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Comment by murdockq | Hacker News Reader

I would say that there has already been one, Notch and Minecraft. Though he did hire people and step down as dev lead, he was pretty solo and already on the 1 billion dollar trajectory.

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Has ConcernedApe ever talked about how much he's made from Stardew Valley before? I've seen estimates from $50M to $300M. Certainly shy of the $1B mark, but, especially if his next project is another solo coded one and does well, he's well on his way.

This seems the closest you are going to get, but Mojang had dozens of employees at the time of the sale. One Reddit post claims there were 40 people there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/18mcpme/does_any...

Yes, but I think the point the parent comment was making is that the value was created by one person. He didn’t HAVE to hire those people and it still would have eventually made a billion dollars.

This isn’t to say that the other people who worked on Minecraft provided no value, they definitely accelerated the game’s success.

I do not think you can assume the guaranteed success of Minecraft. Sure, it bottled lightning, but to go from an indie hit to a Microsoft buyout has a lot of work in between.

Early development of Minecraft had a recurring joke about how Notch did not want to work too hard. If development had stumbled because it was still all on one guy, some mechanically identical competitor game could have grown into the cultural zeitgeist.

Oculus

A single founder and a one-person company aren't the same thing. Oculus had about 100 employees when they were acquired; they had about 10 at the time of their Kickstarter campaign.

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