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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t see myself as a real game developer. I make games because it’s fun, and because I love games and I love to program, but I don’t make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don’t try to change the world.

I think that's the essence of being a real game developer.

It's sad that Notch feels this way, I think the majority of old school games guys and girls were just like that.

Since it's become a big business with huge studios and ridiculous budgets the market has been spoiled. But Notch/Mojang and team have shown that there is still a place for great indie games and bootstrappers.

And I actually believe him that this deal is not about the money. Projects like these can become albatrosses.

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> I think that's the essence of being a real game developer.

I think that's the eseence of being a real X, X = insert whatever you claim to be in.

In my mind I divide companies (and professionals) by whether their occupation is an instrumental or terminal goal. As an example, advancing rocketry and electrifying transport to advance humanity is a terminal goal for Elon Musk. I.e he cares about that and works on Tesla and SpaceX to achieve that. Contrast with most of companies, that do what they do as an instrument to get money. Such company, for which i.e. making cars is an instrumental goal would gladly switch to producing toilet paper if it was a more profitable sector. I like to refer to such a company as "toilet-paper company".

For an example that would likely appeal to the audience here, toilet-paper companies are common in start-up world nowadays. That new SaaS business that tells you (i.e. lies) how it cares about users and solving their problems, while the founders are planning on getting acquired by Google/Amazon/etc. and dumping the product (aka. exit) - that is a paper-toilet startup. Whatever sells.

What's the value I find by dividing companies by whether their work is terminal or instrumental for them? For one, I tend to trust former much more than the latter, because I expect that they'll optimize their product primarily for solving the stated problems and not primarily for selling ability.

So basically, Notch doesn't want to be a paper-toilet game developer; he wants to make games.

> In my mind I divide companies (and professionals) by whether their occupation is an instrumental or terminal goal.

That's a super good observation, thank you. It instantly explains why I have such a loathing for some companies and people and others I feel only pride. Wow. Never ever thought about it that way.

I suspect this may also help you to pick out good founders from an investors point of view and good co-founders from a founders point of view.

> It instantly explains why I have such a loathing for some companies and people and others I feel only pride.

I completely agree with this. It's basically optimizing for getting rich instead of optimizing for happiness. Many entrepreneurs make decisions (i.e. run their businesses) with the main focus being amassing money and getting rich. These are the ones that we find ourselves loathing so much. Whereas other founders make decisions with the main focus being happiness and passion for their work. These are the ones we admire.

I'm reminded of the _Nicomachean Ethics_, which, if I recall accurately, begins with an analysis of what you're calling instrumental activities vs terminal, in order to show that the end goal of any activity is happiness, which is not instrumental for any other purpose.

I'm not trying to go too deep into philosophy with this concept. I guess one could present a convincing argument that there are no real terminal goals, or that the real terminal goal is happiness, or something like that.

From the practical perspective though, people seem to have a limited capability for introspection. Maybe for Musk solving the big problems/retiring on Mars is only instrumental to feeling righteous, which is only instrumental to being happy, etc. but humans don't usually introspect that deep. The recursion stops somewhere around the moment where you feel you care about something for the sake of that something. That's what I meant by terminal goals here.

It's a good insight, but the repeated typo "paper-toilet" (incorrect, but interesting image) instead of "toilet-paper" (correct) made it difficult for me to understand on the first read. It's both here and in the post that links to this.

Thanks for pointing this out. I'm past the edit window, so I can't fix that :(.

It must have come out from the fact that in my native tongue toilet paper is "papier toaletowy"; the same two things but in different order. Therefore my mind didn't spot it on re-reading. I'll be more careful in the future.

You got it right 50/50. Switching languages frequently is much harder than just knowing how to speak/write multiple languages.

While i agree it has to be noted that Musk also did instrumental stuff (paypal) to be able to do the work he does now.

>I don’t make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don’t try to change the world.

>I think that's the essence of being a real game developer.

Really? (to be read with the least amount of snark possible)

I think most game developers have the same sort of mindsets as other people in creative fields, and while the objective is to make great games, most developers seem to have that little twinkle in their eye, the 'what if my game suddenly becomes huge' thought stuck in their head, and ultimately to change the world at least a little.

If you look at people like Jonathan Blow or Phil Fish (who unfortunately needs to hide himself from the world after being constantly attacked), they all seem to have this objective of creating experiences to share with the world.

(There are examples of people who do develop games much like others write their diaries,in a very personal fashion, but I think the majority are out to create hits)

Phil Fish "needs" to hide because he's an asshole who, amongst many other things, successfully bullied a sexual assault victim into apologizing for talking about the fact that he'd been sexually assaulted.

Edit: and even then he doesn't have to hide from the internet except to avoid the flamefests he keeps actively starting, fueling, and turning into Twitter pileons against people he dislikes if he doesn't.

This comment is rude but the basic idea is right. Phil Fish and social media is a combination that does not work. He gets into massive nasty arguments. There's no connection to the game he made/makes.

And yeah I've seen the video about him becoming a symbol, which is terrible and all but still not a consequence of his creative output.

Stupid “Gamergate” conspiracies on HN. What is wrong with you? Why are you posing this here?!

It's the ideal, maybe; most 'real' game developers would love to be able to do whatever they want like Notch can, but run into practical problems like making money. Notch / Mojang got lucky, being one of the first 'building' games of its kind and the first majorly successful crowdsourced games. Nowadays, there's dozens of game developers that want to follow in his footsteps, but the competition in the crowdsourced world is just huge, so a lot will never get to a level where they can make a living out of doing what they love to do.

You mention it being a big business and all, but like you say yourself, thanks to Notch / Mojang, the rise of crowdsourcing and self-publishing thanks to platforms like Steam, indie game developers have a lot more opportunities than Notch/Mojang did back when he started out with Minecraft.

Is the market spoiled? I no gaming historian but I have been playing games since Atari. There's games along the way that have stuck with me,...pitfall, super mario bros., nhl hockey 93 (i know, super rando list). But I also add to that list Fallout 3. If you correct for better underlying hardware, I feel that games are just as good as ever. I don't have the same fascination with games I had as a child but I can still get sucked in. And aren't there still indie games coming out with some amount of fanfare, like Fez and Super Meat Boy?

There are loads of great games that come out all the time now, people just forget about bad games of the past.

And the "worst" games that we see now are at best mediocre if they were coming out 2 generations ago. The bar has gotten higher because so many high-quality games have been released

It's easy to forget about the bad games. I always think of the snes/n64 as some golden era where all games were great, but when I go to used game stores I remember that it's not true. There are a handful of great games from every era, and hundreds of forgettable ones.

> It's easy to forget about the bad games.

I will never forget RISE OF THE ROBOTS.

Preposterous. If it wasn't about the money, could have gone open-source at any time with the same effect/relief. Of course its about the $2B

Just because money isn't a priority for you, it doesn't mean you'll refuse it. He got the best of both worlds by letting other people run the business to focus on what he really wanted (indie dev). Believe me, it's MUCH easier to be creative and work on indie projects when you don't have to worry about your bills and your future...

That is ridiculous. Most people are able to figure out that they are better off with money then without, even if the money are not primary motivation. There is no contradiction in it.

As an indie developer with a normal lifestyle, it probably doesn't matter if you have 10 million in the bank or much, much more. So, it's unlikely to be about the money.

At any point he could have said "I have enough now" and lowered the price of Minecraft to a sustaining level, or made it open source, or just stopped developing it.

I'm glad that you're so up-to-date on the terms of Notch's contracts with Mojang that you can tell us with certainty that at any point he could have altered that relationship and had the public stop associating him with Minecraft's stewardship. It's good to have people in-the-know around.

Note that he's speaking for himself and that he's not the only founder.

he is not an earthworm with one brain cell. Of course, on some level it's about the money to a degree, but I think it's also true that it's not just about the money. It's both about the money and not about the money

If I was already super rich and selling my company I'd still prefer making 10-100 if my peers rich, rather than explain to them why they have to keep their day jobs because I'm convinced it's for a good cause.

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