Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

Eh, a good programmer can just treat Java as an object code format, compiling it in their heads from something like Scala or Clojure.

The real problem isn't that Java is spent, it's that (most) Java programmers are dorky. I avoid the language mainly to avoid associating with the community.

A plumber climbs out of a manhole, and his arms are covered with - guess what? - excrement! A beautiful little girl in a beautiful white dress happens to pass by. The plumber seizes the opportunity and quickly, but firmly sweeps his hands over the girl’s white dress.

Little girl (appalled): AAAH!!

Plumber (outraged): Oh yeah? I bet you love to take a shit though.

http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-cardinal-programming-jokes.ht...

So yeah, Java is dorky and uncool, but I bet we love to play Minecraft (I don't know, since I haven't played a video game in at least a decade).

I suspect that the Lightweight Java Game Library is seeing a spike in downloads.

I wonder if this will get more people doing 3d games in Java. It certainly is a ringing endorsement. Java has some nice features over C and C++ and the performance is good enough as demonstrated by the game. Plus it has a very good collection of libraries.

Forget Valve or Bungie, pretty soon Oracle will come knockin' on his door. ;-)

..so that's why it renders like a hog ;)

It's not the language, it's what you do with it.

Everything else is just hot air.

Meh, Java is just fine, and if you really like it, I'm happy for you. (I find it an interesting but somewhat cumbersome language. Still, if it's the right tool for the job ...)

Maybe this guy's amazing success will serve to change some minds here, tho.

Color me unsurprised. I dislike Java as much as the next person, but for a certain class of problems -- particularly in game programming -- it is a tool I often reach for.

Java is a painfully verbose language that does not trust me with any power tools. When I work in it I wind up cursing its name approximately twice per hour. But the combination of Extreme Portability and Libraries For Absolutely Everything and maybe a little bit of Everybody Understands It often draws me in anyway.

I don't love it, but sometimes it is the right tool for the job.

The main problem with Java for games is that you have to do graphics through a wrapper written in another language (AFAIK Minecraft uses LWJGL's OpenGL wrapper) and working from a language like Java, you lose some fine control of memory management.

On the upside, it allows him to do rapid development, and you can even try Minecraft in the browser.

In this case Java also greatly simplified distribution. Want to serve an OpenGL game over the web with Python, Ruby? Until HTML 5 Audio and WebGL take hold - good luck with that.

I don't think there is another language out there that could have given Minecraft the kind of success that it's had (The same applies to Runescape). Many Windows users have a JVM + the Java plugin installed already, and the only other widely-known plugin that gives the kind of 3D performance that you can extract out of Java is Unity3D. While Unity is easy enough to install, it's been around for a lot less long and it's less widely known and developed for. Most users would have experienced a jarring "please install this plugin" moment before they got to play, and I'm pretty sure that the immediacy with which players have been able to get into Minecraft has been a big part of its success.

Contrary to what you repeatedly hear about Java, it actually has very decent performance. Sure, the ME edition is horrible (if that was somebody's only exposure to Java game programming I'd forgive them for never wanting to touch the language again), and some years ago applet performance was awful (which seems to have left a bad taste in the mouths of a significant number of hackers), but these days if you avoid Swing (and why would you want such a toolkit for a 3D game like Minecraft anyway?) and use a library like LWJGL then you can produce a game with decent performance and graphics. Minecraft is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to scaling down to older machines, but it still runs reasonably well on quite a lot of older hardware (up to about 5 yrs old, or thereabouts). That leaves you with a very large potential userbase.

Also contrary to what you might hear, Java's actually not that shabby of a language either. Sure, you sacrifice some of the features and syntactic sugar found in higher-level languages like Python & Ruby (in return for performance), but garbage collection and higher-level features like reflection that are not found in C/C++ mean that development speed is still pretty good. There are a wide variety of available libraries to help you out too.

Lastly, much of Java's reputation for verbosity doesn't apply to games development. You don't have to use any of the libraries that require XML-heavy configuration like Spring or Hibernate, nor any of horrifyingly verbose stuff like EJBs or JDBC (actually there's nothing forcing you to use those for enterprise stuff either). Once you've taken care of the performance-intensive graphics stuff, you're "only" left with the core game logic. While a higher-level language like Python, Ruby or Lua could reduce the amount of code you need to write by a certain amount, the difference is not as pronounced as it is between, say, C++ and Lua, due to Java's automatic memory management.

And seriously, who gives a toss about whether something's dorky and uncool? I didn't care back in high school that people thought I was a dork for programming or even just for using computers (this was before the internet and Apple made computers cool!) and nobody should have to give a shit what programming language snobs think of their choice of language either, as long as they're getting the job done.

Uncool when it comes to up-voting, but quite cool when it comes about hiring, it seems.

Java is still much better language, than antiquated Objective-C. And you know how many apps are written in ObjC.

When you show a real programmer the path to financial independence, he will code even in brainfuck.

You realize that iOS is just a stripped down OS X right?

I think we're going to see Xcode for Windows before we see iOS running on Macs. In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if there was no more Mac in five years.

Apple created iOS because lightweight devices with a touch screen demand entirely different solutions and paradigms than mouse driven desktop applications do. They're not converging any time soon.

I'm curious as to why this has been downvoted so much?

It seems clear to me that if iOS device sales haven't already outsold Mac OS X computers, they will shortly, both in terms of both dollars and # of units.

It also seems pretty clear, and insiders everywhere seem to agree, that the paradigms introduced in iOS will (and already have, see multitouch) trickle into what is now known as Mac OS X.

Apparently, there are some people who strongly disagree, so what's your viewpoint?

To be fair, I think for a price per person ratio, he's doing well. =)

>most successful big-budget games earn orders of magnitude more.

They also cost orders of magnitude more to create. Also, at this rate it could possibly get to be a 100 million dollar title over its lifetime.

He has sold 272,233 copies, making about $3.6million

http://minecraft.net/stats.jsp

His company (Mojang Specifications) is a sole proprietorship, so the tax situation is interesting (i.e. most of it is taxed as personal income, and Sweden has a progressive tax system, and he has to pay insurance contributions as well). I can understand why he's scrambling to establish a real company :)

dude, we're talking about over $300,000 a day

"unless he can somehow sustain his current income indefinitely"

If he sustains it for 2 weeks he's pretty much set for life.

What do you mean health care? Look again where he's living.

There is more value in having a large quantity of money at once then that same quantity over time. If he is smart with the money, I would say he (and his children) are set for life.

He'll be fine if he gets a financial planner and keeps running a business. He should start a business or foundation. Healthcare concerns are done away with because all your company really gives you with it's health care is the fact they've purchased into a group-policy with some company... you could do the same with your extended group of friends if you can organize the thing.

350k/day = 7 years of 50k/year. If he pulls 10 days of 250k/day he's made 50 years of income, or $2.5 million. |I'm really worried for the guy.|

I hear its not always that far north of 50k.

I understand that it definitely isn't the case, was really just making a joke about the fact that someone who strikes it rich turns down a normal job right after.

You still don't need many of those $350k days before you can comfortably "retire" (or whatever we're calling it when you have enough money to live off it forever)

Probably almost none. It's very rare to find a gaming-related story on HN that gets any popularity, because the HN community overwhelmingly focuses on web development and getting/being filthy rich, which are both uncommon things in indie gamedev.

Free happiness included!

That's a great sentiment. I'm not interested in getting super rich, I'd just like to do interesting work and have some freedom in my life. Hopefully that's not too much to ask.

Depends on your definition of "pretty good living". Anyway, I would not count on it.

Jason Rohrer [1], programmer and indie games developer, author of recent award-winning Sleep is Death [2], manages to get by on around $10K/year. From what I hear, lifestyle this can support in the USA is frugal to the extreme.

[1] Jason Rohrer homepage: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Rohrer

[2] Sleep Is Death http://www.sleepisdeath.net/

Entirely agree. But "good for the community" = "good for me" :)

And, given his success, he's likely near-guaranteed a job at high-profile companies for life if he ever wants one. No reason to jump now.

Just look at the game that the team they purchased made: portal. The indie game was very ugly. The final game was polished, funny, and fun. If he were to bring his game to valve they could probably improve it a lot.

More successful (assuming a sales-metric): quite likely, given a guaranteed advertising budget. But less of it (%-wise) would go back to Notch.

Better: depends on your metric. Fewer customers = less feedback = more likely to get your idea implemented. More customers = more employees = more code backing the game (overall better), and likely more bugfixes and better-performing graphics. More control in the hands of one person = more personality-driven design decisions = ? (and I wish to point out that Apple works largely this way with Jobs - though again, "better" is still subjective)

But, at an absolute minimum, being part of Valve will put more pressure on sales than there currently is. Even if they explicitly say "do anything, we won't even look", there's an implicit push in that direction. He's now made enough money to do literally anything he wants with this game, with no pressure to make more sales. I count that a purely good thing, because there is no game for everyone, and without pressure to appeal to more people it's more likely (IMO, also still subjective) to become better in its niche.

Which is entirely unsustainable, so not much of an argument against working for another company. If they can offer, say, a million per year, what will the ultimate amount he gets be at 20 years from now? 40 years? Reliability has its uses.

Does that actually happen in the game industry? Admittedly, to some extent that's the treatment Will Wright got from EA when Maxis was acquired (they weren't 100% hands off, but he could win basically any concessions he cared enough about), but there aren't very many people with Will Wright level freedom at big studios.

And being forced to justify every small thing and have to use outlook.

There's also the advantage of them taking care of the business side. Reading some of his recent updates seems to indicate that the past few weeks have been spent dealing with administrative duties like lawyers, servers, and hiring. Were he to take them up on their offer, that could all be taken care of for him, if we wanted (I'm guessing).

I'm happy that he's decided to stay independent, but I think Valve could actually handle a hire such as him correctly. They've got a great reputation with most of the gaming community for doing things right, and I'd be surprised if they screwed something like that up.

When you put it that way it makes sense. It all depends on what he wants right? Does he want the freedom of being able to do whatever he wants WHEN he wants or does he want to do a huge dream product w/ the dream team with all the bells and whistles.

I think you're missing something here...

The entire reason Minecraft is so successful is because there IS NO HUGE INCREDIBLE STAFF. The game spawned from the thoughts, dreams, and abilities of just a single mind. Add more minds and the game becomes something it was never intended to be.

Either give a reference, or you must be confusing sales and downloads.

One thing working for him is that to play the survival version, you have to pay. If there was a free trial, I probably would've given that a shot and then escaped from the potential clutches of addiction. But it was paid only, so I paid. And I rarely pay for anything.

cough Worlds Chat cough

Seriously, we had that exact idea implemented around 1997 -- and it even supported multiple authentications (anonymous worlds, versus worlds with user accounts) all transparently. And it could even do VRML, crowd control, dynamic downloads (so you could link to new worlds), and a built-in world builder.

It seemed that we had thought of everything... And then management took over.

The map is not bounded, it's generated as you approach the boundaries. It's only limited by your disk space to hold the map.

It's 9.95€ and 20€, around $13 and $26...

The Portal team was scooped up from Digipen. If their game was netting them over $200k/day, something tells me they wouldn't have been so eager to join Valve.

Hey I f'ing love Valve, my all time favorite game company. No one is trying to suggest working for Valve is a bad thing. But a little perspective is needed here.

I think he'll be ok. Right now he is only selling to the early adopter crowd who doesn't mind the crappy graphics. Once he spends some money on graphic designers, he'll be able to get mainstream appeal.

Once he has mainstream appeal, he can release it for the stores to sell. Which will boost his sales.

But yeah...either way he has already made a ton of money off this game....at least a couple million. Which should give him plenty of room to perfect his product.

looks can be changed, my guess is that the first thing he'll do is update the graphics to give the game mainstream appeal.

right now people are playing for the gameplay...just like they do with WoW

There's a refreshing vibe working its way through the game community where alternative graphic styles and alternative game concepts are given more acceptance. It's becoming a great time to be a game developer.

You have two distinct directions here, though: World of Warcraft's gameplay is rather complex (compare the image of WoW with this image from Minecraft: http://imgur.com/lQdye.png), is about killing monsters and obtaining the best equipment, showing off how much time you're able to spend in-game. I think showing your personality to others is really hard in WoW, at least without talking to them.

Minecraft, on the other side, is about you, your personality and creativity. You're able to modify the game as you like: First off all, you're making your own world! Second, texture packs are available, in order to change both the world and your own character. By making the game less complex, it is also very easy to get into, compared to WoW.

(I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but I'm no professional game developer.)

Minecraft is more like a lego world.

Recently, someone built a 16-bit ALU in minecraft:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/28/working-computer-mad.ht...

And a 1:1 scale model of the Enterprise D:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/09/the-true-story-be...

It's called a 'backlash'. It's been happening for a while now, minecraft just dragged it into the spotlight.

The current demand is for games that are fun, not games that are pretty or push your gfx card to the limit. It doesn't have to look polished, but the look has to fit the gameplay.

Minecraft's blocky graphics allow the player to use their imagination a bit. Don't underestimate that.

I wonder if it might be a requirement (or nearly) for run-away successes though, while obviously not sufficient for it.

Not just coincidence. I've bought quite a lot of indie games the last few years but Minecraft is one of the few I recommend, no, urge my friends to buy.

It's genuine fun, different and has QWAN.

Yep... after all, I can (anecdotally) point to a number of successful businesses in which the founders were simply trying to get rich.

Oh my god, I used to play Starcraft with Zach back in college.

This is the first time I've seen him referenced "in the wild"

Agree. I played a bit of Dwarf Fortress, and there was definitely a learning curve. Minecraft has, essentially, no initial "how to play" learning curve.