You can't always catch lightning in a bottle again. And I don't envy having that hanging over the heads of oh who am I kidding I would totally love to be in the position of potentially disappointing thousands of fans when my next comic doesn't appeal to as many people as my most successful one did.
I'm sure Steve Jobs didn't care what people thought of him either. He just defaulted to "they will love what I do because I will create something great", whereas Notch seems to be more like "people are trouble, so go away." Which would probably be how I'd do it too.
If he ever does create another big game, I'd expect it would be many years down the road, after he's toyed with a lot of ideas and had more than a few false starts.
That is 6 years. Minecraft has been around for 5 years. If we take the premise that Notch comes up with really good ideas once every 6 years he works on games, he'll hit this timeframe next year.
Alternately, the clock might only start from the moment he stopped personally working on Minecraft, which was in November 2011. In that case we will have to wait another 3 years for him to collect ideas.
I think that Phil Fish video that he linked really hit the nail on the head.
That's not a very good proof. If anything, that would show that they are productive. "Noteworthy" is very subjective, and it's not a measure of talent, though there can be correlation. If I have a big marketing team, I can make something noteworthy by someone's standards.
> Sure, someone can be very talented but have only a single thing to their name, but it's just as likely they got lucky.
Notch is talented. He got lucky with Minecraft. That doesn't make him any less talented. And now that he's "famous", his odds for being lucky have increased since he now has a bigger audience, more connections, more money - basically more opportunities.
People confuse popularity with merit. Things become extremely popular because of chance network effects. Humans are herd animals. You get a big hit if you are lucky enough to start a stampede. (Or if you spend a lot of energy carefully engineering a stampede).
Not getting a stampede doesn't mean you didn't make something amazing.
He did build something new and successful with 0x10c. That demo is amazing. Its a 3d shooter with an awesome laser gun and a _full 80s computer emulated inside of it_. And an abstraction for virtual peripherals, a virtual monitor, and a virtual 3d vector display. Its fucking awesome.
Did he make $100 million selling that? No. Does that mean it isn't awesome? No it absolutely does not. For starters, it was never for sale.
Here is a song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBAtAM7vtgc that is an absolutely horrible parody of itself (intentionally, for comedic effect (we hope)) that was in the top five of the charts for its category. It sold quite a lot of downloads, purchases and products. Incredibly popular. Complete crap.
Judging the merit of something on the basis of how excited the herd gets is completely wrong.