How Minecraft Was Born | Hacker News Reader

How Minecraft Was Born

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114 pointsLibertatea71 comments

After watching Minecraft: The Story of Mojang [1] I was left with the impression that no one at Mojang really knows how to run a business, but since the cash from Minecraft just keeps coming in, everybody at Mojang is just having a great time.

In this sense they a very much a like a startup learning to become a company, but without the financial pressure.

It will be interesting to see if Minecraft will be a one-hit wonder for Mojang or if they will be able to grow into a company with sustainable profits from multiple IPs.

[1] http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft

Personally I don't care if they never produce another hit, Minecraft is amazing and rarely does such an awesome game come along.

I thought 0x10c seemed really promising, both aesthetically and conceptually.

I don't know anything about any of their other games. I don't think I'd like them much. The abortion of 0x10c is a real bummer though. I hope they had better reasons than just running out of excitement for it.

WRT multiple IPs, I am interested to see how they interact with the mods ecosystem over time. Not so much can they make a twitter app or a 2-d platformer or something equally unrelated. I don't want a blocky minecraft looking pacman clone, at all.

I'd pay more for the RailCraft mod than I paid for minecraft itself, in terms of enjoyment per $. Of course the RC mod is free ... Also I use buildcraft mod although the gold pipes suck for steam distribution, and I'd pay for buildcraft, although thats free. Thermal expansion has better steam distribution...

The great mothership recently released a new minecraft version, which amounted to a couple new flowers and some biomes for people who don't mine, and nothing at all for anyone who does anything below the surface. Its called Minecraft, gentlemen, not fuzzy bunny craft so lose the giant mushroom biome please, and beg borrow or steal the buildcraft, railcraft, forestry, applied energetics, universal electricity, and a couple other mods so people who mine in MINEcraft actually have something fun to do rather than admiring double height grass blocks and mesa biomes.

The other thing which is hilarious from a guy who's been into computers since 1981 is the mods ecosystem is from a software engineering / systems administration standpoint just a tiny bit more advanced than the msdos era, actually pretty close to my historical digging into MVS/360. So its 2013 and apt and dpkg and friends have existed since the very early 90s, but in 2013 the way you handle version dependence and bug tracking and distribution is you manually visit adware download spam sites and click 50 times to download a tiny mod, and then track version compatibility manually by visiting 50 decentralized web forums. Oh and don't get me started on people who think a 15 minute youtube video with awful video and music counts as the only form of "documentation" required. Dudes, its 2013 almost 2014 not the era of msdos 3.11 and warez BBS systems? It really does suck after using Linux since the early 90s and downshifting back to 1985, even though I run minecraft on linux (both client and server).

Mojang should implement a minecraft mod store with a payment system thats trustworthy/reliable and very fast with excellent versioning compatibility. I'd pay $40 for railcraft and mojang can keep $10 of it and everyone else will be happy as long as I get $40 of actual service, like its very fast and completely transparent and highly reliable and effective and perhaps dare I ask, effectively and centrally documented and centrally bug tracked?

My understanding is that the team at Mojang is seriously committed to their new mod-based vision; but that there are many technical hurdles they must overcome to achieve their goals.

Just looking at the patch notes for the 1.7, 1.7.1, and 1.7.2, it looks to me that they did some significant code refactoring and expanded the capabilities of the core systems. Additionally, they seem to have added new features to really enhance the multiplayer experience.

Among the changes I see as significant (either from improving the social experience, or from technical difficulty) are: + Achievements are now world specific + Gaining achievements now announced to other players + Servers can now have a “server-icon.png” that is displayed in the multiplayer list + You can see who’s online before joining, just hover the player count number in the server list + Links in chat are now clickable + Click on somebody’s name to send a private message

+ Added Stained Glass

+ Added a bunch of new graphics options + Added some shader tests (click on the “Super Secret Settings” a couple of times…)

* You can now have multiple resource packs loaded at the same time * Resource packs can now hold sound effects * Servers can recommend resource packs

* Network code has been rewritten * Sound manager has been rewritten

There may be interesting organizational hurdles, as subjectively the community, or at least the mod community, or the users of the most popular mods, appear to implement changes showing they believe the best way to enhance the multiplayer experience is new sets of blocks doing cool new things with new varieties of technology, whereas most of the listed "upgrades" boil down to making a nice chat system. Make the game more fun with more toys, vs lets make an app to socialize oh and there's also a game attached or something.

I think this frictional point is where most of the interesting action will happen in the near term evolution of MC and Mojang.

Actually, most of the changes revolve around "let's make it easier for modders to make mods" and "let's work on areas that we neglected". Private messaging systems are used a LOT on servers.

Okay, you're kidding, right?

Minecraft 1.7 did not include any major changes. They just rewrote about 50% of the source code.

Nah, not a lot.

And they're doing it EXACTLY so they can make a mod store.

Now, the only reason you cannot pay for Railcraft is because Mojang included a clause stating that you cannot sell modifications or derivative works based on Minecraft's source code. They ARE working on a mod store and API... since 2011. I believe it will be coming in the next year or so, Mojang claims January but I stopped believing them long ago.

About modifications, I started work on a way to improve mod distribution from servers to clients: AsieLauncher. It automatically generates a launcher, a list of modifications and a list of changes between modpacks. It supports delta updating, all MC versions from 1.2.3 to 1.7.2, optional mods and a lot of other things.

The plan was to add support for automatic mod updating and dependency tracking, but the problem is mod authors aren't often willing to participate, due to stubbornness or just plain assholery or laziness. That's why such projects rarely take off.

OK that launcher idea sounds useful.

Another interesting failure mode is some mod authors stop development or apparently disappear. Everything I've read implies Thermal Expansion simply stopped in 1.5.x and its still not compatible with 1.6.x or later. Of course that may be out of date or inaccurate information.

One general startup concept to think about is minecraft mods are another example of an ecosystem built on another companies playing field; much like the companies that write facebook games.

" Everything I've read implies Thermal Expansion simply stopped in 1.5.x and its still not compatible with 1.6.x or later. "

They decided to attempt a complete rewrite of the mod. It's about half-done. Yes, stupid decision, seeing as a 1.6.x port can be done in a weekend for any mod.

I wish I could make a startup, but I'm only 16... although I do have the AsieLauncher - which makes launcher creation and mod cataloguing easy, I also have contacts within the modding group with people willing to join such kind of project... But I can't take any money for it, which kind of misses the point.

An easy way to charge for Minecraft mods would be to create a Flattr-esque system for server owners: you pay a flat fee for servers, set based on server size, and the fee is proportionally distributed between mod authors, who in exchange ensure that the mod versions in the database are okay and that the configuration is in a specific format that makes it easy for the launcher to generate a server- and client-side config that just works (though "ID hell" will be gone with 1.8, when they fully make a move to referring to blocks by names and not IDs).

AsieLauncher Wiki URL: https://github.com/asiekierka/asielauncher/wiki

EDIT: We also have a serverlist! http://servers.asie.pl - and our mod database is viewable at http://servers.asie.pl/mods (I apologize for the Bootstrap)

EDIT2: Meet me @ #AsieLauncher on irc.freenode.net

"But I can't take any money for it"

Yes this is an area where "the minecraft mod community" in general doesn't seem to understand the (recent) history of the FOSS movement. Not invented here syndrome on a very large scale. debian.net doesn't redirect people thru adfly to download DVD ISOs yet none of the devs are starving, and so forth.

Another area of comedy is the early 90s-like "lets make our own license" and the result of programmers trying to practice law is generally about as comical as lawyers trying to program. Yet the modding community with no sense of history has some amusing home grown licenses (sorry no links at top of my head). I compliment you personally for not falling victim to that trap (I looked at your github) but many modders have some truly weird homemade licenses.

The problem is that 12-year-olds are not willing to donate, and that is the major audience for most mod makers, unlike Linux distros.

Only a few get to make for the smaller crowds, and they are usually mocked throughout.

Not to mention, companies don't invest millions in Minecraft.

EDIT: MMPL (Minecraft Mod Public License) and Elo's and CovertJaguar's custom licenses are the most prominent examples. Half of the mods don't even HAVE licenses!

It is the other way around, the FOSS community does not understand the gamming/modder communities.

Most of those FOSS developers are paid by (a) consulting/support fees on the FOSS they develop or (b) working for companies which use that FOSS in their products. That works fine for B2B products, but doesn't translate well to Minecraft - nobody really needs consulting/support fees on Minecraft mods, because the hosting services mostly handle that, and they sell hosting at near bottom-dollar.

Mod authors indirectly monetize their mods by hosting them on the deceptive and ad laden file hosting sites that have some tiny return on traffic.

Yes. I prefer donations, and AsieLauncher got more money for donations than it ever would from adf.ly for the next 2 years.

and ads with the youtube phenomenon which I don't get (would much rather read) but suits my 9 year old nephew perfectly

Yes, major changes—Jeb's Minecon 2013 slide showed 600,000 lines of code committed for version 1.7. [1]

Two years ago I was certain that Mojang's goal was to do a mod store, but at Minecon 2012 Jeb explicitly ruled that out in a slide titled "Making Money?" with a bullet point reading "Not via the repository or the game." [2]

[1] http://gamegenus.blogspot.com/2013/11/text-of-jebs-slides-fr...

[2] http://gamegenus.blogspot.com/2012/12/jebs-minecraft-api-sli...

The Technic Launcher system helps get around a lot of the complexity of distributing modpacks, once you get them put together. I did this, primarily so my godsons and their mother can easily get all the mods they need to come play on my private server. Admittedly, my modpack is mainly based on Tekkit Lite, with a few additions and deletions, so most of the hard work was already done, but I still had to do some tweaking of block IDs to get everything to play nicely together.

they released scrolls a couple of months ago and it already paid for the two year of development it had. I do believe mojang will be creating some interesting things in the coming years.

Notch described what later became Minecraft in a 2009 youtube, calling it an 'Infiniminer clone' he was working on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k

I've been involved in the indie game dev community for a while now, and I was an active member on the TIGSource forums when Markus first presented Minecraft there[0] (he still posted, at the time!)

I remember from day one thinking it would be pretty cool if he could make infiminer with gameplay (at the time, he was talking of a capture the flag mode, and a "defend the castle you built from zombies" mode).

Then he started charging $10 for preorders, which I thought was insane- who would pay money for a prototype that he'd probably abandon within 6 months anyway? (most indie game debs abandon their project- finishing a game puts you in the 0.0001%)

But it actually worked, which surprised me. I finally preordered myself, because everyone was doing it to support him- I think I was order ~11 000 or so. I thought it was insane that he managed to get 10k+ preorders for his small project, and a little something clicked in my head then. Of course, now of over 12 million people have bought the game :) [1]

[0] http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0

[1] https://minecraft.net/stats

Preorders were $5, at least by the time I bought (in alpha), which IMO is a much more justifiable price for an impulse buy that might not work out. It was raised to $10 after it hit "beta" (which was after it was already popular and had made at least a million, IIRC).

Ha, thanks for correcting this- faulty memory :)

Even $5 was surprising, as most people on TIGS just post their demos and games for free- back then, most people made games with the only intention of making something cool. It's only recently that everyone builds a game with money in mind, and Minecraft was amongst the games to start that trend (remember, this was before Kickstarter et al.)

I wonder if minecraft's financial success (after the initial stage where Persson couldn't have done it another way as the article argues) was because of the pricing model that bucked trends in the gaming world, signalling "this game is different", or if it was despite the difference?

I was pretty surprised when Minecraft was charging money for a fairly simple and uncompleted game. I was surprised because I had not seen that done very often. Now it's definitely more popular with things like Kickstarter but I think the fact he was asking for money early on helped a lot. If he had not asked for money, he may not have been able to develop the game to the level he did.

A few thousand people bought the game in the first 6 months. Removing Swedish taxes, that was about $20k. That's not a bad motivator, you know.

Steam is now overloaded with "early access" game sales.

Both. Neither. There's a tendency to mimic currently successful pricing models, almost in a cargo cult manner. Looking at the product, the potential customers, etc. and actually making a decision is harder. But that's exactly how the currently successful pricing models were developed in the first place.

The first time I tried to play Minecraft, I didn't understand it. Once I did understand the basic idea, I simply had to have the game. I would have gone through any sign-up process there was to get the game, and paid anything up to about $60. The game was different and was a watershed, regardless of inspirations. The sum of those inspirations was much bigger than the parts. I would guess that the success was mostly driven by sheer demand for a unique experience, plus network effects once it reached popularity.

98% of all great startups are copycats, not original innovations. Markus copied the look and feel from infiniminer, but minecraft was far better executed.

No, he didn't just copy it, he looked what the players liked and what they didn't like, extracted the good stuff and made a game out of this.

This is how everything remotely successful works.

This is also why things later fail!

The companies want more customers and add stuff to their products to appeal. But what they end with is a product, that doesn't reflect the good things extracted anymore, because they got bloated.

I'm still not sure I'm entirely clear what about this story is "amazingly unlikely"?

Passion > Business. Passion that makes a business is even better.

Thanks for sharing. This is inspiring. Hope to grab a copy of the book!

TL;DR he ripped off Infiniminer.

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

Jim Jarmusch: "Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: 'It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.' "

Inspiration is not the same thing as blatantly ripping off other games and passing them off as unique creations. Comandeer Keen started out as a project to copy Super Mario Bros. 3, for example. But is Comandeer Keen just a "rip off" of SMB 3? Hardly. And Minecraft is far from a rip off of infiniminer. If anything, today infiniminer is much more well known due to minecraft's success. Infiniminer is about as similar to minecraft as pong is to breakout.

+1 for your defense of minecraft. -1 for Hacker's News staunch outlook on intellectual property.

"Inspiration is not the same thing as blatantly ripping off other games and passing them off as unique creations. "

Who said that was inspiration? -no one goes out to "blatantly" rip something off. Your lack of understanding speaks to your lack of creative experience, sorry.

What is "amazingly unlikely" about that though? Revolutionary games that create their own genres (Rogue, Adventure, Dune 2) are amazingly unlikely. Minecraft is just evolution of the games that already existed.

But they play nothing alike. The mechanics aside from the representation of the world are incredibly different.

Not sure of the others, but Dune 2 certainly didn't spontaneously big bang in a vacuum either, it was built on earlier iterations of similar games most notable being Herzog Zwei,whose english translation curiously enough is just 2 letters forward on a single letter, it translates as "Duke 2"

that said, played the shit out of dune 2, what a game!

Relevant: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Doom_clon...

christ its about time there was an article about this, I knew it for about 3 years = (

It's more like he took Infiniminer and made a fun game out of it.

Infiniminer wasn't much fun. Minecraft is. That's about all there is to it.

You read the article right? Especially the part where the creator of Infiniminer is tired of people saying that?

Every time I read a story about some unassuming person getting rich off of doing what they love, I always ask myself: how can I do this?

Step 1: find something I love.

Does lying in bed surfing the internet count?

No?

Damn.

Based on your comment and your username, you must be in bed, drunk and surfing the internet! :-)

Here's an idea for a simple app that prevents you from phoning / texting your ex when you're drunk in bed. You have to (previous to being drunk) mark all of your contacts that you aren't supposed to contact when drunk and give reasons. Use the acceleromter to test if the user is able to stand up straight. If not then block certain outgoing calls / texts.

Then place ads in bars that say, "Don't drunk text your ex tonight. Download the app... DTP (Drunk Text Protector)". Hint: You can charge a little extra for the app because the user is probably part drunk anyway. ;-)

So, as the user, you get drunk and get home and text your ex 'Anna' and the app says:

  Your message to Anna was blocked. You previously told me that she 
  was "some crazy bitch who slept with your best friend".

  If you really want to text Anna, then you can use one of your "go on
  be a dumb ass" credits to bypass this drunk text lock.

  You currently have [0] credits. Click here to purchase some now.

If you really want to text Anna then you can, but you have to buy a "I'm an idiot" credit pack as an in-app purchase, which gives you a number of credits to text / phone people you shouldn't.

Profit!

lmfao

have you seen HBO's Girls? A character creates this app and starts a hip NYC startup

I haven't seen it.

It just goes to show you that the success of an app is all in the execution. Ideas mean (nearly) nothing. ;-)

This app was also featured in the movie "The Internship" (starring Google and Sergey Brin on a bike).

Use the acceleromter to test if the user is able to stand up straight.

Riding on the bus/train can cause a lot of wobbling around. How well can an accelerometer-based system distinguish this from drunkenness?

It doesn't. That is a bonus feature for all the other people on the bus.

even worse, drunk people on a bus might hit the perfect storm where the swaying cancels out and lets them through!

this feature request reminds me of my old (loved) email client that detected drunk emails and quietly filed them for sober review

Step x: Get lucky. :)

Hmmm, I thought that was Daft Punk... ;)

you could lie in bed, surf internet, and do affiliate marketing!

The usual question is whether the person in the article got rich mostly because they were lucky, or mostly because they did something right, where everyone were doing it wrong. (I say 'mostly', because one doesn't completely preclude the other.)

If you ask me, Notch mostly got lucky. There is nothing wrong with that, but I don't think anything he did or said warrants the gigantic personality cult that has grown around him. That cult exists mostly because of the money he made. IMO, Tarn Adams[1] is much more interesting to listen to. Maybe he doesn't have several million dollars in his bank account, but what ho does is truly inspiring on many levels, and much closer to what people can replicate in their lives with reasonable probability.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of...

I won't call it luck, but there were certainly circumstances that enabled Minecraft. For example, Notch being born at the right stage of personal computers; the development of Infiniminer. But all successes will have such circumstances, because all events happen within a historical stream.

I see the particular success of Minecraft coming from multiple overlapping individual components or features that are each works of genius. The piling up of so many feats of genius in one place produces runaway success.

One of these features was borrowed from Infiniminer - the idea of the persistent, destructible/constructible world, modeled as a regular 3D grid to make it tractable, relatively simple to code, and easy to understand and manipulate. An innovation here is treating parts of the world like cellular automata at times (water, fire, etc). The next bit of genius is the crafting system. One might say other games had already done crafting, but I'd say none like Minecraft. Minecraft captured an earthy, complete-feeling microcosm of the whole supply chain. It captures something deeply geological, anthropological, and primal. This is the part of the game that, once I had figured out the very basics of wood and stone, my jaw fell on the floor, because I then intuited where Notch was going with it. How comprehensive and primal it was. I'd played plenty of games with 'crafting' before, and this was something very different. More natural, more tiered, more 'realistic' even though still a simplified model compared to the real world.

Next, the very effective use of lighting as a mechanic. The terror of being exposed on the surface, and the claustrophobia in tight underground packages. The breadcrumb trail mechanic of torches. Other games have used light before, but I struggle to think of one that used it quite like this.

Finally, Minecraft has the type of polish that comes from intentional simplicity, so that you don't even notice it. Part of this is very, very good controls. Another is perfect collision detection, made possible by the simple 3D grid structure. Even though this kind of thing is notable for what you don't notice, it comes from Notch being a good game programmer with a good grasp of 3D programming. Not just anyone could have realized these ideas in such a polished way, even if they had the ideas.

Sure, everyone is a product of their environment, the time they live in, their influences and so forth. You can say that about anyone. But with Minecraft, Notch did a perfect storm of right things, and it resonated with millions of people.

An innovation here is treating parts of the world like cellular automata at times

Dwarf Fortress used cellular automata for water and lava before Minecraft [1]. It also had a from-the-ground-up crafting system with complex production chains, with geology and ecology playing a major role.

Again, this doesn't determent what Minecraft developers created, but they didn't come up with these concepts from scratch, as many people assume. (Even the article says they were inspired by DF.)

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131954/interview_the_m...

Meat Boy is a good example of getting rich-ish based on doing something right. It was a victory won hard.

Another takeaway: Notch didn't just create a good game; He got lucky with his marketing. Infiniminer came first, did a lot of things better, but ultimately failed due to fragmentation.

Does anyone find it funny that Bezos is making money off this inaccurate book about himself, that he probably hates, by selling it in his store? And that his wife's bad review of the book probably drove more sales? (the rank is currently 83, earlier today in a Google cached version of the page the rank is 86)

Not that he should/would pull the book or anything. Just kind of funny.

Wrong thread mate.

Wrong thread, you must have mixed up tabs :)

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