Minecraft? Not at all. Please stop rewriting history. Minecraft definitely had a small dev team but it wasn’t a single persons effort and wasn’t close to being one. You don’t create a world changing video game by yourself.
In addition, code is not the only thing that makes a game. Artists, music, management, and many more.
(There may be others credited; Temmie's the only one I can think of off the top of my head.)
It's certainly made a ton of money, and has generated multiples worth of that in fan content, but that's partly because Fox has been so liberal with policing trademarks/copyright.
>Yes this counts as "alone"
I don't even know what to say to that, I guess we're just straight up redefining words to make yourself feel good?
1) one person but they take VC funding
2) one person but they use open source solutions
3) one person but they live with their parents
4) one person that lives completely off of what they earned themselves previously, but they did get government funded student loans that let them make money in the first place.
5) One person with a copper mine and a soldering gun.
Also, was he not born? Can anyone be said to do anything alone, who did not themselves arise spontaneously from the primordial soup?
/s
Q: was only a single person instrumental to the creation of (product/service)?
A: if yes, then yes; if not, then no. "Yes, but... [help from family / existing wealth / ...]". Irrelevant to me.
> Nearly 60% of households in the U.S. have a net worth of $100,000 or more after accounting for debts, with 29.2% having a net worth of $500,000 or more.
If you live your life thinking you could be great if you only had some 6 figure payout, you're delusional. Building something is hard.
Houses for sure, but cash? Not that common.
I am great at building without 6 figures, heck I build great things for free, why? Cuz its also my hobby.
Did I do it alone? You'd argue that no, I had my old bosses help or something because he gave me the funds to learn and work on it?
If he got it from parents instead would that change anything? What about getting it from his own savings?
No venture is ever done alone. Not just because founders are, as the article say, unable to even handle their own emails, but because every single founder in the world lacks talent. We all do. You're not good enough, and you never will be, especially not to hit a billion. That's a fact. Every single human creating has been a collaborative one, and Sam Altman's delusions don't change that.
I'm thinking about https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_pre-Classic as the Ur-Minecraft.
Edit: Added the missing words
When Minecraft gets acquired for 2.5 billion by Microsoft. Anything before that isn't a billion dollar endeavour. It could have failed miserably. It could have gone nowhere. 0.0.1a was straight up crap, and barely more interesting than Infiniminer. It also hadn't sold for a billion dollars worth of copies either, so...
A business is worth a billion dollars when it either has made it through sales, or someone pays you for that amount. VC funds don't even count, as the vast majority of billion dollar VC funded companies are money hemorraging holes.
Here's a hacker news comment from Sept 2010 which talks about Minecraft's success in the past tense, and according to wikipedia that's the same month that Mojang's second employee was hired. It had already gone viral.
[1] Conveniently ignoring the contributions to graphics and music of Simon Foster and Allister Brimble, but still...