updates to the game that have users finding better and better value for their money.

His regular "secret Friday" updates make noticeable spikes in server usage. Hopefully he gets back on that schedule.

> What I think is interesting about the free-to-play > period (due to website collapse) is that it may > actually be a massive boost,

I think the paypal withholding his funds may have also been a boost - I know I thought "An indie game that did $600,000 sales in one week? I need to check that out."

It may not have been intentional but I think some of the adversity that Minecraft has faced has been turned around nicely.

The single major point against using Java for games is packaging and distribution, which Notch seems to have figured out pretty well with Minecraft.

Between Java Webstart, Desktop applications and Applets, It's always seemed to me like Java had a lot of deployment options. Consider the JWS setup used by TopCoder's IDE/Client[1] or Bytonic's Jake2[2]- both always impressed me as pretty seamless.

In your opinion, does it come down to the overhead of needing the runtime? Something else?

[1]http://www.topcoder.com/ [2]http://bytonic.de/html/jake2.html

If you'd like to check daily (as i do) the progress of the minecraft sales and other statistics just go here: http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ (official data taken from the minecraft site graphed with Google Chart API).

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