Minecraft generated 5 million euros in March for Mojang
arcticstartup.com
arcticstartup.com
I'm considering talking to them again and seeing if they'll provide me a dump of sales data (just the timestamp of purchases) so I can re-grapgh everything, it would be cool.
Like the movie industry, it's becoming easier and cheaper than ever to make professional-looking films, but making "A-grade" blockbusters is becoming more and more expensive.
This sort of transition inevitably hurts the biggest-budget producers, as they're forced to spend more and more money to compete. Similarly, it helps the lowest-budget producers, as they can make millions of dollars off what would have been 10 years ago been considered a hobby project.
People tend to look at the most absurdly successful indie games like Braid, Touhou, or Minecraft and dismiss them as one-hit wonders or exceptions to the rule. But how many exceptions to the rule it takes before the rule becomes invalid -- especially as games begin to compete more and more on features besides graphics?
Many of these features are cheaper to develop and benefit from the agility and risk-taking abilities of a smaller development team as opposed to the designed-by-seventeen-committees-in-separate-cupboards approach of the big game studios.
Braid: A very successful indie game distributed entirely through relatively traditional channels (e.g. XBLA, Steam), in contrast to the other two. It was also rather unexpectedly innovative in a realm dominated by relatively generic platformers.
Touhou: Almost certainly the most successful indie game series in history in terms of the total profit across the franchise it created -- but probably not as profitable as Minecraft for its creator because he intentionally limited his monetization of it.
Minecraft: Probably the most successful indie game in history in terms of net income... and the topic of the article, obviously.
It doesn't help the big players that a lot of the big games are franchises (what's the difference between Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops?) that are nickle-and-diming players through Xbox Live and PSN. It costs more to buy a few hours of new content in Fallout: New Vegas than it would to buy many indie games.
This article is evidence to the whole long tail concept all over again, but now in the gaming industry.
That's not even true. Adjusted for inflation, the most expensive movie was made in 1963:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films#Mo...
That rather supports the assertion that making blockbusters is becoming more expensive.
Minecraft has made somewhere around 30 million U.S. dollars, with incredible growth (7 million U.S. dollars in the past month) and they'll probably sell millions more. And since they do their own distribution (Amazon Web Services, I believe), they don't give Apple 30%.
Minecraft is incredible but the mobile platform is actually giving the blockbuster console titles a run for their money (literally). Let that sink in. Console blockbusters have seen 300m+ opening weeks.
http://www.industrygamers.com/news/angry-birds-one-of-the-mo...
I've watched the video at minecraft.net, and I've read the entire Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft
Despite this, I still can't figure out what the element of this game is that makes it addictive and what convinces people to have spent a total of $30m+ on this.
It's easy to see why Angry Birds or Portal or CounterStrike or Desktop Tower Defence or Need for Speed is fun - but Minecraft's draw confuses me.
Is it something that can only be understood by playing it?
Pretty much exactly that.
Can't....stop....digging!
It has other appealing elements, for sure. Exploring large dark randomly generated cave systems with danger at every turn, combining items with other items to make new, more exciting items.
But ultimately, Minecraft taps into the same kind of fun as lego. IMO, it does it even better.