"Everyone at Mojang was made the same offer: whoever stayed on board for at least six months after the sale would be rewarded with two million Swedish crowns, approximately three hundred thousand dollars, after taxes."
While it pales in comparison to the payday Mojang's founders received, I'd be happy to get that much. Especially if:
"The three founders were yet to make anyone else a shareholder in the company, not even those who had been with Mojang from the start. This meant that the massive profits generated by Minecraft still went straight into their pockets, even though Markus himself hadn’t done any actual work on Minecraft for over two years now. ... Many no longer regarded Markus, Carl, and Jakob as their equals, as part of the team, but simply as management. Mojang had long since ceased to be anything but a workplace."
Sounds like if you were a working stiff at Mojang, your options were simply "find a new job" or "enjoy a $300,000 bonus after 6 months of continued employment". Compared to what had been happening, this sounds like an improvement.
I can't blame Mojang's founders for selling the company; hell, I'd do the same when offered that much money. Markus (Notch) can spend the rest of his life quietly making games mostly to amuse himself. That sounds like a dream. But when I read something like this:
"When Microsoft sent a delegation for its first official visit to Mojang in Stockholm, Markus wasn’t around. Few if any of his employees knew for sure, but it was rumored that he’d just returned from a few days in Vegas with Jakob. Either way, he was either too tired or too uninterested to show up in person. The task of representing Mojang to its new owners fell on Carl."
and:
"The day before, Markus had put in his last day at work. Several others were in the office as he stood up to leave. He hesitated, not sure how to say goodbye. So he decided not to."
...I can't help but think, "geez, what an ass." You've got your big payday, but you can't even be bothered to see the thing through or say goodbye to some of the people who helped make your big payday happen?
This is only one side of the story, of course, and as rilita notes elsewhere in this thread this is largely a promotion for a book. After reading this and having watched Minecraft's lack of progress over the last year (compared to its previous 2), I think that perhaps the acquisition by Microsoft may be the best thing that happened to the game.