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!
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
At the very least, controlling the most successful proto-VR "creative platform" can be used to gain leverage with facebook / Oculus Rift.
But yeah, $2B sounds disproportionate.