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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."
Please. No.
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."
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.
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.
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
For $2 billion? 20 years of current revenue? For a video game? Sounds pretty brilliant to me.
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.
Oh, hard luck Microsoft, you've just run afoul of my country's fair trading act.
Part of my purchase decision was that Minecraft would be released open source or public domain.
You've just purchased some very high punitive fines.
Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL, nor do I believe the other licenses have much merit other than to boost the egos of the original authors, so I might just possibly release it all as public domain.
MS is trying to have a say in the VR game and they think Minecraft would be a nice entry point.
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.
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.