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Microsoft To Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang For $2.5 Billion
jawtheshark writes The rumors were true. Mojang, the company behind Minecraft, is being sold to Microsoft. Of course, the promise is to keep all products supported as they are. From the article: "Microsoft said it has agreed to buy Mojang AB, the Swedish video game company behind the hit Minecraft game, boosting its mobile efforts and cementing control of another hit title for its Xbox console. Minecraft, which has notched about 50 million copies sold, will be purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion, the company said in a statement. The move marks the tech giant's most ambitious video game purchase and the largest acquisition for Satya Nadella, its new chief executive. Minecraft is more than a great game franchise - it is an open world platform, driven by a vibrant community we care deeply about, and rich with new opportunities for that community and for Microsoft,' Nadella said in a statement."
Moichandising, moichandising. Minecraft the game isn't worth $2.5 Bn but I suspect that the Minecraft licencing business will probably add up to that much in the long run.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
My hope here is that the game is developed to go beyond java rendering. Even with a Core i7, the game hogs about 70% of the CPU and about 3.2GB of memory. On average. Utilize the GPU, Direct X, OpenGL. Something to make resource handling more efficient.
By "everyone", please admit to what you are really trying to say.... everyone who matters. Or more correctly, everyone that *YOU* think matters.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Mojang is nowhere close to being actually worth that amount. If you've got money in tech stocks. SELL NOW! We are clearly in a tech bubble and within a few years it is going to pop and take out the world economy in the process.
It’s about my sanity.
$2.5 Billion would do a lot for my sanity, too.
And nothing of value was lost.
It's no secret that Mojang is developing a pay to play kind of add-on called Realms. The idea is that people who want to have a Minecraft server for themselves and their friends can pay Mojang to host the server and take care of the technical details.
There are probably somewhere between 10 and 100 million Minecraft players. Suppose that 1% will subscribe to Realms at $4.99 a month (currently €10). That would yield between 500k and 5M in monthly revenue, or about 6M to 60M in yearly revenue.
Minecraft would probably be worth a few hundred million dollars in a sane market.
> at this insane price
I don't think 8x their current yearly profit is insane. Especially given the additional marketing opportunities.
For instance, you still can't buy a Minecraft backpack at Target.
There is plenty of money to be made.
In a day where whatsapp is being paid $19 billion? Microsoft got a dream deal.
My guess is that 2.5 billions is more than Minecraft and was worth. So why would Microsoft buy it?
They said they wont make changes to Minecraft, so how will they make money?
Announcing Minecraft 2, high definition, exclusively for XBone. In game mod store, where you can sell your texture packs for 99c and you get to keep 33% of the profit! That's how you push consoles to kids who grew up on the Minecraft while still raking in money.
1) One story was the juicy rumour. The other was the confirmation of the juicy rumour. It's not like it's the first time this has happened on Slashdot, or any other tech news site.
2) Two stores is not "so many Minecraft stories"
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I honestly am hoping the community rallies behind one of the many clones out there.
Minecraft is an awesome idea terribly implemented. A properly implemented clone with such amazing features as multithreading (so you can run a decent sized server with a heavy mod load), error recovery, sane entity management, and an actual API for modding would probably do quite well right now as people will be looking to jump off the Microsoft driven wagon.
I honestly don't care if it's written in Java. Java isn't really the problem, especially on the server side. It just has to be well designed and implemented.
I doubt Microsoft cares how it does in Japan nowadays, Japan stopped being a relevant indicator of the health of a video game industry entrant about 10 years ago. Since then both the US and subsequently Europe became bigger markets by far, and even markets like Brasil and China are arguably more worth spending your time on now than Japan if you're in that industry. Japan's two decades of economic stagnation have really hit it's relevance to the industry hard in this respect - the struggling Wii U and Sony's precarious overall financials (The PS4 is doing well though thankfully) have only exacerbated the problem.
Despite their mis-steps this generation they actually did well last generation in the end in large part because they were pulling in over $1bn of pure profit from Xbox Live subscriptions alone within a few years of the launch of the 360. This couple with the highest attach rate by a decent margin coupled with higher profits-per-game than the Wii last generation allowed them to be more profitable despite not shifting anywhere near as many consoles as the Wii did.
Whether they'll keep doing well is anyone's guess, but the XBox division is currently a massively different beast compared to how it started last generation with it's RROD writeoffs and massive initial R&D expenses on the system.
There were rumours of them selling it off and such but I can't see them getting rid of it now that it's finally been a healthy net profit centre for a good few years now - it would seem odd to invest 10 years on profitably making your way into a key target area for Microsoft - the living room - only to then give up when you've achieved your goals of decent market penetration and real actual profit, still, stranger things have happened so I guess we'll see.
I was actually planning on buying a 3rd license, but I will never do that now. Especially since they will kill the Linux version.
At least the guy is being honest about where he's at.... he doesn't want to deal with the hassles of being responsible for a product that is this big. Even if that makes him a lazy ass, who the fuck cares? He's at least had the balls to say he's retiring with what he's made so far instead of trying to coast under the illusion of still being in charge of development, while not actually delivering any real product... and given his position, you know that he probably wouldn't even get fired for it.... or at least not for quite a long time, and it would only drag the company down and hurt everybody.
After you have a certain amount of money, having even more just means more responsibility, and it's entirely okay for somebody to actively make a choice to not want to be a part of that.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The money enables him to make a choice a lot of us would like to make but can't.
He's making a choice to not try to earn any more money, but to only do fun projects.
In that respect it is indeed not about the money, but rather thanks to the money he's already got.
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Microsoft only does well in areas where it has a monopoly. What it's doing here is not buying an asset, it's buying retrospective market share and killing a competitor. Mojang sold a lot of games before Notch left just like Nokia sold a lot of phones before the Elop disaster. It doesn't matter to Microsoft that Nokia imploded or that Mojang's main asset (Notch) left, the point isn't to have their assets or to actually do anything with the brands, that's just a bonus if it happens. The point is simply for them not to be competitors any more.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
They didn't kill the Skype linux version yet: http://www.skype.com/en/downlo...
I think Minecraft has "legs" and will be around for a while. Longer than Farmville 2, less than Legos.
But I do think it says something about Microsoft. They are having a hard time growing organically, which is the curse of many large mature companies. These companies tend to expand by buyouts and mergers, which we are seeing here. Buyouts and mergers have a poor history of returns on investments.
I think Microsoft is trying for a single or double and not a home run. Maybe a 25% return over 5 years.
That's a foolish waste of $2.5B. At least with Nokia, Microsoft weakened them significantly before outright buying them out. With Nokia, the hardware development was what's valuable. That's why they're getting rid of the brand, and why Elop switched to Windows Phone so easily.
With Minecraft, the brand itself is the only real valuable thing. The code itself isn't worth terribly much, considering it wasn't too well-written, and the game itself is not hard to clone (Minecraft itself is a clone of a game). The few Minecraft-only mobs (creeper, enderman, etc.) are really the only bits of the game worth money, and even then, the mobs are much more valuable as brands than as code.
The ecosystem (mods, modpacks, texture packs, etc.) taken as a whole is worth a ton more. But Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record of managing their communities, so I imagine they'll eventually squander that. Hell, I'm pretty certain most mod devs are already thinking of where to move their stuff next.
Throwing devs at the mod API and getting it out the door (after what, 3 years?) might help with the exodus, but that'd be a stopgap measure. People probably won't leave limbo until Minecraft 2 comes out, and at that time, we'll finally know what direction Microsoft's going to take the game. But by then, most mod devs are probably going to be long gone.
Anyway, to your point, Minecraft wasn't really competing with Microsoft. Yes, its ability to run natively on Mac and Linux is a bit of a thorn, but the fact that it runs on Windows as well makes it less so. The lack of a version for Windows Phone (and Metro) was also annoying, but it's really one very, very small drop in the bucket of problems with that whole mess. There's a version for XBox, so it's not like Microsoft was missing out on anything there. Microsoft isn't going to pay $2.5B to make an incidental (at best) competitor go away. They have to have plans for the purchase, bigger plans than just bringing it to Windows 8 and Phone.
What those are, and whether they'll be any good, well, time will tell.
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