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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."
Minecraft is a PC game first and foremost. The console versions are watered down, limited, pale imitations at best. Microsoft is no longer a PC-centric games publisher (long gone are the days of Age of Empires...). The match makes frankly very little sense, which is why it worries me that it just might happen, and it'd probably cause a massive exodus of the modding community. You can bet that MS wouldn't want dirty modders reverse-engineering their new property's code, and yet destroying the modding community would spell the doom for Minecraft.
Notch announced over a year ago that he had suspended development on 0x10c indefinitely. He also stated that he was working on a new project but would be keeping it secret untill it was ready. Ever since the only thing out of Mojang has been stuff like the mojam games, and ludum dare entries. Notch has shown he can punch out an interesting game in as little as 48 hours, but when not given a deadline he gets easily distracted and never produces anything, Microsoft owning Mojang may actually get the team producing.
Imagine you can leverage off of their existing user base, your minecraft character becomes your xbox equivilent of a "Mii", and now you have a 3D avatar in a 3D world you can legitimately interact with. Did you not read Snowcrash? This is Snowcrash. Someone bootstrapped the 3D virtual world we've been promised since the 1980's (and failed at with Second Life) and now Microsoft will own it. And will integrate it in to your living room and cell phone.
P.S. Go read Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson
moox. for a new generation.
Don't forget PowerPoint, which came with Forefront acquisition.
Posting anonymous because I really shouldn't be saying this. Yes, it's for real: notch wants to sell out. It's been known inside the company for weeks. The news hit the developers in the Stockholm office very hard to the point that people were actually sobbing. No-one's happy besides the two people likely to end up with a large pile of cash after this goes down.
I mean seriously, why would you want Mojang?
Maybe they don't want to buy it, they just want to leak a salacious story on the day some other company had big news?
And suddenly the pieces begin to come together.
The news hit the developers in the Stockholm office very hard to the point that people were actually sobbing.
Yeah, they probably know how well being bought by Microsoft worked out for Sublogic. Or Oddworld Inhabitants. Or Bungie, even, forced to crank out endless formulaic sequels.
On the one hand, I can't blame notch, because if Microsoft offered me enough cash to retire, I'd sell out. But on the other hand, notch is already a millionaire, right? It's not like he needs the money.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I've paid attention to what Mojang has been doing because I used to play Minecraft a lot. I didn't even know Scrolls or Cobalt were out. I thought they were still in development, along with 0x10c or whatever it was called before development stopped on it. I found out all of these status updates from this article, today.
"1 trick pony" is correct. They have not done any further successful tricks. (This sell-out to Microsoft will probably increment that, but in the "hooker" way.)
I think it's tremendously smart for Notch to cash in on his Minecraft empire while it's still worth $2 billion. It's a shame that he's selling the whole company, rather than just selling off Minecraft as a subsidiary asset-wrapper. (If you're unfamiliar with the concept, it's a way to avoid the insane legal idiocy of transferring assets while still transferring assets. You assign the asset to a subsidiary, then sell the subsidiary in a buy-out process rather than doing a direct asset sale. It cuts a lot of stupid red tape and saves on capital gains taxes.)
Microsoft is tremendously dumb for spending $2 billion on a game and a name that will never pay off for them. Minecraft is a 5 year old game and is unlikely to grow, spin-offs and sequels are unlikely to do anywhere near as well, and merchandise is already showing up at dollar stores. It's not worth $1 billion anymore, much less 2. Their investors are gonna be pissed.
MS is trying to have a say in the VR game and they think Minecraft would be a nice entry point.
If it was any other game I'd say "...and thats a good thing", but minecraft is a phenomena not like any other. A friend of mine has a deeply autistic son who's never had friends due to the toll autism takes, and he's had deep troubles with school and the like. Until minecraft. On minecraft he's just another kid on a server making castles with his buddies and being part of a gang of kids creating and playing. Its really brought him out of his shell and if I come over to visit his mom he'll even come out and say hello and want to talk (about minecraft... always about minecraft. Its a hobby), and thats a fucking achievement.
He's now interested in school and maths finally because he wants to be jeb (the main 9-5 developer on minecraft these days) one day. He's got a hero.
Basically minecraft is turning him into a normal kid, and I'd hate to see anything ruin that.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Yes we will lose our jobs, it was already said Microsoft is not interested in hiring amateur indie java programmers already.
And there won't be a large severance, Notch is taking the money and retiring.
They are popular with users, but very unpopular with studios. Simply for the same reason: Lack of control over what the user can actually do. It's kinda hard to sell addons when users can simply create them themselves. How do you sell DLC when users simply go "fffft, gimme an hour to code it an keep your overpriced shit!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And suddenly the pieces begin to come together.
There was an article in I think Time not all that long ago, and the writeup made it sound as if notch had lost all of his drive and zeal. It sounded as if notch and the other owner were going through the motions and blowing through mountains of cash like some newly minted pop star flavor of the month with crazy expensive partying for the employees on the company dime. Seemed very dotcom.
Make love, not reality television.
Yeah, just on off-the-cuff calculations, say 30 million copies across all platforms,could be as high as 40 M, but PC is only 16-17 M. I'm not sure what cut Mojang gets from the non-PC versions after you take out the development costs and Xbox/PS platform royalties, but let's say that Mojang grossed about $20 per copy overall. This includes he alpha and beta sales that were for under $20 averaged with the higher costs now.
This comes out to $600-$800 M before taxes, so after you factor in Minecraft Realms monthly fees and any income from Scrolls, you're probably somewhere around $1B in sales. I'm pretty sure there are more than 2 employees with equity in the company, and when you factor in Swedish income taxes, Notch is clearly not a billionaire in dollars.
It's worth $2B to Microsoft, because they can milk the Minecraft cow for at least that much by merchandising paraphenalia and movies, Minecraft Realms is also an ongoing cashflow. Oh, and I bet they institute a monthly fee for Minecraft Server.
Apart from the money, I think Notch is really selling because he's sick of the BS of running a company: Bethesda suing them over scrolls, parents suing them over exploitative MC servers....etc.
We are the 198 proof..
Why not give your employees equity in the company; then, when you sell, they get a chunk, you leave with a much bigger pile, you found a new company, and anyone who liked the deal can leave and come to your new company? A string of selling the shit you already sold xD
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