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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."
I've never "played" minecraft, but I guess they are buying this at this insane price for the marketing and data
mining possibilities.
Minecraft is the only game out there that uses Java, but the Xbox 360, iOS and such versions do not use Java, so what I expect to see is the Java version gets dumped and work continues on the non-Java versions, which would benefit everyone.
According to Mojang, Microsoft has agreed not to meddle in the development of the game for other platforms, although they point out that they can't do anything about any objections platformholders might have about distributing a Microsoft game.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
http://pastebin.com/n1qTeikM :-
to quote
I'm leaving Mojang
I don’t see myself as a real game developer. I make games because it’s fun, and because I love games and I love to program, but I don’t make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don’t try to change the world. Minecraft certainly became a huge hit, and people are telling me it’s changed games. I never meant for it to do either. It’s certainly flattering, and to gradually get thrust into some kind of public spotlight is interesting.
A relatively long time ago, I decided to step down from Minecraft development. Jens was the perfect person to take over leading it, and I wanted to try to do new things. At first, I failed by trying to make something big again, but since I decided to just stick to small prototypes and interesting challenges, I’ve had so much fun with work. I wasn’t exactly sure how I fit into Mojang where people did actual work, but since people said I was important for the culture, I stayed.
I was at home with a bad cold a couple of weeks ago when the internet exploded with hate against me over some kind of EULA situation that I had nothing to do with. I was confused. I didn’t understand. I tweeted this in frustration. Later on, I watched the This is Phil Fish video on YouTube and started to realize I didn’t have the connection to my fans I thought I had. I’ve become a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me. I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.
As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.
Considering the public image of me already is a bit skewed, I don’t expect to get away from negative comments by doing this, but at least now I won’t feel a responsibility to read them.
I’m aware this goes against a lot of what I’ve said in public. I have no good response to that. I’m also aware a lot of you were using me as a symbol of some perceived struggle. I’m not. I’m a person, and I’m right there struggling with you.
I love you. All of you. Thank you for turning Minecraft into what it has become, but there are too many of you, and I can’t be responsible for something this big. In one sense, it belongs to Microsoft now. In a much bigger sense, it’s belonged to all of you for a long time, and that will never change.
It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.
who where what when now?
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.
"a willfully incomplete game"
I don't know which cave you've been in for the last decade or so, but a great deal of games are now sold before completion. Developers, especially indies, realized that people absolutely love putting down $20 for a alpha/beta game that's getting new features added every few weeks/months. I have to say, having Minecraft add new features every few months gave me significantly more interest and play time than if I just started with all of those features already there. It doesn't appeal to everybody, of course, but neither does any finished game.
Isn't Minecraft last week's news? The time to buy them was before the minecraft bubble. Now it's too late. That's like buying Tesla *after* the market for high-end electric cars has been saturated. Unless this developer has a new trick up their sleeve (unlikely); they aren't going to be creating anything bigger than what they already have. They are on their way down, not on their way up. So the buy makes no sense to me, except as another asset to sell off later, when MS is against the ropes and slowly dying. MS seems to constantly be throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. That's not a sound policy.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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?
The thing with minecraft is that it has the ability to be THE interface of a future Xbox, or even Windows
Heck, Windows 8 already has a blocky, tiled interface already. This would just give it three dimensions.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Minecraft: The Flamethrower! The kids love that one.
1 down, 49,999,999 users left to go.
Lets keep this nerd rage going, and soon they'll have only 49,999,000 users left. That'll show them!
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Japanese people buy Japanese brands out of national loyalty.
They only make exceptions for "luxury" brands (like Apple).
Everything released by a foreign company where there is a Japanese equivalent product will fail.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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.
It's small change for Microsoft, but this is yet another desperation move by Microsoft, as explained in this Reuters article.
Microsoft needs Minecraft to boost mobile ambitions
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/12/us-mojang-microsoft-idUSKBN0H72EV20140912
Microsoft has finally found a way to mitigate the development cost of Clippie by replacing Minecraft creepers.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
They can put them in the room that used to hold all of Hotmail's servers. Plenty of space there.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I thought they paid $2 billion for Minesweeper.
I'm looking forward to the "Added shark and waterskis" update.
I once checked out the TV section of a Yodobashi Camera (and if you're ever in Japan, you really must visit a Yodobashi Camera, it's like every store of the floor is the size one or two BestBuy stores, except there's half a dozen floors or more). The brands of TVs on offer was very different from what you'd see outside of Japan. In most of the world, Korean brands like Samsung and LG are quite popular, but in that TV section (of what are probably the largest electronics stores in Japan), there was not a single non-Japanese television brand to be seen. Not a single Samsung or LG television was available.
I think that ship sailed when Microsoft started contributing code to the Linux kernel, although they had released lots of code under OSI-approved licenses way before that.
DLC - sharks $5, waterskis $5, jumping ramp $5. If you want the sharks to have lazers, then they'll cost $10
They didn't kill the Skype linux version yet: http://www.skype.com/en/downlo...
I can't wait for the SQL: Data Minecraft!
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Play and develop the open source Minetest instead of Microsoft Minecraft.
Engine core is written in C++, with gameplay logic and world generation driven by Lua, is multiplayer already, uses the Irrlicht library for both OpenGL and DirectX support and runs on multiple platforms.
Uhm...its java.
Mojang had been promising a proper mod API forever, somehow I doubt Microsoft will deliver.
On the vaguely plus side, if Microsoft lets Minecraft atrophy, at least modders won't be going after a moving target and we might finally get some stability.
Depends on how good their lawyers are. If they write into the contract a term that says that all rights revert to the original authors if the new owner violates such a term, then yes, they can force the new owners to honor those promises.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.