What I know about Minecraft | Hacker News Reader

What I know about Minecraft

medium.com

61 pointsjodok34 comments

A coworker of mine was telling me a story about how his son was supposed to be doing some homework with his friends. He walked in and saw him playing minecraft on the xbox. My coworker was obviously mad that his son was playing a video game instead of doing homework… until his son showed him that he was doing homework. They were all logged in to minecraft using the blocks to solve math problems.

That same coworker describes minecraft as an 11 year old boy's Facebook. I think he has a great point. Minecraft is more than a game now.

The 7yo was ridiculously delighted to find servers you can play on, including roleplaying on, and talk to other people!

(yes, her computer's in the lounge and we keep an eye on what she's doing)

Not just boys. My daughter has been doing some pretty nifty things in Minecraft with her friends since she was 10.

"I worked on a couple things for Mojang, including the relationship with LEGO, which originally was meant to be much more encompassing had it not been for the poor attitude of LEGO’s IP lawyers who were so counter to the culture of Minecraft and LEGO that it ultimately killed the deal."

Wonder if Lego will come to regret that or if they're strong enough to see off a threat in this space?

If your kids play Minecraft, have they also played Lego?

Lego would've been the ones to acquire Minecraft, if they knew what was good for them.

The price paid by Microsoft is approximately LEGO'S yearly revenue. A bit too steep?

Now, certainly. But it seems like Microsoft is always the last one to show up at the party, and always seems to spend a staggering amount of money to acquire what they're after (Skype for more than $8bn, e.g.).

Lego knew just how passionate the community was almost three years ago. They could've acted when Mojang could've possibly been acquired for a much lower price. They didn't.

    Okay, we get it. You have a passionate community
    who wants to see Minecraft themed LEGO sets.
    It just took three server outages to prove it to
    us, but yeah, we're listening. ;-) We never expected
    a project to meet the threshold this quickly while
    still in beta. It took our first launch, the Shinkai
    6500, 420 days to reach 1,000 votes in Japan. Hayabusa
    took 57 days to 1,000. With the start of Mojang’s
    Minecraft CUUSOO project it took just 48 hours to get
    10,000 worldwide. We admire your passion as a community
    first and foremost of Minecraft fans, and second as
    LEGO fans.

https://ideas.lego.com/projects/4038/official_comments

True, they literally saw it, and aside from those few spin-off sets, they didn't act.

On the other hand, LEGO has no experience managing a software product, the LEGO themed games are all outsourced, and around that time they had a pretty big "failure" project (Lego Universe), so they would've been wary of a big risky investment.

I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft were in talk with Mojang since 2011. They knew what they were doing. When Oculus was brought by Facebook for $2 billions, Notch said that he already refused a similar offer. It's clear to me that Lego would never be able to get the price lower and I'm pretty sure that Microsoft manipulated them to be able to make them sell, but that's nothing more than an assumption.

Not strictly true, actually. Mojang isn't a publicly traded company, so they could have in theory sold themselves to whomever they wanted for whatever they wanted. It doesn't sound like Notch was in it for the money, and he famously derided M$. Sounds almost like he wanted to do a deal with Lego, a bunch of non-money stuff screwed that up, and when M$ showed up with $2.5B, he said "Fuck it. Give us the check and I'm out".

Just another friendly reminder that when your lawyers do whats safest for your company from a legal perspective, that's not automatically whats best for your company from a business perspective. This goes triple when it comes to "IP".

Just another friendly reminder that your lawyers give advice, they do not (usually) decide. It's easy to say "kill all the lawyers" and all that, but the reality is that for every finger wagging pack of lawyers, there's a management team that doesn't have the stones to say "we understand the risk and it's worth it to proceed anyway".

I enjoyed the article, but this was the most provocative line.

"Microsoft bought Minecraft to keep its desktop Windows franchise alive."

Is this really still about desktop operating systems?

I don't understand the line of thinking that went into that. How on earth is minecraft going to save windows? It is available on windows so everyone will suddenly throw common sense out the window and buy windows PCs for no reason?

Minecraft is the gateway drug for a generation of hackers and makers. And that creative activity is still best done on a real computer, not a gaming console or phone.

If Microsoft actually provided a free, first-class development environment for modding Minecraft it would be a big deal, and it would win them a lot of exposure and goodwill among the next generation of programmers.

So I don't think it will "save" windows, but I do think it's a potentially smart move that gives them direct access to a self-selected audience of the right people.

Mindshare and omnipresence. Think of it as a gateway drug. When I began tinkering on computers at the age of 14, everything was based on Microsoft. The iPad (and Apple) has utterly destroyed that notion for today's youth. Today's 11 year old picks up an iPad and starts tapping away. Guess what they're going to want to build when they're 18, or 21?

Windows (and any OS for that matter) is only as good as the apps (read-> solutions) that reside on it. As more and more kids lose their attention on MS products to Apple ones, it means less awareness of MS's flagship products (Win+Office).

Microsoft paid 2.5 billion dollars to stay cool.

Cheaper than Oculus, can be adapted to Microsoft VR hardware.

Well, Minecraft involves producing content not just consuming it. So people with enough common sense to be able to produce something will get PCs... Or Macs. The rest will be playing Minecraft and Candy Crush Saga on their tablets.

Sure they will get PCs. They likely already have one. With an apple on it. The notion that people will flock back to minecraft is MS makes it windows only just doesn't seem realistic. They will be more likely to just move to a minecraft clone that isn't windows only.

simply have the logo there, not much else needs to be done. People will equate,conflate the two. Hence subconsciously if they enjoyed the game they will be predisposed to other products?

Also, after having a MBP for an year, and Windows at work, I still prefer Windows in many aspects, and should probably have stayed with a Windows desktop + remote Linux box + Putty for server-side development - and a high end tablet for travelling.

OSX experience isn't that "superior in every aspect" compared to Windows 7. (Their hibernation/power manager is really good though :P)

It's even more puzzling when you consider that Minecraft is written in Java, so it's platform-agnostic for the most part.

Almost any language is platform-agnostic if you don't use platform specific things like system calls.

And almost any language, Java included, can be used in a platform-dependant way. Like Minecraft does. It depends on native code.

Most don't combine the two things that together give Java its big advantage, though:

1) Easily-distributable "mostly-compiled" bytecode form (JAR files).

2) Wide install base for the VM needed to run said bytecode.

Without #1 you need to recompile for each new platform, even when avoiding platform-specific calls, and without #2 the advantages of #1 can't be used without requiring your users to install other stuff just to run your software.

Isn't the price tag quite sad for a product that influenced the world that much? I think even my parents have heard about Minecraft by now.

> Simply put, Microsoft bought Minecraft to keep its desktop Windows franchise alive.

If he's right, then Minecraft's support lifespan on non-Microsoft platforms can be measured in months, not years.

His "Games Redefine Entertainment" video is a good watch (short, 11 mins): http://vimeo.com/97757759

"...did anyone ever care about how much money the founder of LEGO, Mr. Kirk, ever made..." - er, yes. Especially here on HN I believe.

"...I don’t even think my 12- and 8-year old sons know what Word is..." - it means something, right? I mean it's so common for 12- and 8- years old to be using some sort of powerful text editor. I forgot the last time I used iOS, it's getting obsolete and dying, right?

"he consistent manner with which Markus, Jakob and Carl steered Mojang out of the principle of doing the community right, is outright admirable."

That sentence made my brain hurt.

If Minecraft is worth 2.5 billion, how much is Dwarf Fortress (an all around superior game) worth?

Next to nothing.

First, it's not obviously superior. The learning curve, both for playing and creating, is much higher. Proponents with slight (or more than slight) elitist tendencies might see that as a positive, but everyone else sees it as a negative. Also, the mechanics of DF don't lend themselves as well to free-form experimentation as Minecraft's. As a GAME with a goal etc. perhaps DF is better, but as an ACTIVITY and particularly as a learning experience it's far behind.

More importantly, the value of Minecraft goes well beyond the game itself. It's also about the community, the business relationships, the approval of educators. There's a maker place that my daughter goes to, where they offer several very popular courses in Minecraft building and modding. There are probably thousands of such places, and millions of individual kids talking about Minecraft after school. Critical mass matters, and DF will never have that.

So you enjoy DF more? Bully for you. Your enjoyment DOES NOT MATTER in terms of valuation. "Worth" is determined directly by the purchaser, indirectly by the market as a whole, not at all by the opinion of one person who wasn't involved.

Technical superiority (which is subjective) is not really that connected to value.

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