Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft
mojang.com
mojang.com
- My son is 7. We bought iPad edition first, shelled some more for PC edition last month, and I'm sure I'll be forced to buy more in the future if MS puts a price tag on it.
- I spend a fair amount of time during weekends for deciphering the modding world, trying to find something called CraftBukkit, learning to mod, finding launchers, finding maps shown on some Youtube video etc. because the son is mad about it. BUT, he's spending hours trying to learn JS (ScriptCraft on Bukkit) just to make an exploding arrow. I truly believe this is analogous to C64 days back then.
- School started today, he's moved to another school this year. The first thing he asked to his news friends was about Minecraft. Then he advertised how PC version is superior to the one on iPad.
- My 2 yo daughter knows what Minecraft is, tells she'll play Minecraft when she grows up.
- While we were shopping for school supplies last week, saw two people asking for Minecraft licensed school bags for their kids.
- We live in Turkey.
This is pretty amazing since most games and software are pirated.
Of course, people can and do pirate it, but it has a fantastic sell-through that no other game has achieved outside first world.
The popularity among 5-15 year olds is very high.
http://www.steamfirst.com/worldwide-steam-sales-by-region-so...
Keep in mind that Russians has much lower income than Western Europeans.
It pretty much sums up why we've banned Minecraft from our house.
EDIT, To clarify:
I fully encourage them to learn to code. We let them use Scratch and write love2d games.
I've banned it from our house because we want them to build real things that they can actually use. We want them to learn how to build furniture and tree houses and real circuits.
I banned it because we want them to live in the real world.
EDIT 2:
Don't be shy, downvote me if you disagree. It helps me to know just how far off my perspective on life is from that of the average HN visitor. Which in turns helps me to know whether I should just reading/writing comments.
That being said, the amount of positive coming from their involvement in the game is incredible. Doing any large project requires considerable planning and imagination. "Survival Mode" requires resource management. They develop these skills by doing instead of sitting in a classroom and hearing about them. They read about it because they want to, boosting their reading skills. The run through the whole social scientific process in an authentic way (as opposed to the multi-step process taught in schools). And they even use it as an anchor to discuss other things. My five year old was confused about the word "chest" being used as "things that stores", then the eight year old says, "you know, Chest, like in Minecraft!" Five year old instantly understands. Thats just one example..it happens all the time.
I'm more concerned about what affect this has on my kids, not how much it drains me (they always drain me, that won't change).
> That being said, the amount of positive coming from their involvement in the game is incredible. Doing any large project requires considerable planning and imagination. "Survival Mode" requires resource management. They develop these skills by doing instead of sitting in a classroom and hearing about them. They read about it because they want to, boosting their reading skills. The run through the whole social scientific process in an authentic way (as opposed to the multi-step process taught in schools). And they even use it as an anchor to discuss other things. My five year old was confused about the word "chest" being used as "things that stores", then the eight year old says, "you know, Chest, like in Minecraft!" Five year old instantly understands. Thats just one example..it happens all the time.
Our kids are homeschooled, so I understand the benefit of ad-hoc learning. But I won't make that into an excuse to let them obsess over a video game for months at a time.
I would much rather they learn the same skills by building real things in real life. The benefit is that they can actually use these things.
For example, we are teaching them how to garden. They will get to eat the fruits of their labor. They helped me actually chop down a few of our trees, and they helped me saw them into firewood.
Having done these things with them, and seeing opportunities for even more fun activities, I just can't see Minecraft as anything more than escaping the real world for no sensible reason.
Now it all makes sense. You're fitting right into the home-schooling parent stereotype.
I hope your kids just turn out to be fine with it. You are betting on them that they are just like you.
I hope that the ones that get badly affected by your good intension can forgive you (for your strong believes)
Their father.
> I hope your kids just turn out to be fine with it. You are betting on them that they are just like you.
I trust they see and will always see that I'm doing my best.
> I hope that the ones that get badly affected by your good intension can forgive you (for your strong believes)
I trust that there is nothing to forgive, and that these hypothetical "bad effects" are all in your own worrying mind.
I hope that a long going process may start running in you mind based on this/your HN experience.
(poor kids, can't play games ;)
Many people who homeschool do so for religious reasons. The (comparative) isolation from their peers, combined with the tighter control they have over their children's experiences, makes it possible for them to "force" their children to believe in their religion.
Many don't object to this because of the religion itself; it's the fact that the parents are "abusing" their power to keep their kids from making their own choices.
Also, this isn't really a stereotype, but phrases like "eating the fruits of their labor" sound almost Amish. They homeschool, too.
You also sound negatively biased against parents handing down core values and religious beliefs to their children.
We'll have to disagree about both of these. And anything that stems from them.
Which, in our case, probably means this discussion should politely end here.
Just sharing my anecdotes, not trying to change opinions. I'm sure there's some actual research out there on the topic.
*time played, game modes, who/where they play, etc.
We could tell.
I imagine it comes from a line of thinking where the parent worries if their kids becomes too focused on one particular thing and spends too much time either doing it, talking about it, or thinking about. The parents may worry that their child's interests are not well-rounded enough. Perhaps "Minecraft time" is taking away from outdoor time, or music time, or sports time, etc.
A total ban seems harsh, but perhaps the child's interest is bordering on addiction and this an attempt to solve that problem (again, I'm not endorsing this, just trying to reason through it).
I know my parents were very unhappy with the amount of time that I would spend playing video games. They often called it an "addiction" and from an adult's point of view they may have been right. Personally, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with a child or adolescent immersing themselves in something for a period of time, as long as it's temporary. As an adult now, I certainly don't spend much time playing video games anymore and I see many facets of my life where that time investment as a child has paid off, but I can see where my parents' worries (even if misplaced) were coming from.
Its important to note the vast majority of lets play type videos are mom approved. Almost all of them. But once in awhile one comes up in rotation that's PG-13 or worse rating wrt language or behavior (serial killing in game pigs while making cop killer jokes and then uploading it anyway, wtf is wrong with you, boy?) (and edited to emphasize, the "big name" video guys are virtually all "mom-approved" the worst behavior and language is usually some goofball one off not a semi-pro show host wanna be)
Unless kids have dramatically changed in the last decade or two I know he's heard worse on the playground, its not the end of the world. Its better than watching TV, for example.
I would rather they learn how to build actual things that they can use. I'd love for them to learn how to build a real circuit or a real tree house, whatever.
I would rather them live in the real world.
Question: Are they nearly as enthusiastic about building "real" circuits?
It's a virtual world. Our kids were not at all thinking about the Java bytecode that went into running it, or the x86_64 machine code that ran the JVM, etc.
> Question: Are they nearly as enthusiastic about building "real" circuits?
My 10-yo son was thoroughly loving the electronics kit we bought, making LEDs light up in different patterns depending on which SPST switch you pressed.
Moreover, there's less exposure to solder vapors, no chance of burning, and an ability to undo/redo, not to mention show it off to their friends or to you in a "cool" way.
Imagine how much your son might like it if you were to let him wire up more than LEDs, and instead do things like create a castle or amusement park or train system controlled with in-minecraft circuits.
where I work, they let children work with soldering irons too, and at first I very much wondered about the safety of this.
turns out, soldering irons aren't all that hot to do serious damage[0]. the worst they can generally do is a minor first-degree[1] burn wound and a seriously valuable learning experience.
what remains is a chance of fire hazard if they forget to switch things off. this obviously is a parent/teacher's responsibility.
(btw I agree with your general point, this is just an addition, from experience)
[0] unless you poke them in the eye, but there are a lot of objects you shouldn't poke in someone's eye.
[1] it takes some effort to get a second degree burn from a soldering iron, it can be done in theory, by accident, I've never seen it.
And...so? Why is it a bad thing to be able to work at a higher level of abstraction?
i am a professional programmer, and see programming time as productive because it is akin to circuit-building, engineering, etc. Even video game CREATION can be that way. But playing them..... I do it, but it is the worst bit of myself -- pretty much total rubbish lazy brain stimulation, on par with TV re-runs
even if it involves stimulating puzzles you are still marching through a virtual "to do" list. in a way it can be less stimulating than TV, in that there is often no human element to consider that may trip your mind up. nothing more to think about than the task.
i've been back into gaming for about 6 months, since work really burns me out & i cant always be active at night but im definitely not proud of it, even tho i play puzzle games. if you could just play Portal 2, Braid, w/e for a day or so then walk away it would be fine. But your brain starts getting rewired with habit.
If a parent can spare their kid from that mental monotony, why not?
I mean, my day job consists 100% of putting the right numbers in the right places in a completely virtual system that is entirely meaningless in the real world, that I cannot interact with and cannot use. These numbers don't do anything, they don't change anything, and they certainly won't build a treehouse I can go hide in when my parents get overbearing and obsessively controlling.
However... my day job consists of managing an entire Enterprise Resource Planning system, and the numbers I put in the right place are the resources of this company. The right numbers mean that people looking at them later on will get the right parts at the right time, and build things faster, and eventually clients will have their product on time and at best quality. The wrong numbers... well, 2+ year late deliveries and 2-million-dollar penalties are called "getting off easy" here.
So you see, your idea of what is imagination and useless, and what is "real world" and practical, definitely isn't relevant to the problem. The real question here is: Comparing between a childhood with minecraft, and a childhood without minecraft, which childhood will produce the more happy and productive and overall enriched humans later? And that's not a question about what you, as a parent, consider to be Real World™ or Imagination™. It's a question about what skills and what abilities and what methods of thinking the children will grow up with, and how they will apply and be able to use those abilities later in life.
The problem is about losing yourself to a video game for months on end, even having it take over the other parts of your life when you're not playing it.
Sure you can understand how different these things are? The first one is perfectly fine, the second one is really unhealthy.
I could use a script for this, and a variable. Here, let me try:
>The problem is about losing yourself to a job for months on end, even having it take over the other parts of your life when you're not doing it.
> The problem is about losing yourself to military training for months on end, even having it take over the other parts of your life when you're not doing it.
> The problem is about losing yourself to a scientific research project for months on end, even having it take over the other parts of your life when you're not working on it.
> The problem is about losing yourself to [INSERT MANY OTHER PERFECTLY HEALTHY THINGS] for months on end, even having it take over the other parts of your life when you're not [INSERT ACTIVIVTY VERB] it.
The root of the problem is that you single-mindedly see "video games" as something unhealthy to focus on, without any evidence that it even is unhealthy at all!
Where have you heard that video games are unhealthy? Was there any research done? Did you perform long-term experiments? How large was the sample size? What control groups were there?
In short, YOU KNOW NOTHING, and are doing this based entirely on your general impression that video games taking over one's life is more unhealthy than having something else (like school, or work, or surviving in the jungle, or building a tree house) occupy your thoughts.
I have plenty of evidence. I just haven't felt particularly compelled to spend my precious time conveying it to admittedly skeptical strangers online.
> Where have you heard that video games are unhealthy? Was there any research done? Did you perform long-term experiments? How large was the sample size? What control groups were there?
Contrary to popular belief, not all wisdom is obtained using the scientific method.
> In short, YOU KNOW NOTHING
I'm not sure why you feel you have the context to make such a bold claim, based on a few comments I posted to an internet forum.
But at least this demonstrates to me that your only goal is to talk and not to listen. In which case, this isn't a balanced discussion, and I'm out.
Part of learning how to build something is being able to visualize it, prototype it, and understand the key principles.
Professional electrical engineers don't always begin by building physical circuits. They sometimes begin by laying them out in software, refining them in software, and then eventually printing a usable version.
MineCraft is a great way to explore the idea of building. So is lego, and construction kits of various sizes.
I've banned "Real Life" for my parents because that's all they ever talk about, all day, non-stop, whenever I'm nearby, for years. To this day they still talk about my "Real Life" and compare it to theirs and play "different Real Life" imagination games with eachother.
I would rather they learn how to do important things where they use their time and mental energy effectively. I'd love for them to learn how to imagine and design and have a project come to life, and see all the steps going from nothing to a completely realized construction, from idea to reality, whatever.
I would rather they don't waste their time hammering away at mind-numbing "day jobs" where they are bogged down by having to do all the manual steps and take care of every little detail and do all the menial work.
I would rather they develop their mental abilities rather than spend all that time repeating trivial actions (like all the repetitive, non-mind-enriching wood chopping required before you can even consider talking about building a tree house in "Real Life").
What I'm trying to say:
There are many advantages to being immersed in something "that isn't the real world", and avoiding menial, repetitive, dumb, costly labor and trial-and-error are some of them.
What you're doing with your ban is simply imposing your view of the world onto them, without having any sort of context as to what their lives will be like in the future with or without this ban, and without even the context of their own minds and what minecraft truly gives them.
The reason it's all they were / are talking about is that it's a whole environment to them, and if they still talk about it it's because they still have things within that environment to talk about.
It's also important to realize that specific skills taught in childhood are almost never as important as general abilities and methodology (except for certain basic required skills like walking, eating, etc.). Learning how to analyze the flaws in a design or creation and how to come up with a more elegant, time/resource-saving solution in general is going to help your children much more over the course of their lives than learning how to specifically arrange planks of wood together so that their floor is straight and solid.
To be completely honest, I think you're making a life-changing mistake by micromanaging your children's time and activities this way. Yes, your role as parent is to guide and educate. You should inform them of dangers, and consequences, and problems, of things they want to do or are doing or are interested about. You should take action whenever it is clear and without doubt that not taking action would lead them to harm... and explain what you did and why to them later! And by later, I mean the next day, not "when you're grown up". However, the key thing to keep in mind is that each time you impose a practical rule that you came up with, you unwillingly make them more like a clone of yourself. You force their actions, and thereby their thoughts, closer to yours, while hampering their own ability to learn about the world for themselves.
My recommendation: Talk with your children about why they like minecraft, what they do in minecraft, and why you think they shouldn't spend so much time in it. And then, most importantly, listen and understand what they have to say about it. Do not dismiss their thoughts. Do not come up with reasons why their arguments are invalid, or assume you have a better picture of the situation than they do. Think about it this way: They have two fully-functional brains, and both of their brains were thinking about this issue way more than you for way longer than you did. Are you ready to claim that whatever short time you've taken to consider the issue before banning minecraft is all you need to overrule two other human beings?
You're telling your daughters, indirectly, that you can make a better decision by thinking for a few days than they can possibly make after months of being fully involved in the subject?
Because this is what they will learn. They will learn that their parent has taken decisions and imposed rules that change their lives because said parent thought about it for a little while and came up with this idea, without asking them. They will learn that you think you know best, at all times, and that you think they are incompetent, and that you think they are incapable of thinking for themselves.
At worst, they may even think themselves incapable of thinking for themselves, and give up trying, and become faceless sponges absorbing whatever your education gives them, without any more personal growth or exploration of their own.
The least you could do is acknowledge his point.
Do you say the same about the "real world" in regards to programming? Is writing software, web pages, etc. not "real world" enough for you?
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Memory_circuit http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Basic_Logic_Gates
You claimed that one reason you wanted to prevent your children from playing a game was their "obsession".
Children sometimes develop strong attachments to items of clothing. If a child developed a stron attachment to a jumper would you prevent them wearing it? Why is an obsession about an item of clothing different from enjoying a game?
I've prevented one of my children from wearing a favourite jumper (well, hoodie), either because it needed washing or was inappropriate. He likes to wear his hood up all the time and I require him to take it down rather than indulge his desire to not confront his surroundings - namely communicate with other people. He is like I was, afraid to initiate communication and willing to 'hide' to avoid it. But I was always far more fulfilled when I was unable to avoid other people and "forced" to make the effort to communicate; it seems the same with him.
Someone said 'call obsession "passion" and see how it fits now'. Would you call staying up all night, missing work, feeling terrible, ruining your sleep patterns "passion". That's more akin to addiction: I've been on a Minecraft binge recently. My analysis is that it allows me to escape the real world and control my interactions; it's definitely escapism for me. Yes, Minecraft has a lot of potential educational value but I'm very cautious as my personal history with computer games - and other things - has been one of unhealthy obsession.
Veg out with the computer? Well I'll allow that for a short time but to me real world interaction is also far more valuable; I can appreciate the position that sdegustis appears to be presenting. I'll let my kids play for an extended time on the computer/console with a friend, for example, but not by themselves.
It's interesting that the reactions here are similar to the reactions we had when we quit having a television. We have reneged, we now have non-broadcast TV: in part I see that as a failure.
I notice you've set noprocrast on ... a little like denying a child a favourite thing for a while ...?!
/slightly drunken early morning comment
Lack of energy and focus in our parenting.
Probably some social pressure is in there too; certainly being able to talk to people about something in the mass media eases social interactions.
Childcare availability - we don't live near family that could watch the kids whilst we go out. Also passively consuming is easier than actively participating; general poor motivation [on my part].
That would be my surface analysis.
Sweaters don't do this. Minecraft has.
EDIT to add even more courtesy.
Another alternative I never see mentioned is Meccano (http://www.meccano.com): a bit more advanced than regular Lego and plenty of bits and pieces to tinker with :)
Needless to say, attempting to ban the game from my life was unsuccessful, even with scorched earth policies like physically cutting internet cables. Meanwhile, I firmly credit my time on this game as the kindling to my career as a developer. A point which (along with making more at 23 than he did at 45) I take great pleasure in reminding my father of whenever the opportunity arises.
Here's to hoping your kid grows up and finds an annoying and creative way to say "I was right, you were wrong, check out this pile of cash I got"
We'll see how it works out, but I'm hopeful.
It seems that your entire decision to ban Minecraft stems from your impression that they're "too obsessed" with it and that they shouldn't be spending so much time on something that they are clearly passionate about (studies and research show that passion generates the best workers and innovators!)...
I raise my children based on my own judgments of what's best for them. And I use my own God-given intelligence and experience to form those judgments.
So no, I will not agree with you. If you do not agree to disagree, then that's your choice. But disagreement doesn't require both parties' content.
So you refuse to acknowledge that you might be lacking in knowledge and experience in some critical aspects of your childrens' education. And/or you refuse to accept that the conclusions you reach with your limited knowledge, alone, one single human out of billions, might be erroneous and cause harm to your children. And/or you refuse to accept that there might be others out there with more knowledge and experience than you on certain topics. And/or you think God will make everything okay just because you have faith, and the fact that people get raped and killed every day despite their faith does not sway you.
I think that, right there, is the source of your problems.
I pity your children for having you for a parent. For having someone like you be in control of their lives.
I was responding to what stuck out to me the most in his comment:
> because the son is mad about it.
> School started today, he's moved to another school this year. The first thing he asked to his news friends was about Minecraft. Then he advertised how PC version is superior to the one on iPad.
> My 2 yo daughter knows what Minecraft is, tells she'll play Minecraft when she grows up.
These stuck out because our children had similar signs of unhealthy obsession. (So did my wife and I for a while.)
I suppose I don't totally understand your decision. If your children were equally as engrossed in a popular and technical school sport or club, would you disenroll them from it and cut them off from their peers? Have you found that your children having deep, socially enhancing interests and being willing and able to learn new or advanced concepts to be mutually exclusive?
Things like this can be important to kids, so if you're willing to give it another chance (since it sounds like you enjoyed it, too), I would try incorporating principles of analog circuits into labs for your kids to do in Minecraft, then design a project with them using what they've learned to see if it works the same way in the game as it does in the physical world.
(I haven't played Minecraft, so I don't know that this is possible, but from what I've heard about it, it seems plausible.)
A few months back, I wanted to see what the story was with Minecraft, and I had a 16-hour trip. So I got a copy for my Android tablet and played it basically every moment I was able. My whole body ached from the weird position I had to take on the plane to be able to play, but I kept going. When I got home, I deleted it from my tablet. It was too addictive for me.
I'm sure there are some people who can play it in moderation, but I'm sure not one of them. It's an amazing game, but like you I value getting things done in the real world.
When I was at high school age, after changing school, the first thing my new classmates asked me was which soccer club I was a fan of. I find this to be worse (obsessing about clubs) than talking about something like minecraft.
(edit: spelling)
Most people here probably have an unhealthy obsession with computers and they're going much further in life than people with no hobbies who spend their spare time watching TV
But contrast playing legos with friends, or playing a ball game, or building sand castles. Those are active, creative and they can be social.
Now, I'd consider a mix of activites to be acceptable; a ban may not be my choice. But I understand it.
1) Your first edit makes it sound like you value hardware over software. I don't think that is your intent, but it confused me for a bit.
2) The implied definition of "the real world" scares me. It seems to be a common cultural thread. It creates instances like this, where parents dismiss interactions in video games as less real than those in flesh and blood. But, in its extremes, it also creates a culture where threatening someone on social media or in game chat is ok, because "it is not real". It creates a weird dichotomy where making a new friend at a bar is somehow better than making a friend online. A lot of pop culture media is currently struggling with the narrow pre-internet definition of the real world. I think that this is going to be an ongoing issue as our lives become more digital.
3) Based on your other comments below, it sounds like, if you had been my parents, you would have banned everything I loved for my entire childhood. My childhood was defined by a series of obsessions up until I graduated high school. A large portion of my early life can be summed up by Legos, Power Rangers, GI Joe, Sonic the Hedgehog, Scooby Doo, Dragon Ball Z, anime, and live theater (think Shakespeare). None of those things have any direct real world application, but they did give me a series of common frameworks for social interaction. "Oh you liked Scooby Doo when you were a kid? Me too!"
4) Based on Edit 2, I would downvote you, but I don't think that is the purpose of downvoting. I don't favor downvoting items that are adding to a discussion just because I disagree with them. Instead downvotes should be reserved for posts that are off topic (to the point of attempting to derail a discussion), incendiary, etc.
2) I used that phrase out of habit. I meant the physical world as opposed to the virtual world. But even though they're both "real", there are very important differences.
3) Yeah, I probably would have.
4) The fact that there is no official clear purpose for downvoting implies it's up to the community to decide. Which is actually a really cool social experiment on their end, but in practice it's just utterly stupid, and I'm really sick of it.
Responses to your responses:
1 and 2) I guess I'm trying to say that maybe the differences do not matter as much as you think they do. The virtual world is encroaching on the physical world more and more, but in the same way, our lives are sliding into the virtual just as much. Not only does this seem to be inevitable to me, but it also seems like a positive development.
3) I would certainly be a different person! I don't think we can really know which approach was better, but I know that I am enjoying life as I am. I fear that less freedom as a child would have turned me into a bitter, broken adult.
5) It is a cool social experiment! I'm not sick of it though :-)
I might not respond again for a while. There is work to be done!
(edited for formatting)
Not surprising, given the # of downvotes I'm getting on here all the time.
Perhaps it's time I break up with HN.
I second this, I find sdegutis's comments to be very useful, if only to provide a fresh (and entirely valid) perspective. Contrast is so so needed in our community...
The result of downvoting is not simply a karma thing. It actually effects visibility of comments. Downvoted comments do not get any discussion.
Therefore, writing a comment that gets downvoted is a one-way communication channel. There's no benefit in it for me when there is no discussion.
My time is too precious to give away for free. Your time is too precious to waste reading downvoted comments.
So it's in everyone's best interest for people who don't share popular opinion to stop commenting.
That includes me.
I'm saving my downvotes for those who are rude or insulting to others.
1. State your disagreement and justify it with religious reasons. Good luck avoiding downvotes.
2. State your disagreement without justifying your reasoning. This comes across as over-assuming and somewhat rude. Also, many people recognize your username and fill in the blanks.
For you, the only way to win is not to play.
Please do stick around. I do not downvote things I disagree with, not if they're written in the measured and sensible manner that you do it. Many people on HN are like that. Instead they will reply (as they have done here in this thread) with polite replies explaining their own viewpoints.
The only reason to leave is if you actually don't care about reading those.
This means I can spend all my spare time playing with my kids or reading books.
I find that deeply disturbing.
Your choice to ban a fun relaxing game because your children enjoyed it is as weird to me as people who ban rock music because SATANIC SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES or people who ban Elvis Presley because JUNGLE MUSIC or the Scottish cult who banned calculators not because they wanted to improve mental math but because SATAN TALKS TO YOU THROUGH SCREENS.
Children have obsessions - see lists of dinosaurs for one example. And of course they're competive - "zx spectrum is much better than vic 20". It's probably a good idea to remind them that they're not infallible and to encourage a few other interests.
But, your children your choice, I guess.
My problem isn't so much that digital devices can't be used creatively (we know they can), just that they are too easy for kids to slip into deep passive consumption modes (like say TV).
Instead of blocking off the computer entirely, why don't you instead limit what they can do on it? No, or very limited website access; very few AAA-type games, more sandbox-type games, etc.
Yes, we impose our values on them. I call that "responsible parenting".
And maybe when many disagree with a post it would actually promote this post because it would be good for discussion.
It's not necessarily entirely bad to restrict what your children can do, since it encourages them to find ways to disregard your rules. My childhood was basically 10 or so years of a sort of cold-war escalation between myself and my controlling parents; the end result was me being independent by 17 and a skilled enough programmer to get into and work my way through university by the time I was 19. Controlling parents lit a fire under my ass; it gave me a reason to seize control of my life.
In case anybody is wondering, my relationship with my parents improved when I moved out. We now have a healthy respect for each other as adults.
I also became very independent very early on, because my parents were open with me about the things they did to take care of themselves as adults (they shared finances and budgeting, and included my sister and I in decisions about things like banking, insurance, major purchases, etc), so I knew how to be an adult.
Who knows, maybe this just shows that no matter what parents do, kids figure it out :D
But they are. There's a lot less bandwidth in online interactions and it's harder to communicate subtle nuances. I'm sure it's more comfortable for borderline autistics when everything communicated is explicit, but it's not necessarily better for their development.
In this, my video game experiences were almost always more positive than things in the real world (class projects, sports, ...).
In fact, I think that's why I ended up being a software engineer, and why I love what I do; it may have been something that I loved and enjoyed as a kid, but I did stacks of other activities too so I made an informed choice when I was older. It also helped developed crucial social skills by doing other social activities, and has really helped my career in doing so.
The other girl can have her iPad in her room and yet choose to draw, make art, come and speak with us (parents) and still finishes her homework.
So, you see, some kids can't resist the temptation. Other kids can balance them out.
With computers, kids wall themselves from a lot of other activities like: riding a bike (ours sit in the garage for weeks), going to the library, meeting with friends IRL, painting, playing music - any and all of a 100 things we did as we grew up.
IRL interaction forces them to get out of their bubble. They shouldn't learn to run away from things they don't like so early in life.
When I was a child, my parents banned reading (I kid you not) for mostly the same reasons.
It was horrible; and not in a "now I'm older I appreciate it" way. Creativity, thinking, and passion is not something to lightly try to eradicate from a child.
I will not downvote you, but your post made me sad, and relive a terrible part of my childhood.
Contrast that with the time I let them play Minecraft for a single month, for only a few hours a day, and only a few days a week. For the entire month and a few following months, it was practically the only thing that ever came out of any of their mouths.
But one is often crazy about the things one love; and it seems harsh to ban something they love. I won't argue you might need to restrict it, but is it really harmful to let them have it a bit? Do you really think harm can come of it? I'm genuinely curious about your answer to this last question.
Let me relate my experience: I used to obsess about a few video games when I was a kid. I don't talked to my parents about it, but then your kids are homeschooled, so I guess they must talk to you more than I did to my parents. I remember spending whole afternoons doing build orders for strategy games. Nothing bad ever came of it. Later, I ceased obsessing so much about video games, which became for of a brain-dead leisure activity; but the obsessive behavior carried over to other topics and I think it helps with my work (I'm doing a PhD). I would in fact be more worried about kids who never learn to go in depth into a topic than about those who take the dive easily.
I hope your children quickly learn the lesson I did: Never tell your parents anything - especially about things they enjoy. Parents cannot be trusted and any situation will be made worse if their parents know about it.
I also was forbidden to choose my own books as well, which resulted me giving up reading. Because I wasn't able to buy any, and I didn't want all that crap they were giving.
I only hope you are doing right things for the right reasons, unlike my parents.
I think that's an interesting quote to understand both the generational appeal of Minecraft and why the deal makes sense.
Continuing the lego comparison, Lego was recently valued at ~$15b (2) and I think that also demonstrates the potential here.
Lego mastered the IP licensing biz (lego star wars, batman), merchandising (theme parks, etc), distribution (market specific sets etc).
I'm almost surprised that Disney wasn't the acquirer but I imagine that with a corporate profiteer behind Mojang we'll see significant expansion of the brand.
(1) http://www.atbmedia.com/lego-we-wish-wed-invented-minecraft/
(2) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-13/lego-builds-new-bil...
Mojang? Too small to care about. The parents seem to know that; at least I haven't heard about any multi-million dollar lawsuits revolving around MineCraft's chat, for instance.
I really wonder what Microsoft is going to do about this.
Even though it probably happened by accident, Minecraft is pretty kid safe.
Likewise, chat can lead to bad interactions. "Where do you live?" and "Are you a girl?" type questions. I haven't observed this, but the possibility remains. We've has serious talks with our son about this kind of thing.
I'm not paranoid, but forewarned is forearmed.
I'd been dubious prior to letting him try them out. It's hard for kids to be safe about downloading things.
Which is, frankly, an absurd demand.
Mojang should have a mod API, but that won't do diddly squat to improve saftey. Don't execute code if you don't want that code to run.
You might argue that HTML is not a general purpose language, and that is exactly true. That's what makes it easier to sandbox.
And JavaScript runs in a VM designed specifically to handle untrusted code.
Neither applies in the slightest to the Java VM or Minecraft mods which, by definition, occupy the same process space with the same permissions as Minecraft itself. It is not a web browser, it does not have process sandboxing, it does not have a seperate VM specifically for mods, etc...
That's exactly a point I wanted to make. See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/login/2011-12/ope... and http://langsec.org/papers/langsec-tr.pdf
[1] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/SecurityM...
Yeah, that worked great
Regardless did you even bother looking at the documentation of SecurityManager? That would be a disaster to try and support. It can't clamp down per-library, it's all about current thread. Mods run in the same thread, they have to. So now you're suggesting that every. single. call into or out of a mod is guarded manually by updates to a permission manager that you are preventing the mod from modifying via reflection through... magic? Yeah, there's no way in hell that would ever work.
Kids need to be able to tinker with computers, and that includes both downloading malware and cleaning the machine including possibly reinstalling it from the ground up. That's how people grow their digital immune system that helps them navigate technology landscape safely.
Constantly fixing everything for our kids will lead to another generation of computer illiterates. This article covers this topic pretty well:
http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...
What's "flattened"? Like you stomped on it?
Grats on raising another dumb user.
If that would be too much time, use the FTB launcher; the modpacks there should be about as safe as it gets.
Or, hell, use my modpack at http://madoka.brage.info/, though that's pretty much just TPPI anyway. I'm a random internet person on hacker news; you know you can trust me.
I think Minecraft goes beyond digital lego though. There are many little pieces of minecraft's design which came together to make a game better than one would expect. I honestly wonder how many of those choices were intentionally done by Notch, and how many were arbitrary choices which happened to be right.
The reality is that Minecraft's explosive popularity is the result of a perfect storm of all kinds of fickle conditions. It doesn't mean that Notch made the "right" arbitrary choices, as some posters in this thread have intimated; it just means that the choices he made didn't preclude the other externalities from converging.
I think the two biggest factors in Minecraft's success were a) notch's responsiveness and availability to the community on reddit and twitter and b) Mojang's decision to have the game ported to Xbox. Neither of these have much to do with the specific design decisions in Minecraft itself (many of which were frankly terrible and are still only gradually being reversed).
TO mod Minecraft you have to:-
i) find the right mod - it has to be for the correct version of Minecraft
ii) Locate the Minecraft jar; expand it.
iii) Copy the mod into the correct folder
iv) Delete a file (if you haven't already)
v) recompress
vi) test
vii) do all this again for the next mod you want to apply
A better mod interface would be lovely.
Installing a mod is generally: extract rar to game folder. Step two is play the game.
1) Download the MinecraftForge Installer and run it.
2) Find the right mods you want.
3) Copy the mod into the correct folder.
4) Change configuration (if you want)
5) Test
Furthermore, you can use various launchers such as the Feed The Beast launcher where you download the launcher, run it, pick a pack that it'll download and then run with a very low chance (< 1%) of there being problems. Oh, and you can also join servers that are configured to that modpack too without doing anything.
I don't teach them Minecraft. Sometimes I wonder if maybe I should. But then, I really don't need to. The kids that want to, seem to have no problems at all figuring out the seven steps you just posted. They use a combination of youtube videos/tutorials, persistence, and if all else fails, reading the docs/wiki. What I help them with is basic computer literacy (I can read English faster, and know my way around the OS, file system, zip/jar files, etcetera, quicker). I'm just a catalyst in that sense. In fact I know very little about Minecraft at all (I think I know slightly more about modding the game than actually playing it).
The kids that have a drive to figure this out (and some are as young as 7 years old, incredible), also happen to be the same ones that will want to learn other types of programming such as shell scripting (or .bat/VBS programming, depending on the OS), relatively advanced Gamemaker stuff, things like that. They also like explaining these things to the other kids (which we try to encourage).
For that reason, and that reason alone[0], I do ban Minecraft in certain circumstances. I only allow it if they're actually modding stuff instead of just playing. They only get to play games the second half of the day (if they want), otherwise they have to do something more creative on the computers (or go play somewhere else). This limitation is because I've found, by experience and experiment--not just because I want to believe this is the case--that there are many kids who have talents to do truly amazing things on the computer at a young age, and that it really helps them if they're not surrounded by peers simply playing games on those same computers (peers that have other, non-computer-related talents, but just happen to like playing video games, become a distraction). Of course they have to test their mods in a real life network setting later on, which makes it even cooler :)
[0] okay, there is one other reason. you may be familiar with applications such as TeamSpeak or Ventrilo. Kids like to use a similar voice-based, wireless communication protocol known as "shouting across the room".
I don't help my Son much in getting mods and stuff. So, he does whatever he can. That puts some sort of a break.
Some kids circumvent this by watching YouTube videos of games instead ... but usually not for too long, because they quickly realize there's so much other interesting stuff to do. I sometimes feel I should regulate this watching of videos too, but it never really got to a point where it was that bad. There's also a social aspect to it, when there's five kids watching a video of a cat doing something silly. Plus, observing what they like to watch helps me connect to their world a bit better. It also makes me understand the more inane and stupid parts of YouTube better. In particular those ultra-cheesy MineCraft music videos, with the over-autotuned voices, superhappy melodies about mining stuff and creepers. On the one hand it's a terrible musical equivalent of HFCS, on the other hand, the sheer exuberance and happiness that radiates from it makes me remember, I loved to listen to Happy Hardcore when I was young :) :)
I don't regulate their general "screen time" (how long they are at a computer), although a few of the parents do tell their kids they don't want them the entire day in the computer area. Surprisingly, those kids take care of that request fairly good by themselves, partially because there's more than enough other fun and interesting things to do, partially because there's something about how the place is run, giving the kids some responsibilities, positive attitudes, that just makes them really well-behaved.
Haha, this made me laugh. I think it's great that you have that perspective!
Other tech CEOs limit at 30 minutes screen time per day for their kids.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-jackson/why-the-creato...
CEO's also don't have to use iPad's and TV as cheap babysitters.
The Xbox is now the Minecraft machine, it has no other uses.
The basic idea is the product being worked on in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs released in 1995 (Blockland launched 2004, Minecraft 2011).
As you say, it's the design and execution.
These design decisions could have been lucky, but I think it really takes a person who "gets it" like Notch, who spent years up to that point thinking about and building games to internalize what makes a game fun, and turn it into something that comes together like Minecraft.
I wonder if they're concerned that it might cannibalise their existing product sales? The Lego games on consoles already are not about building, they're just platformers. To build a Minecraft equivalent for Lego, you'd need to give out a lot of bricks/options and that'd work against the current default with Lego which involves buying more and more sets.
Building 3D models with contemporary computer interfaces is clumsy and the really powerful tools for it are also clearly tools. Using them is work, not play.
Minecraft takes this building of 3D models and simplifies it, making it suitable for play.
Part of that is certainly putting that building in an alive and big world with rules and limits. That way the play isn’t happening in some sterile environment. That also provides jumping off points for creativity. Whoever plays doesn’t have to come up with everything on their own. There are already elements all around that are starting points. (Lego does much the same with their play sets. Coming up with something completely new is often hard, so they provide a whole world as a guideline and starting point.)
However, another big part is creating completely new tools for building 3D models. Those tools are much less powerful than what you can find in any 3D modelling program, but they are also much, much simpler to use – both because they have a real world analog (Lego and all other building blocks), but also because of their large scale. Computer interfaces are still clumsy, so to make building fun (enough) and not too boring picking an appropriate scale was very important, I think. And that 1m scale of Minecraft (blocks are one cubic meter, two block high corridors are high enough for the player to walk through) just works very well for that.
I don’t think Lego’s scale would. It‘s too detailed, too small.
And just like you, I spent enormous amount of time learning about Minecraft mods.
BTW, I live in Serbia.
Merhaba Bodrum'dan!
I'm reminded of a refrain that seems to be going around recently: the computer revolution is just getting started.
When people today talk of how computers can empower change, often they're thinking about getting better taxi service. In reality, there are entire cultures that have yet to fully engage in the revolution. With Turkey in particular, I am so excited by the possibilities. Turks have such a natural hacker-mindset, it's just that thus far it's been mostly limited to "real-world" hacking. Imagine what can happen when a population that is naturally curious and creative is given tools to effect great change.
At the same time, for this reason I'm wary of Microsoft as the buyer. In many parts of the world, Microsoft successfully monopolized business and personal computing, but even at their highest height they never fully monopolized developer mindshare. Contrastingly, Turkey's developer community was effectively "colonized" by Microsoft such that, if you were a programmer in Turkey it was just assumed that you worked with Microsoft technologies. That is starting to change...and I wonder if that doesn't cause Microsoft some small amount of concern.
I think it's not an exaggeration to say that how Microsoft serves as steward of the Minecraft community will be telling as to whether they've changed their ways, and are willing to be participants in a larger community, or whether they remain the Microsoft of old.
With this deal it is even better suited.
He learned about it all by himself around the age of 7 I think, and then started pestering me to buy. I acquiesced. First on iPad, then Mac, and then the XBox.
This game changed my view about games. I don't worry that he is wasting time on it. He seems to learn a lot constantly by playing this game. Everything else he has learned about computers & internet is through Minecraft.
He even got me to build a server so we both could play on a private server. I've played once and then stopped.
He watches videos on YouTube and learns a lot. Now at 9, he wants to build a YouTube channel that has millions of subscribers. When I told him I have 4 subscribers on my YouTube channel, you gave me a pathetic look :)..
(Oh, and she has a cuddly creeper that goes "ssssss-BANG!" when you squeeze it.)
Personally I feel this makes (much) more sense than instagram, these guys have a very loyal following, a tremendously strong product and actually make money.
Congratulations to everybody on the selling side in this deal, too bad it had to be Microsoft but with amounts like that there are not too many companies on the acquiring side.
Does anyone know if this was stock / cash / a mix?
edit: this Microsoft - Mojang deal will do more to get people into (games) programming than a million $ adspend by codecademy would
edit2: right now (16:43 my time) microjang.com is still free
Wonder how long it will take before that is a registered domain.
edit: microjang.com is now no longer free.
Registrant:
Microjang Development (DR is US)
PO Box 100439
NY, NY 10163-4668
US (UNITED STATES)edit: downvoted already, new record.
At least I didn't suggest that Microsoft would now have to re-write minecraft in C# rather than in the Java that they love so much there.
I reserve downvotes for rudeness and demonstrably wrong/misleading comments.
Personally, I use upvotes to reward new knowledge or an interesting argument in a comment, I don't upvote every comment I agree with, and downvote only if the comment is offensive.
With all due respect, I don't find it particularly relevant what one guy said 6 years ago. I don't care whether he created HN or not. He's no longer an active participant.
I'm not!
It's a small sample size, but I think Minecraft is destined to be a kids' game with a minority of adult enthusiasts. (That's not necessarily bad--Lego and Pokemon fit that description, too.)
If MS can nurture the hackers and enable them to create and maybe even monetize their hacks, then it should be possible to keep a core set of fans well into adulthood.
I believe this to be a mythology that "everyone knows is true" although it isn't.
For similar examples, MMORPG players are all 13 year old boys, FPS players in general are all 13 year old boys, there is a perfect 1:1 mapping between WWII FPS and gaming in general...
I'll admit in public to relax I'll log in with my son and we'll work on the big base and rail system. Better than watching TV together. I find rail work to be relaxing exactly like working on a model railroad (obviously you need railcraft mod for this). I like building vast chemical refineries, like a fully automated system where you dump ore blocks in one side, all mixed together, and via AE and IC2 and compactsolars and all that, ingots of metal eventually plop out the other end. I also like multifarming and setting up automated ethanol plants.
From talking to other parents its very fight club where the first rule is we don't talk about it. Kind of like how legos seem to get played with by dad as much as kids, unofficially, although its a kids toy. Like many I have tried to sneak a lego imperial star destroyer past the wife "for the kids", unsuccessfully. Lego seems very expensive compared to when I was a kid...
Well, yes, I'd expect parents and teachers to talk largely about < 16 year olds.
Of course this is all anecdotal.
The terms seem pretty generous, though, a completely clean buyout with no requirement that the principals stay for even a little bit.
"One centillion is a number, which is equal to either 10^303 or 10^600, depending on the system used."
Centi can designate 100 of something or one-hundredth of something.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centi-
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centimillionaire
http://www.forbes.com/sites/calebmelby/2012/11/12/breaking-d...
I think it doesn't matter that much. Microsoft stock is notoriously stable for tech stocks, so the difference between an all cash deal and an all stock deal wouldn't be too big after, say, a year or something.
Notch also probably wasn't too pressured to make the sale, so the terms would be understandably in his favor.
If an opportunity to re-invest came along in that window then you'd miss out, microsoft stock is relatively stable but has seen both 'up', 'down' and 'neutral' years where up and down were on the order of 20 to 30%.
On top of that, cash is king, simply put: there is absolutely no uncertainty at all.
Given the option between x in cash and x in stock or a mix or stock and cash you should always go for the cash.
And something a bit less than x is probably still preferable in cash.
I want to do business against you. :P
Because currency values don't fluctuate at all...
2009 was only 5 years ago. Money markets nearly crashed, banks went bankrupt, the Fed printed enormous amounts of money, and BTC was invented. With $2.5 billion on the table, I'd first hire a team of lawyers and accountants, and maybe some lobbyists too... then I'd let MS know how I want to receive the rest of the money.
Stock wouldn't be bad though.
They're missing a huge market... children's birthday party crap.
Now we're starting to talk about mods or being able to write mods for Minecraft some day. As this young, enthusiastic population of users grows up, they will have a lot of buying power and interest in things like the customizations and programming aspects of the game.
It is also a thrill for me, as a parent, to be able to see their young imaginations manifest in a 3D space which I can explore and interact with.
Principles were already gone. Notch never really worked on the game anymore. He stayed around because they wanted him to.
Minecraft makes a crazy amount of revenue at present without very much effort being put into monetization. If MS did nothing other than to offer paid high quality hosting and other basic features they'd bring in even more revenue. If they developed the game more thoroughly, came out with a sequel, more merch, etc, they'd be rolling in cash.
The most popular version of Minecraft in terms of raw sales is the Pocket Edition which is Android and iOS only, so I suspect MS is seeing an opportunity there.
I don't think there's the revenue growth potential in Minecraft like there is in Instagram. On the other hand, Mojang made $330 million in revenue and $129 million in profit last year. They can probably hold on to those margins because their sales system doesn't share revenues with retailers or distributors (or Valve, Google, or Apple for that matter).
The interesting question is whether Minecraft has legs to continue selling for ten or twenty more years. I think it might. I know lots of parents that don't let their kids play video games except for Minecraft. When I pick my kids up from school, I always see a handful of kids wearing Minecraft shirts and carrying Minecraft lunch boxes. It could become like Lego--a toy that's viewed as educational and beneficial by parents.
If I was Microsoft, I'd do two things: First, I'd work on performance and clean up the presentation a bit, especially on the loading screens and menus. Second, I'd roll out a service to make it easy for parents to set up a locked-down server for their kids. You wouldn't believe the number of parents who have asked me for help in setting up a Minecraft server for their kid and his/her friends. I finally stopped showing them because it's too complicated for them to keep running. A service that cost $4.95/month and was reputable, simple, and secure could make a killing.
The margin is interesting, because Mojang supposedly paid Notch personally another ~$129m in licensing fees.
If he has managed to sell the company and will still collect such large licensing fees, he's laughing all the way to the bank. If he sells whatever rights he is licensing to Mojang/Microsoft first, however, then their margin will leap up as their expenses are, in reality, a lot less than they seem due to this arrangement.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-03-19-mojang-made...
I do agree about improving performance and presentation within the game though. My understanding is that there is a lot of room for improvement.
Repeating the success of minecraft is nigh impossible, it was the confluence of several factors at the right place and the right time. The best that can be hoped for is good stewardship of the minecraft community and client. Unfortunately this isn't the way microsoft thinks about games or products(see halo), expect a Minecraft 2: Creepers Return, Minecraft 3: the Blockening, etc... They didn't spend 2.5 Billion to steward a community.
How long before they port it to C#?
> How long before they port it to C#?
I beat you there by a while :)
They won't. They'll just take the C++ ports that already exist (Xbox, mobile) and port that to desktops. Or rewrite the whole thing in C++. While C# is MS' baby, it makes no sense to write a 3D game in it (and for everyone who thinks Unity is C# - it isn't - Mono is just used for scripting).
There is quite good reasons not to do everything in C++ if game designers are involved. Unity uses C# for scripting; only the inner graphics engine need be native.
You use scripting languages to save dev time - Microsoft can just throw more devs at it. They spent 2.5 billion on it - labour is cheap at that scale...
There is a reason why kids prefer lego batman and lego starwars to real batman and starwars.
On the contrary, Minecraft is very heavy on the CPU and would benefit from running on native code rather than a managed bytecode based virtual machine environment.
It isn't heavy duty graphics, so you don't need a super strong GPU (it's still quite heavy), but Minecraft is very CPU and memory intensive. Graphics can be fast regardless of the programming language if you unload things to the GPU, but Minecraft requires a lot of CPU side work to prepare the voxel graphics (ie. building GPU vertex buffers, etc from the voxel octree in CPU/main memory).
There are huge potential performance benefits of rewriting it in native code. I don't think that will happen, though.
Here's a recent interesting article about optimizing visibility and minimizing overdraw, in particular for mobile "chunker" (aka. "tile deferred") GPUs. In the end it improves performance but at the cost of even more CPU work.
Moving to C++ is always a PITA, I hope this isn't an optimization made so early, especially when there are other things to do.
You mean Minecraft.NET Pro?
There is no way Microsoft will let it run like that. They bought it because they have plans for it and those plans will likely collide with the interests of the community. Microsoft is big in the gaming console business and struggling in the mobile market. It seems likely that they'll try to use Minecraft to push those markets.
Even if they won't do it immediately I suspect that they'll eventually make Minecraft exclusive to Xbox and mobile. Meanwhile they'll drop or decrease support for systems they don't like, like GNU/Linux, Playstations, etc. Maybe this will be part of a rewrite or a new huge upgrade (which I guess we can call "Downloadable Content" or whatever it is called in the XBox universe from now on).
And Microsoft will put their game guys in charge of it. And those guys speak a different language than Mojang. They don't care about indie and close community. They care about downloadable content and making new sellable releases every 12-24 month.
I have. Granted it was around 5 years ago so things have probably changed, but it was around the time they were launching the XBox arcade dev kit and they seemed very genuinely interested in indie dev and supporting communities.
Meat Boy certainly seemed to come about in that kind of positive environment.
Not saying that I'm 100% confident that MS won't mess up Minecraft. I've never played it, but have always enjoyed following Notch and his epic trip with Minecraft as I was once a starry eyed indie game dev. I also have a young child who I know will be into it. Everything I've read seems like Minecraft totally failed to learn from id software and valve when it comes to modding. And still Minecraft mods are massive.
It blows my mind. It also makes me think that MS would have to try REALLY REALLY hard to mess it up. If Minecraft has been a success with all the hurdles so far, I figure it is basically an unstoppable cultural entity now.
I have played it but I'm not really a Minecraft person myself. However as far as I know the modding situation isn't that bad because the Minecraft jar can be easily decompiled. The problem is only the lack of a stable API (which seems to be in development though) which means updates can break mods and other mods can break mods. There also doesn't seem to be an official loader or mod list. Thus people are forced to deal with obscure websites and obscure mod makers.
Mojang is not putting any artificial hurdles in the way of modding. Something which I highly doubt would have ever been possible if it had been a Microsoft company.
>There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC/Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android
If they have a solid idea of how they want to use the IP, it makes sense. It also comes with a massive risk though - it will be very easy for them to "be the guys who ruined Minecraft".
I imagine it will need to be something like "stay very hands-off for a significant amount of time to prove that they didnt in fact ruin it" followed by some way of turning it into a link in and value add for their existing products rather than something that they sell expansions/new stand-alones for.
Something like Minecraft being the Tetris/Solitaire of the 2010s or so? It comes pre-loaded with their OS's, create a great experience on surface tablets etc, trying to turn it into "the new Microsoft gives you cool stuff and makes it open for everyone" to position Microsoft as the open alternative to the more closed environments of Google and Apple?
I dont see how the purchase makes sense from a money-making point of view today - the Mojang crew hasn't proven they can do repeated success with new IPs, but I could totally see it making sense from a holistic point of view - successful integration of Minecraft in the Microsoft universe could add significant value to Microsoft as a whole.
Even if they do nothing else.
I take it that is in the hypothetical sense or are you capable of closing $2.5 B deals by your lonesome?
> Microsoft - Mojang deal will do more to get people into (games) programming than a million $ adspend by codecademy would
Definitely. And it will get more developers into the MS ecosystem than any Microsoft Certification tests would.
There was a blog post from several years ago from Notch saying that after he made enough money with the game, he would "probably clean it up and release it as open source". Oh well.
Instead now we have the DMCA-infighting and an atrocious modding community that hosts their binaries on shady file upload sites, their "project page" in a forum thread, make their measly money from adfly-like sites and have never heard of Github.
So much wasted potential. Anyhow, congratulations Microsoft.
But hey, who knows which of my words I might eat with gravy sauce?
> Instead now we have the DMCA-infighting and an atrocious modding community that hosts their source code on shady file upload sites, make their measly money from adfly-like sites and have never heard of Github.
Couldn't agree more, but it's more of a consequence of most modders being new and inexperienced developers and kids. Some of the bigger and more professional modding projects like Bukkit are already hosted on GitHub [0], so I wouldn't blame it on just being closed source. It's not guaranteed that it would be that much better, though it might be because that way a lot more existing developers might feel like contributing.
So no, bukkit isn't the problem. The problem is all the bukkit mods, and the situation between bukkit and mojang. Urgh.
The only fork of it that's still standing is Spigot, who are releasing their updates as binary patches against the last pre-DMCA-notice release to avoid redistributing the stuff which was the subject of the DMCA, and aren't making any source-level patches available. (Which in turn is almost certainly a violation of the GPL/LGPL license that CraftBukkit was under.)
I'm not sure what you said is (solely) the result of Mincraft being closed source. As far as I know, Android is released as open source, but most of what you said also applies to that modding community.
I bought Minecraft quite early, back when it wasn't such a big hit. Normally I do not buy games. But I'm all for free & open source games, and back then what the site said read or at least felt like a personal promise to eventually release the code. That is why I bought Minecraft. The game looked interesting, and I wanted to contribute to (eventual) open source gaming. I wouldn't have paid for it otherwise... and no, I don't actually play Minecraft.
No. I bought the game (cheap), I played it a bunch, I enjoyed it. They have no further obligations to me.
What about the people who back to-be-released-as-free-software projects on kickstarter or such, are they silly?
I might be silly. I know, I'm not like everyone else. :-)
But hopefully there are more silly people like me.
No. Because they are open source. Minecraft was not. Vague platitudes about someday being open source are worthless. Notch is notoriously dishonest and would say or do anything to push minecraft early on. Look how quickly he jumped from 4chan being his only customers to "4chan is the worst thing ever right reddit!?".
I bought Minecraft for what it was, and still is, a sandbox game that I've had hundreds of hours of fun in. I've bought it for several friends of mine for the same reason. But I won't buy something because of the chance it might become something I want, when it currently isn't. (I learned that lesson when pre-purchasing Spore).
We're still looking for a way to fund free games. And I don't think donations work too well. More importantly, the people who actually make games don't seem to find it working too well, because they are not making free donation-supported games. On the other hand, many game authors already see the value in eventually freeing their work. So if they promise to do that, it is a reasonably effective way of getting a free game by first helping them do what it takes to make it profitable enough to actually build and finish the game and eat something too. Is it not?
Microsoft has been releasing more and more of their software platform as open source. It's not outside the realm of possibility that some bits of Minecraft would be open sourced.
While I'm grateful for that, I'd be shocked if they released the source for any of their consumer products, including VS.
Not holding my breath, but I wouldn't be surprised by anything at this point.
clean re implementation
I really don't mind that Notch sold out. I do mind that he says that this wasn't about money. It sounds more like he is trying to convince himself of that more than anyone else.
If it really wasn't about money why not just open source it and walk away? Or just give it to the employees of Mojang? He already has over 100+ million, so he's certainly not worried about food.
More power to him for making an insane amount of money, because he certainly deserves it, but don't bullshit me about your motivations.
If Microsoft is trying to build its own Steam competitor (which given Valve's current strategy to make Linux an alternative gaming platform to Windows, makes sense), then Minecraft is the perfect acquisition to start it up, for a number of reasons. It 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.
Anyone else has any other idea why the 2.5 billion price tag?
A lot of people were super pissed. Gabe Newell said "I know, I know, but trust me: this is going to be AWESOME in the future" - boy was he right :)
You know what happened when you lost any of those physical assets before the rise of the Internet? Go buy a new game.
As someone who feels that it is a moral imperative to pay for creative works or forgo them, Steam is just fine by me.
Could you imagine if tomorrow, every Minecraft player needed to create a MS account and use some new sort of steam-like MS Games service to launch it? Sure, a few would quit, but not the majority. Overnight you could gain enough users to compete with Steam.
I'm not saying this will happen, or is even likely. Just that it makes sense to me.
Pretty much every machine on the planet on which you can sell software has a copy of Tetris. Ports of Minecraft could also exist into infinity in a similar sense.
I can't see it actually working -- do users really switch phones for a single game? Even if a new version were to become exclusive or measurably better on their platform?
If that is true, I'm sure that is just a small part of it.
In my house of kids (10,7,4,1) Minecraft is more popular than Lego, and it is a point of interest shared by many kids. I have been instructed several times that a Minecraft related gift would be good for a kids birthday party. Since the kids provide the design, entertainment, etc like Lego, I think this has a long long way to go.
My kids are still playing on the Xbox, and have not learned about mods or anything else yet. I am sure it will come soon.
This is the exact same play and frankly, they're pretty good at it. They're going to turn the Minecraft franchise into a Xbox/Windows exclusive. Obviously that's going to piss off a lot of folks, but it's still going to result in a ton of XBox sales - at least as many as Halo was responsible for. They'll iterate on this for the next 10 years and my guess is they'll do it quite successfully.
Halo wasn't released anywhere when they bought it, so they could use it as a cash cow for the XBox.
Minecraft is already everywhere.
My kids are fairly young, but both of them play Minecraft on the Xbox purely for the creative outlet. They've only played a few times with other kids on Xbox live.
I suspect as they grow older they'll be more interested in online multiplayer. However, like most parents, I haven't figured out how to let that happen and still shelter them from the frothing insanity I used to regularly encounter when I'd play Halo back in the day.
""" Hi, this is Alice's dad. Mal has been really mean to her when playing on our Minecraft server. It's a shared creative world that Alice, her friends, and cousins have been cooperating to build a city in together. Mal decided it would be fun to destroy most of the city, and cover the rest of it in lava.
This really Alice's feelings, as she and the others have spent a long time building together.
Unless Mal will apologize to Alice and the rest of their friends, we aren't willing to let Mal play with us this way. """
There's probably a better way to give the "your kid's being a jerk to my kid" than what I came up with off the top of my head, of course. I suspect that the rest of your kids' peers would swiftly ostracize griefers, as well.
Call it three or four hits, depending on how you count Halo, or the Halo-that-never-was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game...
Seeing as I bought my premium Minecraft account on 8/1/2010, I must be due some sort of equity for supporting him at such an early stage.
edit: Oh, and what do you think will become of the old alpha/beta/release builds? I'm thinking about going ahead and archiving them all in case access to them is revoked. Not sure if I'm being too paranoid, but I much preferred the simpler versions without all the distractions like XP, hunger, and those weird tall black guys.
That's a valid point.
> Seeing as I bought my premium Minecraft account on 8/1/2010, I must be due some sort of equity for supporting him at such an early stage.
I don't think that's a valid point :)
Very peculiar seeing this news after Notch was so
critical of the OculusVR sale to Facebook.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has the xbox and has been publishing games since at least the 1990s, maybe the 1980s?
Even QBasic Gorillas is from 1991, and published by IBM. Not Microsoft.
PS: Separate comment as the anti-procrastination filter kicked in. ;)
And facebook, being in the communication business is now trying to push this forward by backing Oculus. Trying to make VR be just about gaming is sort of like trying to make the TV be all about displaying your xbox picture. When in fact the TV can be used as a medium for much more.
Occulus did something similarly unacceptable because they cashed out, in spite of fan monetary support. (Don't get me confused: I'm not accusing them of cannibalism, there are degrees in abhorrent: cashing out is low on that scale.)
Notch said he never wanted to sell because cashing out didn't make sense to him. It still doesn't. He sold because he is tired and detached: he didn't sell for money's sake, he left and took the opportunity to have paper to throw at "cancer surgery and beer". This is not abhorrent to most because both his changing motivations (keeping creative control vs. not having to deal with that responsability) are both in the same principled realm.
I would love to say this distinction is black-and-white, but any class on moral philosophy would show how it full of greys; in Notch case, the effort to stride such discrepancies is explicitly the main reason why he is leaving the company. Making moral calls in the name of a large community is exhausting; he prefers clear choices, like "fighting cancer". Good for him.
I'm happy that he can do what he wants now without having to worry about impacting the giant brand he created.
And if he sees my tongue-in-cheek claim to equity and wants to jokingly send me a few thousand dollars, I'll gladly send him my details.
This is completely about money, which is fine, but let's not pretend like their is some superior moral virtue going on here.
Doing something "for money" means that the money was the goal, the driving force. Selling one's controlling stake in a profitable company, even if lucrative, could be for many other reasons: a desire to focus on something else, a desire to no longer have to check e-mails, and so on.
Giving it away would be magnanimous, but isn't an ethical imperative (to most people). He wanted out for the reasons he stated (couldn't deal with the social pressures), and if that happens to come with a big fat paycheck, more power to him.
I am not arguing one realm is superior to another; just that handling their interactions is something Notch has expressly said he didn't want to deal with. Selling is simple.
Not really. MS is also a gaming company. Facebook is in no way a VR or emerging tech company. Are we really going to take seriously this "all big companies are alike" attitude?
I wish the Oculus guys all the luck in the world, but I see myself buying a Sony or MS headset well before I'd consider the Oculus, which would require a gaming PC that dwarfs my current PC. My current PC plays just about everything at high or near high. The idea that I need a $1200 machine to do 1080p (or higher) per eye at 60 fps is kinda rough. From a culture point of view, it fits in with the hardcore gamer crowd. What does Facebook remotely know about that crowd? How does 'the social' intersect remotely with that crowd, especially since that crowd is so sick of tacked on social crap. I share the doubts that Notch has and with good reason.
> The founders: Notch, Carl, and Jakob are leaving
Yeah, that's exactly what I suspected when the rumors started. Markus doesn't really want to run a company, so he's cashing out and doing his own thing. Good on him.
Minecraft has a huge modding community and a lot of first time coders are getting into the scene because they love Minecraft. Imagine Microsoft ports Minecraft to C# or possibly C while maintaining full support for all existing platforms. Then go about developing a great API/SDK for modders and making it incredibly easy for anyone to download Visual Studio and the Minecraft SDK.
They just introduced an entire generation of developers to MS technology.
I made a similar comment. Confirmation bias tells me your on the ball :)
First people to make money on this will be lawyers. There's going to be a blizzard of copyright takedown notices going out to every unlicensed (most all) Minecraft merchandise and spinoffs. The offline fan ecosystem is going to get slaughtered.
Mostly I'm just sad for all the kids. They love Minecraft, and this won't end well.
Notch creates a small game on his own, improving on Infiniminer, it catches the imagination of an entire generation. Without the internet and social networks this would have never happened. Without this game having a multiplayer mode added (which happened fairly early on) it wouldn't have happened. I wonder what it would be like it Doom was first released into a similar environment but maybe it's a little less universal.
People in their bedrooms recording themselves playing video games speak as loudly, or more loudly than traditional media. PewDiePie has 30 million subscribers - he can make any game just with a mention.
It's interesting now our networks are concentrating and distributing influence, power and wealth. Nothing I could have predicted and I'll enjoy seeing what comes next.
Shutting down Etho, Yogscast, etc is likely to lead to hordes of 13 year olds hating MS for ever.
Maybe there'll be an MVP programme for YouTubers? </s>
I just hope MS can sort out modding: a sane mod interface would make many people very happy.
Personally I doubt it extremely, but you never know.
Imagine one part of MS submitting stuff to YouTube for ContentID, and including the Minecraft music.
Suddenly you have a bunch of people struggling to put content online.
If those channels are offering tips on circumventing MS's lockdown (yes I'm pessimistic about what MS will do) then MS will use IP initially to shut them down I imagine.
The Minecraft EULA has the standard "we can change this without notice" clauses. I will be fascinated to see what changes come to it.
Heck, you can broadcast to Twitch from the new Xbox. I think MS fully understands the value of fan created videos and supports them.
Can you say with certainty that 13 year olds know what Microsoft is?
> Game Content Usage Rules
> We know that people like you love our games and sometimes want to use things like gameplay footage, screenshots, music, and other elements of our games ("Game Content") to make things like machinima, videos, and other cool things (your "Item" or "Items"). We'd like to make that easier for you. So long as you can respect these rules, you can use our Game Content to make your Items.
Linux is absent, but I wonder if they lump that in with "PC".
>There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC/Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android versions of Minecraft to stop.
So what is happening to the Linux edition that has been fully supported since day 1?
https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-174?jql=project%20%3D%20MC...
(If they repatriated this cash to the US instead they would lose something like 40% of it to taxes)
Its a good time to be a foreign (to the US) company.
Yeah, right. It's MS we are talking about. MS don't even hide their mindset here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/sept14/09-15n...
> Minecraft fans are loyal, with nearly 90 percent of paid customers on the PC having signed in within the past 12 months.
That's MS for you. DRM to be expected.
Impressive.
I hope that Microsoft won't disrupt Minecraft's development (e.g. like they did with Skype, making Linux a third-rate platform - which should not happen since Minecraft's coded in Java).
Manual conversion to idiomatic C# would be a better route and add the benefits of deeper familiarity with the application. It's one thing to wrestle with a new codebase. It's another thing to try to make sense of something transcoded by a tool. Was the original coder insane or is it just an edge case in your translation tool?
And then there is the problem of external libraries and their APIs. Either translate them as well, or find API-compatible replacements, or find replacements and handle the API differences yourself.
Actually, it comes down to the same thing either way, when considering the standard library just as a library, among the others.
#stopspeculation :)
You know, on principle.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+cubic+meter+of+gold == $765 million.
I hope that MS's lawyers were smart enough to make sure they were actually buying Minecraft and not just a license...
Xbox announcement: http://news.xbox.com/2014/09/games-minecraft-to-join-microso...
Back in 2010 when Minecraft was very young.
"Take care everybody. rm -rf .minecraft MS free for 20 years. Not starting now!" https://twitter.com/minecraftcpw
Don't care about the money at all? Open-source it and let it thrive.
Care about the money a bit, but really want the game to survive? Want the community to have faith in its future? Sell it to Valve for $25m or something on the condition that an API gets built. If it's worth a fraction of its sell price, Valve would have jumped on it.
But instead, it got sold to a company devoted to closed source software and killing its game purchases. And Notch got a fat check for it.
Listen, I can't judge him, and I won't. The game is great, and he built it. But every action in this says it's about money, while none of it shows a care for the game. We'll see how it pans out, but history tells us to be suspicious.
1) The older Minecraft binaries suddenly become unavailable for download which will effectively kill many launchers, mods and modpacks
1a) Microsoft aggressively uses DMCA notices to kill off the modding community when the modding community tries to work around #1 by hosting the binaries themselves
2) Microsoft adds unnecessary integration with the win32 API via JNI to Minecraft in order to make it Windows-only despite the fact Minecraft is written in Java
2a) More aggressive DMCA usage to kill off the community attempting to work-around #2
Those are just off the top of my head but I'm sure I can come up with more not too far-fetched scenarios.
> The founders: Notch, Carl, and Jakob are leaving. We don’t know what they’re planning. It won’t be Minecraft-related but it will probably be cool.
I have a hard time understanding where they get the $2.5B valuation considering its revenues. Another friend thought advertising: " heck, even brand recognition - if they put "Microsoft Minecraft" on the title, I'm sure that's comparable to a few superbowl ads &tc"
So we ran that math.
"the average cost of a 30-second advertisement was around $4 million" - wikipedia [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_advertising ] "Super Bowl XLV, played in 2011, became the most-watched American television program in history with an average audience of 111 million viewers " - wikipedia. 16.7M people have bought minecraft [mincraft.com/stats pc and mac] + 5M for android. That's still a fraction of a super bowl ad (like 16%) or ~$670,000 value in super bowl advertising terms. Except I suspect anyone actually in advertising would say the value of a finely crafted 30 second video advert massively beats your company name under a game title.
Regardless of quibbles, the advertising potential seems off by many orders of magnitude. also as was mentioned: "Is brand recognition something ms has a problem with?"
So where is the $2.5B coming from? Especially when the gamesutra article [ http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/225611/Minecraft_studio_M... ] has them saying they think they can recoup the full value in 1 year!
Microsoft is trading today on a P/E multiple of 17.6.
That means, in super simplistic terms, that $128 million in extra profit increases Microsoft's market capitalisation by ($128 x 17.6 =) $2.2528 Billion.
Given those profit figures are 6 months old, and the negotiating team would have access to current data, $2.5B is about on the money. Recoup full value != recoup the $2.5B in profit.
Minecraft kart racer, brawler, side scroller, kinect game, store.minecraft, themed COD maps, Forza tracks, minecraft 2 pre-order beta access
I would offer an educated guess that Minecraft is/was the single most valuable indie game IP outside of actual game sales.
"It’s almost impossible to overstate just how big a deal Minecraft is for my son and his friends." [1]
My son is 8, and he and his friends are CONSUMED by the game. I wonder how Microsoft is going to leverage this fact for reaching new users...
* A bigger development team that could optimise and speed development of minecraft improvements
* Maybe actually make an official, well-designed, modding API.
I agree that the scope for them screwing it up is huge, but lets try to think at least a little bit positive.
Translation: MS hasn't killed them yet, but probably will soon.
I obviously don't know the whole picture here, but I see the purchase of Mojang as a strategic move to strengthen the Xbox One platform. They're banking on Minecraft being a strong property for the next few years; they could easily sell a few hundred thousand units holiday season 2015 if they have a exclusivity on Minecraft 2.
Confirmation that the Linux version has been killed then
Yeah, with $2.5 bil in the bank, I'm sure it will.
Billions in VR-device/console sales secured via platform exclusivity. See Halo(Bungie)/Xbox etc. Games dictate console sales.
Minecraft will actually be a lot more effective. Massively popular among every demographic. Smart move and good timing.
Hats off to New-Microsoft.
- Replace Mojang/Minecraft account with a Microsoft Account, use it to login
- Minecraft installer comes with Bing
- Minecraft ported to C#, Java version discontinued. Name changed to Microsoft Minecraft 1.0
- Minecraft servers can only be run in Azure, legally
I wouldn't mind if it would use Azure Cloud CPU farms for some bad-ass physics and other cool stuff. Not very likely though.