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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."
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?
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?
54 million sold already. Lets assume they can sell the same amount for Minecraft 2. If they priced it at $10 they would make half a billion. They can probably make more money off DLC on the existing game. And make money off DLC for Minecraft 2. Then there is stuffed creapers and toys. They are still loosing money at 2.5 billion. Was good deal for Notch.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that goarilla was actually just making an atrocious data-mining pun.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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 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.
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!
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
You're obviously modding the game.
Default minecraft vanilla installations with default graphics pack eats like 800 MB of ram.
Cpu is not used that much.
Now, the mod pack I put together, uses 2.3GB of ram for the client and a lot more CPU.
Mods aren't designed for performance, more for compatibility, which means they drastically increase resource requirements.
If they were developed by a single team and placed directly into the game, you would see a significant performance boost for those 'mods'
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?
I thought they paid $2 billion for Minesweeper.
I'm looking forward to the "Added shark and waterskis" update.
"They need to drop Java or figure out a way to compile Java to actual machine code so the game runs well."
Yeah, why has no one thought of this?
You realise the way modern Java (since like 1999) works is that you write an application in Java, that Java code gets compiled to Java bytecode, which you can think of as a cross platform version of assembly, and then that Java Virtual Machine on which you run that bytecode (i.e. the compiled Java application) does in fact convert it into actual machine code right? Not just machine code, but machine code optimised for the exact machine the JVM is executing on? This allows the JVM to reach C++ levels of performance and some cases go beyond, because C++ is generally only compiled for a specific architecture, whilst the JVM optimises for a specific machine.
This does mean slow first time execution of modules as each module is optimised to that executing machine's native machine code the first time it is used, but after that first execution of the program or library you're basically getting native performance.
For what it's worth though, the console version of Minecraft (360, PS3, PS4, Xbox One) is apparently written in C++ because some of those platforms - i.e. the Xbox - don't have a Java Virtual Machine on which the Java version could be executed on.
I have a relatively low end laptop, it cost like £300 a year ago, and it runs Minecraft absolutely fine. What spec are your machines if they can't even run Minecraft?
And so a whole new generation of gamers will learn the pain and heartache of a loved name from their childhood getting ruined by a poorly-thought-out corporate-developed sequel.
Minecraft: the flamethrower. The kids love this one.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
DLC - sharks $5, waterskis $5, jumping ramp $5. If you want the sharks to have lazers, then they'll cost $10
They purchased mojang. That usually includes the cash on hand and monetary assets. Recent estimates I've seen were talking of 1.5B in tangible assets for Mojang. Thus, it's a 1B premium, meaning that they value the profits per year for the following years at 150-160M, which is very easy to reach with that license.
Minecraft has sold more than 100 million copies, every of them having the possibility for paying for a minecraft realm monthly to share their creations. A lot more people can buy the game. Then, if it start fading away, they will be able to grab a lot of money with minecraft 2.
Finally, they can also use this license to push their devices for which there was no minecraft before. Optimized for Windows Phone!@
This is not an insane amount at all, compared to the twitch buyout or such..
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
Or the ever popular Minecraft-themed Bag of Glass.
They didn't kill the Skype linux version yet: http://www.skype.com/en/downlo...
Yes, I too believe I can make a better estimation of the value of Mojang in 3 seconds than an entire specialized Microsoft department over the course of a few months.
There are probably somewhere between 10 and 100 million Minecraft players.
I can personally testify that I have met more than 10 Minecraft players just myself.
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.
They are purchasing this to get Minecraft on the Windows Phone-no-longer-called-Phone platform, in the hope that people will buy their devices to play Minecraft on.
Yes, I'm not actually bullshitting you on that one.
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.
Minecraft is a simplistic game any software developer can code in 6 months.
It has zero value.
What they bought is the community.
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.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Lego was a toy set that any toy maker could throw together in six months.
Yet it was lego that was massive among young boys back in the day, just like minecraft is massive among that very same audience today.
I'm not sure what rock you've been living under if you believe Minecraft is last week's news. I might have thought so too until I started noticing that kids are more into Minecraft than at any point in the past. I think the cultural impact of that game has thus far been underestimated.
Outside of Farmville, Candy Crush and that class of social games I've never seen a game cross gender lines like Minecraft. I can't recall every seeing a game with such widespread, universal appeal, period. Super Mario Bros doesn't even come close. Walk through any store with a Minecraft book or toy in hand and you'll have a half-dozen kids comment on it. Every boy I've met under 14 plays the game and seems to do so on a regular basis.
It's possible Minecraft is peaking, but I personally think this is uncharted territory for any game. It's on the level of a Facebook in it's ubiquity. Someone will eventually unseat both, but it won't be easy. In the meantime there's so much that can be added to Minecraft to sustain that popularity, and significant updates still come on a regular basis.
Not that Microsoft couldn't kill the game by sticking everything behind pay walls but hopefully they'll be smarter than that.
Mojang had 1.5 billion SEK in cash at the end of 2013, or about 220M USD at 2013 exchange rates. Their turnower for 2013 was 2 billion SEK or about 300 million USD.
Source: http://www.allabolag.se/556819...