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Comment by noodle | Hacker News Reader

i dunno about that. we're probably seeing one of his larger sales periods, as it enters into the mainstream from obscurity.

it might continue to do well, but i'm skeptical that he'll be able to keep up the rate at which it is currently selling.

either way, though, he's doing amazingly well for himself.

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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.

I don't really see how you can "graphically improve" a game that is built around square voxel-like elements and pixel graphics.

He definitely nears market saturation quickly.

Better textures and lighting?

just by way of illustration, see the difference in graphics between civ1 and civ2, which were both basically square tilemaps with a limited number of different terrain squares.

The real early adopters of Minecraft largely overlapped with the 8-bit/lo-fi enthusiast community, which consists of active forum goes and very connected social gamers. I think a lot of people overlook this when they comment about the graphics of the game; the ones that hold the most credence in gaming are the ones who have a nostalgia further back than anyone.

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