Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
1) You have "Big Plans" that need funding (eg. Elon Musk)
2) Running up the numbers as a life gamification to "beat" your peers, or just because you can't stop chasing yourself, like one of those freak beast weightlifters that looks like a space monster but is addicted to "the gainz" (eg. Larry Elison, et al)
There are only so many houses and planes and boats and experiences you can buy, practically speaking, and at a certain point all your grandkids' grandkids are easily taken care of (should you decide to reproduce, and assuming society stands and the dollar keeps its value, of course).
Interestingly I'm pretty sure Bill Gates started in bucket #2 but moved to #1 at some point later in life, but I think most people stick in one or the other.
For example, if he has someone in charge of spending money on medical research, don't you think there is a point (a few billion) where they just don't know what else to spend money on? I mean, there are only so many medical researchers in the whole world.
Of course you can always just throw money away/at people, but it won't do any good. "Give a man a fish" vs. "teach a man to fish."
Only about 16% of proposed NIH grants alone are funded each year- we can immediately see from that data that funding all NIH grants in just one year would probably take well over $100 billion.
The life scientists of the U.S. could find a use for Bill Gate's entire fortune in a few years. Not that dropping $80 billion on across the board medical research wouldn't be incredibly, enormously beneficial, but the infrastructure and manpower in the medical sciences are there to be able to absorb it and put it to use.
That is about twice as much as NASA [2].
[1] http://www.nih.gov/about/budget.htm
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C...
Edit: well, of course everyone's salaries would go up since there would be so much more demand and no extra supply, but I doubt they could go up that much all at once; most of the money would still go unspent.
I've done grant funding as well. People say they want money, but the minute you give them a deadline, they're gone, and they can't collect even the merest evidence required for due diligence.
That's hardly surprising. Managing money is investing, and wise investment requires a lot of skills, market information, and connections. There's only so many good investors out there.
Not investing as a whole is a zero sum game but specifically increased levels of investing sophistication and savvy.
Yes, throwing fish at the poorest is the right thing to do. Malnourished children grow with diminished intellectual capacity. Then it is too late to teach them to fish.
Look at the recent US drought - were people wrong to have had children ten years ago? How were they to know that some areas of the US were going to be in severe multi-year drought?
Why is it different if you change "the US" to some other part of the world?
Have a read of "Too Poor To Farm" which explains some of the problems very poor people face, and explains some of the reasons why very poor people have children.
http://www.irinnews.org/report/94947/lesotho-weather-extreme...
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/09in12ms.xls
Effective tax rate plateaus at around a half mil in annual income, then starts going down again after around five million.
I couldn't find any hard data about brackets above that. Didn't Mitt Romney pay around 15%?
Then there's my all-time favorite quote, of Leona Helmsley:
>Only the little people pay taxes.
But, that's only anecdotal, heh :-)
It's also worth noting that the tax rate for the very rich is still 15%. As far as I can tell, certain very rich people "not paying taxes" is a myth.
Finally, it's worth noting that Notch is not American.
Rich people do have ways of reducing their tax burden, sometimes to surprisingly low amounts.
[1] planning is normal reduction of tax burden and is unlikely to be challenged by tax authorities.
[2] avoidance is legal, but sometimes exploits loopholes in tax laws in weird ways and you might risk the Inland Revenue changing the regulations - sometimes retroactively.
[3] evasion is just illegally not paying tax.
Exactly, there are good reasons for this. The problem is that it would be grossly unfair to tax a small business owner or small investor at say income tax levels because their risks are so much higher. On the other hand a big investor will millions or billions ends up paying the same tax rate as that small business owner or investor, but is able to spread their risk across many investments reducing the overall risk. Yes it would be unfair to tax them at a higher rate for doing fundamentally the same thing - how would we justify one tax rate for one investor in a company, but another rate for this other investor?
Taxation is a hard problem.
Because taxation has gone way beyond what it was initially meant to do. That's why it's a hard problem; we're trying to make value and fairness judgements and using that as a basis for applying tax.
To me, personally, people can't claim fairness if they're treating people differently based on their arbitrary value judgements. Until we start treating "fairness" as a universal, with no subjective component.
The big reason why the rich guys can lower their tax rates is because they can use investment losses to offset taxes. It's not a loophole, just a tax deduction you can optimize.
1. almost everything is capital gains (which comes to 23.6%). Note that this was 15% under GWBush, so it was even better back then.
2. You can avoid state taxes by relocating to WA/TX (If I recall correctly, this was Bezos' motivation for starting Amazon in Washington). A lot of billionaires live in 0% state capital gains tax states, except the ones that need to live in CA/NY for the tech/financial sector respectively. If you live in one of those, then think of the total taxes as more like 33% total (federal + state)
3) you don't want the project to lose its integrity/vision. The dollar amount matters less than finding a fitting buyer at a good enough price.
Microsoft can sell Mojang to EA the very next day if they want to.
> once you have that sort of money, there are only a couple of reasons to run it up any further:
Your reply seems to indicate you didn't read what he said, but instead read your own meaning into it. Your #3 doesn't make sense as a reason to "run it up any further".
He briefly though about investing into Psychonauts 2, but dropped out when he realized how much money was involved ($18m). [1] With a couple of hundred million dollars on his bank account he could get interesting and novel AAA games that would never get funding from traditional publishers made.
He even mentions this in [1]: "Perhaps in some distant future when I’m no longer trying to make games, I could get into angel investing."
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/04/exclusive-minecrafts-notch...
Why take the big payment today when you can have the bigger payment on-going? Especially if you want to continue to make it your life's work. Look at some gaming stars from the past. John Romero didn't "make us his bitch" with his post iD offerings. Carmack's career seemed pretty down until his recent excitement with Oculus and even that happened while he was playing with space companies on the side. Even with all his brains and cred, he's now just a Facebook employee and his boss is a 20-something php coder.
A lot of gaming luminaries are often one-trick ponies. Its difficult to get lightning to strike twice. Smart money is keeping a tight hold of the IP that made you successful. Notch has seen what happens when you lose your IP and maybe he doesn't like it.
I can't imagine Bill Gates selling MS in '86. He wanted to build an empire.
I won't pretend that makes me really know him as a person but I can say I've never got the impression he cares much about empire and/or massive ego building. I would venture a guess that by now he accepted the fact that MC was his one massive strike and that he likely won't have another one & would be content to live his life of luxury with that.
I don't think he wants to build an empire, but he wants the freedom to do his own thing, with people that he cares about (the mojangstas).
In my own personal case though, the second I had anything worth $2 million I would sell out and retire. I just want to be able to feed myself and shelter myself and I'll gladly do independent research the rest of my life.
(I'm with you on "sell out at $2 million" in general, though. For the area I want to live in, which I coincidentally already live in, that'll last a lifetime.)
Minecraft the game does not generate a continuous income after the initial sales, but recently they started an official multiplayer server hosting service (called "Minecraft realms"). You can buy a private server for $10 per month.
Given that Minecraft is played by a lot of kids whose parents whose parents or themselves do not know how to set up a server, I think this is a very viable monetization strategy, albeit launched a bit late.
Of course, there have been 3rd party commercial hosting services for Minecraft for a long time, but again, it's not something kids and their parents go after.
Hell, I know how to set up a server but I am considering hiring a Minecraft realm for the winter months, just because it is less hassle than setting up a server and the price is reasonable.
It's a platform for development. More importantly, it's a platform that lets many people create things in 3D without having to bother with OpenGL/etc.
If you think I'm talking about pixel art or other static things, or if you think I'm talking about mods, I suggest watching these, which are all stock minecraft only.
* SimCity reimplemented in vanilla redstone & in-game command blocks *
http://www.jigarbov.net/simburbia-map-release/
* FVDisco's Cake Defense, a wave-attack game with many features. (everything FVDisco has done is outstanding...) *
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwxD3axvgt4
* Razul, an older scripted rpg adventure game with command-block based quest system *
http://www.planetminecraft.com/project/razul---skyrim-inspir...
* Hypixel, a many-thousand player custom server that works with the stock client *
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BdSq8fMtY
--
The larger ideas that Minecraft is effectively a prototype for is basically the VR environments we've wished for over the last several decades. We achieved a lot of the 3D graphics capability (and are ok with sound, the few cases where the developer bothers), but interactivity is just as important for immersion. Not being able to interact with things that are not part of the "intended" experience can rip you right out of your suspension of disbelief.
This interactivity is what Minecraft gets right, and we've barely scratched the surface.
Minecraft : interactive 3D voxel games :: NCSA Mosaic : hypertext documents
For instance if Minecraft sells 10,000 copies a day (as someone else said) that is $100m a year. Assuming other platforms add up to the same that is $200m a year. At an 8% interest rate that is worth $2.5 billion assuming it continues forever. It is worth $1.3 billion if it only happens for 10 years.
Anyhow, the easy rule of thumb for converting between income streams and present value is simply "multiply by 20". In rough numbers, it $1/year is worth $20.
You chose one, I chose the other.
The much much bigger problem is how many years?
But Mojang’s revenue and profit are public: http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/20/5531046/minecraft-mojang-pr...
$322M revenue, $128M profit. However, I’m not sure whether that profit number is the correct one to assess the value of the company and IP.
If I understand this potential acquisition correctly, Notch seems to want to sell everything (company and IP). I think the company is currently set up so that Mojang pays Notch licensing fees for the Minecraft IP. That could potentially be a large part of their revenue. If Microsoft acquires company and IP they obviously don’t have to pay those licensing fees anymore.
Mojang is only a 40 person company, labour has to be their by far biggest cost, and I really don’t think a 40 person software company (that doesn’t really do any marketing, by the way) costs nearly $200M to run per year.
Determining the value of IP is incredibly complex and something I would love to avoid having to do.
Then let's say they lose 10%-15% of revenue in licencing cost (apple, ms, google, xbox, and let's say some facebook/twitter campaigns and software).
So then you'd have $322m * 0.85 - 40 * $150k - 128m (notch's pay) = 139m profit.
That looks reasonably close on the money. So you'd expect net income to be about $265 million.
My guess is that it was EA that made the offer.
[1] http://kotaku.com/5907576/minecraft-creator-calls-electronic...
Hopefully Microsoft can reign in all of that crap and make the game less of a nightmare to maintain.
Speaking of that, I've looked into the mod making scene and it's rather disgusting. Mojang really dropped the ball by not having an official way to write mods/plugins. Instead we get a horrible client side mod environment (Minecraft Forge), and a half decent server side (Bukkit), but they're not compatible with each other. Bravo Mojang!
I'm getting mad just thinking about it. I need to stop now.
Configuring a Bukkit server would still have taken some work, but it also only required that to be expended on the server side.
Players would be able to connect with a purely vanilla client and benefit from the enhanced interactions and gameplay mechanics that could be handled on the server side only. This attracts thousands more people than fiddling with launchers, or worse, .jar files.
My read on the situation is this:
0) Bukkit people reverse-engineer MC code. MC code is non-GPL'd.
1) Bukkit people release RE'd MC code under GPL.
In order for the Bukkit folks to be able to relicense their code, they would have had to add a couple of steps, and rewrite step one:
0.25) Bukkit folks write a spec from the RE'd MC code.
0.75) Bukkit folks hand that spec to an unrelated third party who then implements that spec without any other input from Bukkit.
1) That third party releases their work under the GPL.
(Apologies if this is what you meant by "reverse engineered" - it isn't clear)
From the get go we were plagued with issues and obstacles we needed to overcome, one of which we were sadly unable to tackle despite our best efforts: the legal barrier of licensing and permission. When starting the Bukkit project and even getting involved with hMod before that, we all knew that our work - no matter how well-intentioned - fell into a dangerous legal grey area. - EvilSeph[1]
The contributors still have copyright over the things they wrote, but they also weren't writing them in a vacuum. They were creating derivatives of Craftbukkit under the assumption it was valid LGPL.
The LGPL wasn't violated because it came out that Mojang controls the Bukkit project. It was voided before these contributions came into question. It's not clear what license, if any, the contributions by Wesley, et. al. fall under.
I am very interested in the legal issues of this whole situation and am constantly looking for the best resources I can find. If you're curious, I suggest reading some posts by /u/VideoGameAttorney on reddit[2]
[1] https://forums.bukkit.org/threads/bukkit-its-time-to-say.305... [2] http://www.reddit.com/user/VideoGameAttorney
Now, in the bukkit project there's two sources of code:
1. Mojang owned closed-source 2. Contributions made by commiters under the LGPL
Then it was distributed in it's entirely under the LPGL. Source #1 clearly is incompatible with this, and this is an issue. However, this has NOTHING to do with the fact that all contributions were licensed by their rights owners, THE CONTRIBUTORS, under the LPGL.
Just because you contribution was distributed with something that's incompatible with the license it was distributed under does not mean you lose the rights to your code.
I'm not arguing that anyone, including Wesley, should have lost valid interests in the code they developed. Please consider the following scenarios:
1) Contributor was clear to license his contributions free end clear under the LGPL. They contributed them to a project that was a priori in violation of said license. If they were unaware of the conflicted project status and were led to believe it was valid LGPL, they should have sought correcting actions as a soon as they were made aware.
1.a) If they knew that contributing their code would directly create a violation of the LGPL, they shouldn't have contributed. If they knew and did it anyway, they are party to violating the license.
2) Contributor code is encumbered and isn't free to be licensed under the LGPL. Depending on circumstances, just because you type the keys doesn't mean you're completely clear of another entities interest in the work. In this case not only is the project encumbered but so is the contribution. It's unknown what the validity of any license would be in this case.
A case could be made that the trigger to this recent mess, Wesley's DMCA notice, is scenario #1. That the contributors were just recently made aware that the project they contributed to was violating the LGPL. They would be right to seek redress for the violation of the license. This is the process working like it's supposed to.
It could also be that we're seeing cases of #1.a (or if skeptical #2). Certain contributors weren't just submitting patches to an email list. They were also the ones accepting pull requests to the main repo. It would stand to reason that they would be aware of the status of the main project. It's a legal nightmare.
In _any_ of the three scenarios, the status of the project as a whole is still infringing. It's so encumbered that it can't be distributed and individual rights owners who are being violated should seek remedy. This doesn't take the rights away from anyone. If they have found their rights to be violated, they should speak to an attorney.
Addedum to 1.a "You can't violate your own license." The contributor could have dual-licensed the code under the LGPL, but then contributed it to the project under some other, unspecified license. That would be ok depending on the terms of the other license, but it's not documented and impossible to verify. Also, we have contributors stating that their LGPL licensed code being violated, which discounts this possibility.
Of course the forums are a Wild Wild West of inconsistent solutions that make me feel like Druidic incantations would be just as effective.
Its a really retro game, and I'm not talking about block graphics. Culturally and technologically its like something out of shareware game programming on a C64 in the 80s.
The crazy thing, is in 2014 there's a lot of people making a lot of money telling us that doesn't work, but just like 80s software development, it really DOES work. Maybe not well, maybe lots of heads pounding on desks in frustration, but it works surprisingly well.
If you're in the modern dev community it does feel like visiting a museum or an Amish community, very deja vous.
Mojang really needs to fix this: standard mod interface (which doesn't require jar surgery), sane distribution, etc.
I would find it difficult to live with just one mod. Half the time it doesn't even make sense; they assume the presence of others.
See my previous comments on this exact problem[1].
I'm actually working on a server app thing to make this easy. The idea is pre-configured sets of mods which will work together, installable with a single click. I have various techniques to constrain the resources used by mods so they don't kill other servers on the same machine, too.
The mod part isn't ready yet, but on-demand Minecraft server provisioning is working well.
People on HN probably aren't the real market since most here can wade through the horrors of incompatible mod versions etc, but my contact details are in my profile if anyone is interesting in testing it.
I find the most odd thing about minecraft is how much 3rd party adds to the game, but is in no way supported by mojang. Even when Things such as pistons and horses began as mods, and were implemented into the standard game years later.
Its been years since mojang announced they'd make a mod api, and it still doesn't exist.
Technically, CPM 2.2 is much more secure than windows 8.1 but its not sweeping the market.
Launcher aside, mods are easily able to have shady code in them anyway. I remember a server which required you to use a custom modded client which, upon decompiling, i found contained a nice FTP module inside its mandatory anticheat, allowing anyone with permission on the server to issue your client commands to retrieve anything from your minecraft directory.
Minecraft is probably attracting tens of new people to Java and game modding every day. Backgrounds vary all over the place. Not everyone knows the best practices well enough to just go out and start on them.
This leads to the scenarios described around here about poor mod management in 2014. The 'state of the art' definitely has changed, but it's not a structured community so the outside view still looks similar to 3 years ago.
He's smart, but not a genious. He's doesn't even speak or understand english. Most kids can learn to do their own minecraft-management.
Kids love minecraft. They love to have their own server. I shamelessly abuse that love to install some *nixcraft on them.
Notch didn't really see it. He created the metaverse.
Skype was secure and impossible to TAP. Now it is tapped by the NSA.
Skype had a nice and clean UI. Now it's confusing as shit. Crashes. It has ads...
What kind of turd will Microsoft turn Minecraft into.
Also since Mojang is a European company MS can no doubt use some of it's $90+ billion stockpile of money outside America without getting hit for taxes.
True.
Unless you planned on a Minecraft 2. The brand name, the look and feel and the concepts within the game are still worth a lot.
But yeah, $2B sounds disproportionate.
I can only assume that MS are going to insist on a sequel with all of the 'NextGen' trappings we've come to expect from them. Minecraft2: MasterChief Edition. With Kinect! And day1 DLC! And product placement... (Use the new MTN DEW powerup to double your building speed! Feed your animals DORITOS to improve their stats!)
Good for Markus and the Mojang guys though... they built a multi-billion-dollar empire out of nothing. It's real indie-games success story. An inspiration to the rest of us! Congrats!
Not sure what it's written in, or how difficult of a port to Unity would be (another possibility).
Anyone who can bring accountability to Mojang will be a good thing.
The first one they're already doing: that's a commercial server hosting service (Minecraft Realms).
The other one is bringing mods to the console versions as paid DLC. Mods are popular on PC (but miserable to install and maintain) but I don't know if there are any modding options for the console versions. At least the Android Pocket Edition doesn't seem to have any modding options.
Well, there's a third strategy but I don't think they'll go that way. Pay real money for getting some in-game goods or consumables. I don't think this would work very well, because it seems like people really like grinding for hours in search of the elusive diamond blocks. I certainly do :)
At the very least, controlling the most successful proto-VR "creative platform" can be used to gain leverage with facebook / Oculus Rift.
It’s not growing, but it’s also not exactly shrinking (I remember obsessively checking those stats years ago and they always hovered around 10k), and hasn’t for years. Minecraft might be a different beast than other video games, truly more like Lego than video games actually. There are always new young people you can sell the game to and with constant maintenance for free that might just work out.
That’s even ignoring other platforms and merchandise – or however much Minecraft Realms (their server hosting service) makes or how much potential that has.
The believe that they already made all the money seems completely wrong to me.
When you release something that, on day one, already has 'dated' graphics, you don't have to worry about keeping up with the latest graphics cards or poly-counts or anything of the sort. Its just about the game. Like Legos there are countless others, The Game of Life (Milton Bradley, not Conway) has been around since the 1800's. The beauty of this is that you've never completely saturated since kids are coming of age every day and growing into the game.
Which is really funny considering what Lego did in the video game space - they made video games where many things were made of Lego, but there was no "building" involved at all.
That's a fuck ton of revenue if there are only 40 employees. Growth might not be increasing, but I can't help but see that as a lot of sales.
We do know their revenue and profit for 2013. Revenue was $322M, profit was $128M. (http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/20/5531046/minecraft-mojang-pr...)
I think the large difference between revenue and profit is mostly down to licensing fees that Mojang has to pay to Notch. At any rate, it seems unlikely to me that a 40 person company could cost nearly $200M to run per year, especially since I really struggle to come up with any significant costs besides just labour (and even if every employee costs half a million per year that’s still only $20M). But I obviously don’t actually know this for sure.
Even if we ignore the VR/AR stuff, Minecraft with Kinect would be loads of fun. The Kinect's killer app may not be been dancing games. It could be world-building games. Imagine lifting your hand to move a brick and flicking your wrist to toss it.
...and thats on top of revenue MS would make on more traditional Minecraft monetizations. Look at how Disney is re-invigorating the Star Wars IP. Suddenly new movies and games are coming out. We're finally getting a third Battlefront and upcoming movies that seem under the aegis of more... competent creators than the recent prequels (Sorry George!). People are more excited than ever about an IP, that frankly, has been treading water for the last 20 years. MS could do something like that to Minecraft, which always seemed more than a bit under-commercialized.
VR is better suited for other types of games, especially those were you are inside a cockpit and your avatar is sitting just like you are in real life.
Sounds incredibly exhausting to build anything sufficiently complicated. At that point I may as well become a mason.
I'd also prefer not to be trapped to one platform. I really hope this doesn't happen.
Minecraft has been so wildly profitable but the company is set up in a way which Mojang the developers get a tiny portion of the profits to re-invest in development.
Notch essentially diverts all the money into his own pocket while leaving a very small staff to work on what is prob the most profitable video game franchise in history. Just from a very basic business standpoint this seems to make very little sense to me.
If someone could get control of minecraft that was willing to invest in it's development amazing things could be accomplished. Imagine big budget lego minecraft expansions, minecraft re-written in C with a good rendering engine. So many things could happen!
(story from March 2012) http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/7645-notch-gives-3-millio...
You don't understand. The whole point of Minecraft is user created stuff. In a Lego-like world, for profit expansions are not needed.
The mod community is what has made mc what it is, but it gets no support from the developers.
Minecraft is more open now, than it will ever be at Microsoft.
minecraft re-written in C with a good rendering engine
How do you think they got it running on PS4. It was completely ported to C++.
Minecraft has been so wildly profitable but the company is set up in a way which Mojang the developers get a tiny portion of the profits to re-invest in development. Notch essentially diverts all the money into his own pocket while leaving a very small staff to work on what is prob the most profitable video game franchise in history. Just from a very basic business standpoint this seems to make very little sense to me.
That is simply not true. Do you have any data to back that up?
what is prob the most profitable video game franchise in history.
Nitpick, but Minecraft doesn't make it on the top 10.
Other than what I have seen written on it I don't have any hard numbers, but what would mojang be doing with all the money if they had it? I don't think mojang is stockpiling cash.
Nitpick, but Minecraft doesn't make it on the top 10.
It's currently making over 100ml a year, not sure there are many other franchises that can pull that off. I mean total money of course it is smaller because it is only a few years old.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-03-19-mojang-made...
Won't you return the favor?
The whole point of Minecraft is user created stuff.
And that's why it never should have been closed-source. It is foolish of users to build their worlds in a closed universe, where a 3rd party could wipe them out on a whim with a forced update.
But we should forgive those users for building on unstable ground: they are children, after all.
Yes, Minecraft has captured the imaginations of a generation of children.
Captured is the operative word.
Minecraft is more open now, than it will ever be at Microsoft.
I need not (and won't) point out that this doesn't mean [...]
Anyway, +1 for Minetest. (You might like it!)
The flat game is a voxel engine that does mostly what MC does. It is written in C++ and is a billion years more optimized than the desktop Java Minecraft client. It is also open source.
It has an actual modding API, and has a bunch of mods like mobs and home decorations, etc, but nothing on the scale of the Minecraft mod scene (which is kind of insanely stupid, since you have to decompile the Java binaries of MC to mod it at all).
I do think the Minecraft mod scene is at its own dead end. Mojang iterates slowly on the game if at all, and its proprietary nature prevents true collaboration. It is a real shame all the effort is being poured into Minecraft at this point.
http://nothingjustworks.com/why-ms-would-want-minecraft-and-...
Notch should give Mojang to me, the first thing I'll do is rewrite mine-craft in a combination or Haskell and Erlang.
Notch has a history of bashing Microsoft and MS's efforts to lock down Windows and Microsoft has a pretty bad track record when it comes to acquisitions. They seem to kinda squash anything interesting out of them to try to force that acquisition into helping the MS/Xbox brand.
If anyone buys Mojang I really hope it's either Valve or a company much like it. They seem much more analogous in outlook, business model and process.
In the case of the latter it is well known and can be planned around. In the case of the former you have fully invested and then suddenly the game changes.
Applications from outside the App Store run just fine, as long as they're signed with a developer certificate. The certificate presumably costs $99/year, but you don't need Apple to approve your application.
http://www.google.ca/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=angry+birds,+... #googletrendsexplore
edit: Also I hope this wouldn't kill any momentum to get Minecraft on the Occulus Rift. Something tells me MS wouldn't be so happy to have a first class game experience on a competitor's hardware/platform.
Markus Persson ✔ @notch Follow
@bar10dr that's up to the minecraft dev team
http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=142&t=17489&p=12...
As much as I dislike indie shops getting sucked up into starships... let the well-funded VR wars begin!
Observing how killer apps are crucial, the makers of risky, new platforms have since attempted to load the dice in their favor. This is particularly the case with game consoles.
Just look at how Nintendo and Sony line up games for their consoles, these literally make or break it for them.
It wasn't an acquisition, but Office was the preordained killer app in the early Mac days. Apple pulled MS in with unparalleled access to their new machine in order to get Word/Excel out in time.
Later, as we all know, Windows became the main platform for Office apps, and Office on the Mac was seriously neglected. So what was one of the first things Steve Jobs did upon returning to Apple? He persuaded his old friend Bill Gates to promise to get an updated version of Office on the Mac. This turned what seemed to be sand into concrete.
I'm forgetting what the original killer apps were for the iPhone, but I'd guess that, like MS with Office, Apple focused on their own music, photo, and chat apps.
Fable, Gears of War, Forza Motorsport and (until Forza displaced it as the Gran Turismo for Xbox) Project Gotham Racing.
Mass Effect also started off as an Xbox exclusive.
Really? The company that owns Windows feels that it doesn't have enough foothold on PCs? Really? If Nadella is talking about PC gaming, then I get it. I find it difficult to believe that they are serious about it. Remember that Games for Windows thing that Microsoft epically failed to act on?
They don't need to buy game studios, they could do fabulously by releasing old Xbox exclusives on PC. If they released that Halo Collection on PC, I'd buy it right away.
While immediate changes would likely not be visible, I'm sure that over the long term it would mean the end of the ongoing Minecraft development, less developer-community interaction, and the start of Minecraft 2 development ... exclusive to Xbox 1 (with Windows 8 launch TBA). And DLCs out the ying-yang.
If true, I can't blame the Mojang team for cashing in on an incredible opportunity. But as a consumer, I really hope this rumor turns out to be false.
Notch seems very content to just participate in things like Ludum Dare, make games and enjoy life.
Minecraft is the best selling video game of all time, with over 15 million copies sold for the PC (54 million copies across all platforms), and it has over 100 million accounts registered. It is possibly the only successful indie game that has never integrated with Steam, and that has a very young userbase (based on my experience) which, given their ages, probably isn't part of Steam's userbase. All of these aspects make it a great strategic acquisition if Microsoft wants to make a new and successful game marketplace and platform for Windows.
Which also described Minecraft, of course. But I doubt anyone making decisions at Microsoft would take that gamble.
Really, really wish 0x10c would get a second chance after this, from either side of the transaction. If Minecraft is the baseline measure against which future efforts are compared to determine "success", Notch is likely to face a string of "failures". Might as well make one of these failures that comes up short something you love.
So what IS Notch's second act going to be?
It looks like they want the ships to be programmable in C#, and I'm wondering if that's going to work out for them. It doesn't seem like the right kind of language to embed within a game.
I'm not saying they have to go all bare metal like Notch was going to do with computers in 0x10c -- though I was kind of looking forward to bootstrapping a Forth environment on my spaceship -- but I would have expected a language designed for embedding such as Lua.
What makes the most sense to me is that Notch is completely tired of Minecraft, never wants to touch it again, and he wants to hand it off to someone completely. Even though he hasn't been directly working on the project for a long time now, he must still get dragged in enough that it's an issue for him.
He was experimenting/coding on a public stream for the last two weeks while talking to chat. Also he always announces his Ludum Dare entries, when he could make them using a pseudonym. Doesn't seem like he has problems with free time or fame.
I can't wait to see what the reactions are to this news.
Especially when you bought it under a license [1] that allows you to do so
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110923135753/http://www.minecr...
I was there just as it was starting, and helped (what seemed like) a lot with the early dev work and community management. Mostly it was just fun hanging out with the team (primarily EvilSeph and Tahg, but of course Dinnerbone, Grum, and all the other core devs as well) solving problems, but that started to happen less and less.
I have heard snippets of what has been going on, but haven't yet really read up on it. I do know that Warren (EvilSeph) was always at the core of the project, he kept the community more or less under control and helped co-ordinate everything. It was always clear that if he ever stopped pulling the various threads together the project as a whole would stop working.
Sure, devs would be able to keep adding features and upgrading to latest versions, but the project was always more than just the plugin API and server implementation. It's incredibly annoying to manage the expectations of thousands of minecraft server admins (who seem to mostly be 12 years old, though there were definitely a lot of older admins) and no-one but Warren ever seemed up to the task.
I should probably go do a bit of reading to find out exactly what has been going on.
It seems that Bukkit had just been going on too long under it's quasi-relationship with Mojang. Semi-blessed but not supported (and still technically illegal). Energy drained to a point where the developers realized that as fun as Bukkit was they might like to work on other things after so many years.
This point has been almost entirely lost on the reddit lynch mob. They've only been focusing on the secondary event, the DMCA take down and it's effects. This was also significant, but I don't think people appreciate that even if Bukkit were still up and, like you said, "devs [...] keep adding features [...] upgrading", the very heart of the project was already walking away.
I really wish Bukkit would have been able to find a better footing to build atop of than relying on distributing Mojang's code sans license, putting them in a legal bind. If they would have had that technological footing early on, I think Mojang would have actually been more legitimately supporting of more of their efforts. Instead, they only turned their eye to the violations, and skirted the issue leaving it ambiguous.
Eventually the ambiguity without change got to the core team and they decided to close up shop.
Luke is someone I still have the contact details of (in fact I could probably find most of the guys on irc or through various social network profiles) and I reached out directly to thank him. He was one of the few still involved today who was with us at the start. I was incredibly humbled, and grateful (there are tears in my eyes as I write this), when he listed me along side the 4 who were acquired by Mojang -
"Thanks to @Dinnerbone, @Grum, @Tahg, @Cogito, @EvilSeph for kicking off such an amazing project that’s been a big part of my life"
Minecraft is almost no part of my life today, but I can say for sure I wouldn't be where I am without these people and the Bukkit project. It's sad to see it in turmoil like this, but as you say the world is a bigger place, and no open source project is worth pouring your time into when legal ambiguities abound, the community is so volatile, and the rewards are so fleeting.
[1] http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/an-independent-goodbye.3100...
[2] http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/a-sysadmin-falls.310051/
If Microsoft dropped $2B on this property, the last thing they're going to do is continue to pay a development team to work on a game that has already been completed in their eyes.
A re-write, on the other hand? Guaranteed. And it will be the first of many sequels, Halo-style.
For Xbox One and the newest version of Windows.
Believe it or not, Notch did a great job creating the game and doing a few updates, and then became totally incompetent (or maybe just disinterested) after that. Development has been at a standstill for years, despite many bugs and vast potential for improvement.
I would love to see somebody do something great with this game and Mojang does not seem to have "the right stuff."
Reading /r/minecraftsuggestions shows that most people ideas of vast improvement are sub-optimal.
Yes, they release bug fixes and minor features often now... but the game is almost identical to what it was years ago.
The only really big thing I know they've done lately is make the game properly multi-threaded, and while that is a big and worthy accomplishment, that should have come years ago.
$40 per a customer? It seems a bit excessive to me, unless MS counts on extracting more money from the same customers...
Would this mean they'd split the 2 billions by themselves? ... wow. I wonder how do the employees feel about this.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/02/markus-notch-persso...
Overall this is great for everyone. I wish Microsoft would burn in hell though.
Also, the movie could be about teens who play networked and develop relationships in-game and out of the game.
Minecraft: The Story of Mojang http://www.minecraftstoryofmojang.com/
It was funded through Kickstarter.
Minecraft on the other hand has a giant fan base that loves it and will buy anything related to it. Just look at all the merchandise that's started coming out over the last few years and now is everywhere. It's basically Angry Birds 2.0, just 10 times bigger, and Angry Birds it's still making tons of cash.
Minecraft is huge right now, there's a lot of money to be made by someone who knows how to properly milk it for all it's worth and has no problem with doing so.
Im not sure of how wide a net Minecraft has globally, but based on every kid you know (U.S.) who spends hours on it, it has to be worth more then 2 billion. Especially, when compared to the WhatsApp acquisition.
https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
I agree with thepumpkin1979:
I hit that paywall every single time. Can we have a rule against posting links with paywalls? WSJ and other websites can either disable it for HN or we don't link to these websites at all.
(I just searched for Minecraft Wall Street Journal, and that got me the link.)
I don't see why they should be forbidden from discussing that material here just because some of us might have trouble seeing it. Enough people apparently CAN read them for them to get lots of comments, lots of up votes, and get a lot of people "liking" them on Feedly (this story seems to be the most liked non-Apple submission today on the main RSS feed).
Also, in most of these discussions of paywalled stories, other sources pick up on the news fairly quickly. There are dozens within the last hour reporting on this particular one. None have as much detail as the WSJ article, but many give enough information to allow one to reasonably follow the discussion here and participate meaningfully.
Also it's not hacker news. I am sorry. But quality of links being promoted here degraded in quality and keeps going down.
Isn't it well established that slightly different content is okay?
Minecraft started as a small company and has always had a fairly vocal development team so a lot of people likely have heard a lot of programming material about them.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the exit frees those with passion to really let loose and experiment. I hope so.
In this mod, Clippy runs around dropping random notes that give players worthless hints about how to play the game.
"Did you know . . .!"
Microsoft will also close the game for any modding so...
- Sorry, you can't build any more wood blocks today! Would you like to buy an extra 10 wood blocks for 99 Mojang bucks?
- You Died! (Respawn for $2.99?)
Next thing you know they release sequel as an exclusive for their shitbox</hate>
It's incredible luck that such an innovative (not Apple innovative, but really innovative) project is maintained by a company like Mojang. And it needs to stay that way. Being avid player, I really don't want Minecraft to become DRM-infested crap Windows became (still, Windows is a very good day-to-day OS, kudos to them). Not to mention their last attempt at gaming: GFWL (yeah, we all remember that one).
I mean, Mojang stands out as one of the few independent studios (as opposed to indie) that * gasp* charges real money for software. Not F2P, not P2W, not whatever else. Microsoft would love to go back to those days.
(For the record, so would I.)
No more mojang/mc accounts all auth will be thru live.microsoft.com.
No more java, next version will be dotnet only.
No more ingame chat but skype will be integrated.
Pocket edition works great on my android phone, that'll be the first thing to be "fixed", although the 0.5% of the population with windows phones will now be able to run minecraft.
I've only run it on my linux desktop, although I'm told it runs on Windows I don't have 64 bit windows set up so it runs out of memory. Whatever it'll never run again on linux and possibly macs.
As you imply the UI will have keyboard/mouse removed and you'll only be able to use kinect.