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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."
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.
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.
My 9 year old is about to learn the hard realities of life.
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
We all work so that we can pay the bills. If we're given an opportunity to sell something we've made for the option of never working again but living in luxury for the rest of our lives why not take it? That gives security, and the option to go on and do bigger and better things that 2BN dollars can provide. It's a dream come true.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
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.
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.