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Report: Microsoft To Buy Minecraft Studio For $2bn+
dotarray (1747900) writes "A surprising story has emerged today that suggests Microsoft is looking to buy Minecraft developer Mojang. The reported price tag is "more than US$2 billion."
The original report is at the WSJ (possibly behind a paywall). Quoting: "For Microsoft, "Minecraft" could reinvigorate the company's 13-year-old Xbox videogame business by giving it a cult hit with a legion of young fans. Mojang has sold more than 50 million copies of "Minecraft" since it was initially released in 2009 and earned more than $100 million in profits last year from the game and merchandise. "Minecraft" is already available on the Xbox, as well as Sony Corp.'s PlayStation, PCs and smartphones."
Remember when everyone was excited about this game in development called "Halo", and MS went and bought that up?
Not too surprised here.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
I mean seriously, why would you want Mojang? Minecraft itself has already made most of its money. You'd never make $2 billion on it going forward, it's big sales have already happened. So you'd be buying the talent/IP for future games... ya, about that. Mojang seems to have little or nothing at all in the pipe to speak of. 0x10c has gone all of nowhere, Scrolls has very little interest anymore and that's about it.
When you look at Minecraft, particularly what it started as, where it came from (Infiniminer) and how much has come form community contribution, it is fairly apparent that Notch is not some genius game designer, he just had the right idea at the right time, and got lucky that it went viral. Minecraft was not some amazing feat of design, it was a digital lego game that struck a chord with people. Fair enough, and he deserves his success, but that isn't the kind of thing worth buying in to, particularly given 0x10c's complete lack of development.
I can't see what MS hopes to gain. Maybe the Minecraft name? I guess, in theory, that is worth some money but I don't really think so. I think people will happily play a good builder game, regardless of title.
Just seems like a bad use of money to me.
The interesting thing here is that the valuable part of Minecraft is not the software produced, but the development and publishing method and its userbase.
If MS touches the development or publishing method, it will lose its userbase to someone else doing the same thing properly. Basically, it'll end up like the Sims Online.
Not just software licenses. Licenses to print sticker, to make kids' notebooks and BMX bikes and a billion other shitty things from China with Minecraft-branded content. It's the brand they want- probably don't give a shit about the game itself.
Why do these successful companies allow themselves to be bought up by behemoths who almost never improve upon them? Is it just so the current owners can retire?
Especially Microsoft, whose modus operandi has been shown again and again to be embrace, extend, extinguish.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Skype got worse on GNU/Linux after Microsoft bought it, so I stopped using it completely. The Android app was terrible last time I used it too.
For $2 billion? 20 years of current revenue? For a video game? Sounds pretty brilliant to me.
I think one of the things which made Minecraft popular is Java. There are a huge number of plugins and mods, these wouldn't happen without Java. It is easy to reverse engineer and modify anything in Minecraft exactly because it is in Java. Even its plugin system was written by an external developer! I do not really know Minecraft myself, but my 13 old years son plays Minecraft, and he spent months coding Minecraft extensions, and as far as I hear from him, a usual server uses a very large number of extensions.
Java is not ideal for graphics intensive applications, but it is also not that bad either. Minecraft (without mods) does not represent what is possible in Java, becuase it is very under-optimized. The new 1.8 version is much faster, but there is still much room for optimization.
This is similar to why PHP web softwares are very popular, they are not perfect, but they are very easy to be modified.
Yes. And I predict MS putting it up for sale in a few years for about $200M
Microsoft is a dying old fart company, much like Hewlett-Packard. What they can't earn with innovation is being replaced with attempted acquisitions. Unfortunately, all that they acquire is typically destroyed with no revenue to the bottom line. Acquire, lay off the people, destroy, forget. Management by "bean counters" vs. the ability to invent. Sad but the state of large cranky corporations of the day.
But funny thing about money, people always want more.
Pretty much this. There is very little in the IP itself, especially since everyone and their dog either already did a Minecraft clone or is currently developing one. The moment MS taints the IP by turning it into something its users do not like, it's gone from the front page and replaced by one of its copycats.
For reference, see Napster.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What if that "minimum time" is a couple of hundred years?
Good luck taking some vague hand wavy statements as evidence in any court case or consumer complaint. So, did he ever outline what a "minimum time" would be? 10 years? 50 years? His lifetime?
If its not written into the license you received when you purchased the product, its all too easy to dismiss in court.
Another issue is that enabling server-side mods means players don't have to buy anything at all. I didn't have to pay for the mods, but even if I did, me paying once would be far cheaper than players having to buy them individually.
I had all sorts of things on my server -- giants, creepers started fires, skeleton arrows could blind you, spiders could poison you, zombies could make you hungry and/or cause the Wither effect, nearby explosions would cause you to become dizzy, there were "space zombies" with glass helmets and 5x the health wandering around (in the Nether too). Monsters would target you from 27 blocks away rather than 16. There were Elementals, invisible monsters, and flying carpets. I also nerfed the enchantments to reduce the power differences between well-equipped and just-starting-out players. That way I didn't have to crank the difficulty up quite as high, and the n00bs could live a little longer. There were shops, and there was an economy. We had mcMMO. We had trading posts stocked with villagers. We had minecarts on the backs of bats, so you could ride in a random aerial pattern if you felt like it. We had bouncy blocks that would catapult you into the air. I added drops (for example, blazes would drop quartz, and magma cubes could drop regular slimeballs). One of my admins made uncraftable blocks such as circle stone and packed ice expensive but available through stores.
The effect of any one of these mods was minor, but taken as a sum, they made up an environment unlike any other Minecraft server. What was the player required to do to enable all of these changes? Absolutely nothing. Just sign on and play.
This is anathema to the DLC business model. Therefore, it can't be monetized by the company producing the game. Mojang was OK with that. (I wasn't running Pay-To-Win.) Microsoft most likely won't be.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
It still has no official modding support. Mojang bought Bukkit and hired its team over a year ago, but they still keep it an independent project and not the official mod API (think how CentOS is now owned by Red Hat but still has a social/corporate firewall between RHEL and CentOS devs).
As for being written poorly in Java, it was original just some dumb idea that Notch had to remake Infiniminer, and his Random Java Project #56 -- he already had mild internet fame (albeit nothing compared to his post-Minecraft fame), but this particular game had just enough potential to keep it moving. He didn't make it to be very performant in the first place, Java was just familiar and convenient to him.
Actually lateral thinking would be to buy Lego and create a full game based around constructing with the Lego blocks. You then have a full 'click and mortar'(heh, heh) solution ie a full range merchandise already in stores to go with the newly created game. Makes much more sense than buying minecraft.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Who is to say they are even the same A.C.? Any AC comment here on this topic that professes to 'inside info' is suspect. There are a large number of people who resent or otherwise strongly dislike Minecraft and Mojang, for any number of reasons.