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Comment by math0ne | Hacker News Reader

As an avid minecrafter since the early days I can't help but see this as a good thing. The mod community is what has made mc what it is, but it gets no support from the developers.

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!

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Minetest is most of this : http://minetest.net/

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.

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

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.

That is simply not true. Do you have any data to back that up?

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.

For comparison, GTA V grossed almost 2 billion after 7 months (October to May). That's just one game not the entire franchise. The game should have another large bump in sales when it hits next gen consoles and PC this fall.

This article indicates that of $316M revenue, 130M was paid to Notch, $57M was spent on other costs and expenses, leaving $129M profit for Mojang. That doesn't seem tiny.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-03-19-mojang-made...

http://bootstraptemplates.io/infogram/how-much-minecraft-mad...

readerrrr: I appreciate you taking the time to consider the possibility that someone else doesn't know what they're talking about.

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!)

It makes a lot of sense to me. The barrier to expanding Mojang isn't money, but trust. It's very difficult to turn money into trustworthy, talented people who share your artistic vision. Throwing more money at it doesn't help - it attracts the sharks as much or more than the people you're looking for. People you trust can help, but it's hard to go from trust-to-implement-vision to trust-to-vet-people-for-trustworthiness.

I _never_ use mods not in 3 years of playing Minecraft. There are a lot of us who don't use mods. Your statement is a broad overreach.

Well if Microsoft gets the rights to it we all know what will likely happen: It will be made exclusive for the XBox. Maybe not immediately but eventually.

Agreed. This could be a win-win situation for both minecraft and MS. I have a short writeup here:

http://nothingjustworks.com/why-ms-would-want-minecraft-and-...

I'm not saying you are wrong about the business structure, but all the money does not stay in Notch's pocket.

(story from March 2012) http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/7645-notch-gives-3-millio...

Sure but mc is making over 100ml a year.

And based on where he lives I assume a huge chunk goes to taxes.

Why is 'rewrite in c/c++ the first thing anyone does when they acquire a wildly successful project.

Notch should give Mojang to me, the first thing I'll do is rewrite mine-craft in a combination or Haskell and Erlang.

lol it's almost like you think they are real programming langauges

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