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Comment by lukaszdk | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

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