Minecraft surpasses 3 million sales | Hacker News Reader

Minecraft surpasses 3 million sales

attackofthefanboy.com

44 pointsDanielRibeiro29 comments

I bought the game during alpha when it was 13.25$ USD. I'm quite happy with it at that price, but now that it's up to ~21.00 USD I can't say I'd purchase it again.

I am constantly nagged with 'This is an unlicensed copy :( or logged in from a different location'; neither nor or true, I've got documentation.

Keys stick all the time.

It's gotten slower in the past updates.

I bought the game because a) works in linux(my only battle station), b) ran fine at lower specs. Now I can't see dumping that much into it. If more work was done to make the game more adaptable/stable/patching exploits(remote code execution) than adding achievements/characters/ect I might reconsider... but I'm glad I got it when it was cheap.

Keys stick all the time.

This is usually fixed by updating LWJGL to the latest version. See

http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Tutorials/Update_LWJGL

(Not that this justifies the bug in stock configuration).

I think it’s kinda important to clarify that your issues are not at all common. Your experience is not the typical experience. There is something wrong somewhere with your copy of Minecraft. (Have you tried deleting it completely and re-installing it?)

I'm on my third copy. Might mention I'm using Ubuntu with the newest Java update as well. Nothing against them game, it's awesome, but the bugs bug me.

I use minecraft on a ubuntu 10.04, with java version 1.6.0_25, and I don't have any such problem. Unless I use bad password or my connection gets into trouble. Then I can use the offline version, which outputs this message.

Guilty until proven innocent. I'd rather them not output this message at all. It's a bit discouraging as a paying customer to see this as I usually only play the game offline; due to my incredible slow Internet speed. It's one of the better "DRM"s, but could use work.

My son plays it on my (admittedly underpowered) PC running Ubuntu 10.10, and it's rather crash-prone. I suspect it might be due to an issue with the graphics driver.

They DRM'ed the game? I thought they didn't mind piracy.

Last I heard, that "you're a pirate :(" message was the entirety of the DRM. It will still let you play the game.

I won't buy it unless perhaps performance increases. I tried it with the humble indie bundle and on both my computers with okay specs it was extremely laggy and noticeably slow. (i5 i5 m480 and an older e6300 oc'd)

For a 16 bit game I just find it sad that it performs so badly.

Tried in linux and windows on both machines (with 4gb ram each) and both did indeed experience the sticky keys.

This is great for the company, but I wonder if it is the best thing for the game.

You have to remember that this is still in beta. Does any 1 game really need 3 million beta testers?

I think you really start diluting comments that will help you advance the game and start caving to a mass of people looking for a complete game.

"Beta" is a very loosely-defined term. Gmail was in "beta" for years. All it really means is that it isn't the "final product".

"Beta" for gmail was different. "Beta" for Minecraft means just that. The 1.8 update is suppose to completely change the direction of the game adding adventure and NPCs.

My fear is this is because of the 3 million beta users and grand views of the masses.

Not really. Giving the game some sort of (optional) goal (i.e. actually turning Minecraft into a game) was always Notch’s plan. Nothing special about that.

Right, showing how it's in beta.

I guess my main point is that 3 million users might not be the best for a beta game. It might work in the end, but I think Minecraft might get bogged down with 3 million users making suggestions to a non-complete game.

Why are you hypothesizing about how the way things currently are might be a problem, when they in fact visibly aren't a problem? What's your point?

I don't think the majority of Minecraft users even consider that the game is in Beta. I don't think of that when I play, the game is functionally complete, and I play it just for fun.

I imagine most people, when the game is finally "finished", will respond something: "oh... that's cool ... so, what's ~this~ update changed?" It'll be little different to them from the many other updates that have occurred.

For Minecraft, I think, Beta is just a word. (though it does affect payment options, which I'm sure some people will be very sad from)

Does it matter that it is still in beta? Gmail was in beta for a long time?

It's obviously not a "beta" version of the product in historical terms. It's a product that's being publicly used, with all of its imperfections on show, which is continuously being developed.

These are paying customers.

I would say that the actual software component of Minecraft isn't in beta so much as it's the "game mechanics" side of it. It's like having a board with pieces, but not all the rules are written yet.

>"You have to remember that this is still in beta. Does any 1 game really need 3 million beta testers?"

Markus had sold somewhere between 800,000 and 850,000 copies before it went into Beta. Does a game really need 800,000 or so Alpha testers? No.

However considering how the game has ultimately developed, it's best to ignore the naming conventions entirely, considering that -- bugs aside -- it's still a very enjoyable playing experience. "Beta" is effectively a discount. "Alpha" was an even larger discount, and the promise that all future updates would forever be free.

I am following the Minecraft story with interest. I think it is the best example of a game made with Agile developing practices: Individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, responding to change.

Notch has been in very close contact with the players of the game throughout development, and has a keen sense of what this mass of people is looking for.

Success has a thousand fathers. All successful projects are retrospectively "agile" (or so the agilists claim). There are no agile projects that fail (including the original Chrysler project whose sponsors shut down the program and threw the team (consisting of the agile founding fathers) out. In that case you just redefine failure.

If you can show that Mojang does TDD, 'story' card walls, velocity tracking or kanban pipelines or any of the concrete "developing practices" (to use your term) pushed by the agile consultant folks (vs some motherhood "values" that can be retrospectively applied to any successful project try say Google+ instead of MineCraft and you could call it an "agile" success story too) then you'd have more of a case.[1]

Otherwise you could label any successful project anywhere "agile".

[1] I am not saying Mojang doesn't do "agile". Maybe he does - in which case a comment that explained which concrete practices he found useful would be great. I am just tired of agilists latching on to any and all successful projects and calling them "agile" to the point where "agile" becomes a synonym for "successful".

Many of the updates have introduced bugs that, from an outsider's perspective, ought to have been obvious. If I were a gambling man, I'd bet they don't do any kind of automated testing. Add Notch's peculiar reservations about Git to that, I suspect that agile practices are way too advanced for their team.

I'm just speculating of course, as are we all. Just saying that from my perspective, they don't look like a team using agile practices. They don't look like a team using any kind of standard industry practices at all, really.

Disclaimer: I love Minecraft, play it all the time.

You also have to remember that Minecraft as a Beta also happens to be more polished than the majority of pieces of 'software' that make it to market as final releases.

'Beta' in this situation is a modesty thing, I think.

Are you kidding? Playing beta is the best part about Minecraft. The game keeps advancing, and the team blogs and tweets asking for suggestions or new ideas. This is the kind of stuff kids dream about: designing a video game!

Honestly, I think this could be a great business model for indie game designers.

Stats: http://www.minecraft.net/stats.jsp

Statistics

11447747 registered users, of which 3003640 (26.23%) have bought[*] the game.

In the last 24 hours, 45219 people registered, and 10093 people bought the game.

The quoted math is wrong, it's actually 6 million total and 210k per month so far.

uh, what? I think your math is wrong. The game retails for 15 euros, that's 10,000 * 15 per day. The total revenue for the game is about 40 million euros.

yup you are right. I guess I slipped when I was typing in the calculator to check the figures. That's what I get for rushing to write a comment before eating. oh well thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com