Minecraft Tops 100 Million Sales (engadget.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Mojang has announced today that its game 'Minecraft' has passed 100 million sales across all platforms, including PC, Mac, consoles and mobile. Nearly 53,000 copies of the game have been sold every single day around the world since the beginning of the year. What may be even more impressive is the fact that more than 40 million people actively open up a Minecraft world each month and play around with a blocky axe, shovel and sword. According to Wikipedia, Minecraft is the second-bestselling video game of all-time next to Tetris. Tetris has sold a whopping 495 million copies, so don't expect Minecraft to earn the number one spot anytime soon. Microsoft did acquire Mojang almost two years ago, and there has been no word on a sequel as the company continues to release Minecraft for new platforms like HoloLens and Samsung's Gear VR. Soon, there will even be a version made just for China too.

Comments

No way

[Anonymous Coward]

First Post?

Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

I will not care until Minecraft is open source.

Re:Open Source

[donaldm]

I will not care until Minecraft is open source.

Well, you could try "Minetest" or any of the following here

Re:Open Source

[Thanshin]

How strong is your grasp on assembly?

Re:Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you need a "grasp on assembly" when the game is written in java?

Re:Open Source

[jones_supa]

Java bytecode is assembly code of the Java virtual machine.

Re: Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Or until it stops using Java.

Re:Open Source

[mlw4428]

It would never have sold 100 million copies as an open source game. You're more than welcome to do all the work they did and make your own popular game and open source it.

Re:Open Source

[SharpFang]

Actually, following some leaks, decompilation, forgotten debug symbols etc, full source of Minecraft is available. Not legally, but still.

Re:Open Source

[110010001000]

Whut?

Re:Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, as a former Mojang developer (hi, I'm TheMogMiner), you're full of shit. There have been next to zero leaks other than some minor screenshots from when Markus was still developing it single-handedly literally years ago, and the decompiled source code has the following issues:

1) It's 100% crowd-sourced, and with the Minecraft community being comprised mainly of kids and teenagers, some of the community-supplied symbols are fucking dumb as hell and not at all accurate.
2) Nowhere near 100% of the source code even has community-supplied symbols.
3) The decompiled code has every single static final member of every class inlined into the code, thanks to the compiler doing the inlinng at compile-time, so simple tweakables like the world height and utter parameters are an utter shit-show when it comes to modding them in the decompiled source.
4) Similarly, the decompiled code has zero comments, because again, comments are not retained by the compiler during compilation.

tl;dr: You have no idea what you're talking about.

Re: Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

JAVA Virtual Machine is a simulated computer/operating system. It executes programs that come in as byte code. The simulated CPU environment knows how to unpack the byte code and execute it on the VM. It's a pretty direct software analogy to what happens in a physical computer executing low-level assembly on a real CPU.

Re:Open Source

[lgw]

Which has nothing really to do with actual assembly language, in terms of either syntax or performance.

Re:Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been next to zero leaks other than ...

You are an idiot for claiming this. The only thing you can claim is that there are no leaks that you know of.

Re:Open Source

[JediJorgie]

I think TheMogMiner is right, if their had been any leaks it is likely we would have heard about them.

Re:Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Pity we need to resort to a crowd-sourced thing rather than the official API we were hoping to have in our hands years ago.

Re: Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's a pretty direct software analogy to what happens in a physical computer

You are confused.

An 'assembler' is a low level computer language that directly relates to the instruction code of the target machine (whether virtual or physical), thus there are hundreds of different languages called 'assembler', one or several for each different machine architecture. A couple of assemblers for the JVM are Jasmin and Krakatau. Programs for these include code that is written in mnemonics that directly produces bytecodes.

The Java language is a high level language that, like many other HLLs, the compilers for will produce a variety of binary different codes for various machines. It happens that most will be JVM bytecodes, or Dalvic codes, but, eg, gccj will produce x86 or many other codes.

Java language is nowhere close to being an 'assembler', no more so than C++ or Python.

2.5b / 100m = $25USD per copy.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what MS has paid per copy. How much have they gotten?

Re:2.5b / 100m = $25USD per copy.

[Anonymous Coward]

considering it is still selling 53,000 copies a day and they bought it about 2 years ago. So they have recouped about a billion dollars of that already (minus ongoing costs). It sounded insanely overpriced at the time, but it seems like it was actually a pretty cheap buy.

Re:2.5b / 100m = $25USD per copy.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what MS has paid per copy. How much have they gotten?

I'm not sure what your math is supposed to be telling us. So here's more meaningful numbers:
53,000 copies per day @ $25 per copy, let's say 150 days so far this year. That's just shy of $200 million just this year. If those numbers held up for last year as well, that would be an additional $480 million.
That's just from game sales, it doesn't include merchandise, things like skin packs, map packs, or revenue from Realms.

I don't think Microsoft has officially released actual revenue/profits just from Minecraft (or Mojang in general), but they've hinted that they are either close to, or already have hit the 'break even' point on their purchase.

Re:2.5b / 100m = $25USD per copy.

[Anonymous Coward]

They bought it for 2.5 billion, and they are counting sales previous to the buyout.

Re:2.5b / 100m = $25USD per copy.

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't the moron parent poster is. At $25 a copy which is actually roughly what they get without expansions/story packs and other DLC and merchandise they have already made about a billion back from the 2.5 they outlayed. Pretty damn impressive investment, not ashamed to say I thought this was another WTF moment of MS pissing money down the toilet but it seems it was a very smart investment.

who did what, now?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does this sentence mean? "Minecraft did acquire Mojang almost two years ago"

Re:who did what, now?

[rapu]

They mean Microsoft.

Re:who did what, now?

[SeaFox]

Maybe that's not such a bad idea. Rename the company Minecraft.
Kinda like Philip Morris changing their name to the Altria Group, to help people forget about the horrible products [i]they[/i] made.

Re:who did what, now?

[donaldm]

Maybe that's not such a bad idea. Rename the company Minecraft. Kinda like Philip Morris changing their name to the Altria Group, to help people forget about the horrible products [i]they[/i] made.

They will even make more money if they bring out a version of Minecraft called "Call of Duty - Minecraft" or better yet to cover all bases "Minecraft Battlefront". :-)

Re:who did what, now?

[Thanshin]

You're expected to replace the wrong words until it becomes an interesting, readable and factual article.

'tis no site for lazies.

Re:who did what, now?

[Opportunist]

Right now Microsoft could rename themselves "Puppies, Candy and Fireworks Factory" and it wouldn't help their reputation...

Re:who did what, now?

[jones_supa]

At least in my perception Microsoft's reputation has increased in past few years. They make stable, fast and secure software. Also, for feedback and support, their developers are more easy to reach than before.

Re:who did what, now?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like internet explorer becoming edge? or msn messenger becoming skype? or hotmail becoming outlook? or outlook express becoming live mail? etc. Article about it from 2012: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/earth-to-microsoft-please-stop-changing-your-product-names/

They keep trying to polish their turds with new names to escape their bad reputation but they are still turds.

Re:who did what, now?

[drinkypoo]

Right now Microsoft could rename themselves "Puppies, Candy and Fireworks Factory" and it wouldn't help their reputation...

That's because they would feed the puppies the candy and then load them into the fireworks

Re:who did what, now?

[Anonymous Coward]

edge and internet explorer are 2 completely different products as is msn messenger and skype, both completely separate code bases. Hotmail and outlook are websites, who gives a shit. Outlook express and live mail again were different code bases.

Re:who did what, now?

[SharpFang]

It got a decent boost with Win7. Win8 was more or less underwhelming, but not disastrous. Now the current push for Win10 earns them reputation of some supervillain with a master plan.

Re:who did what, now?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

I'm leaning toward Overcraft or Minewatch.

Re:who did what, now?

[donaldm]

It got a decent boost with Win7. Win8 was more or less underwhelming, but not disastrous. Now the current push for Win10 earns them reputation of some supervillain with a master plan.

I installed MS Win10 in a virtual machine a few hours ago and as an operating system, it is fine, as I would expect it to be.

Here are my observations.
1) The base OS installed from the ISO is about 9.4GB.
2) Very pretty although that is subjective and you like tiles, although it is possible to hide them.
3) Verry intrusive into your private use.
4) Loves to make is fairly difficult for the average user to change the security settings. Fortunately, there are private tools (be careful) that can fix that.
5) Please check out the following site . The presenter does not object to Win10 however he does not like the way Microsoft hides the fact that this OS can phone home if you let it. What is even more reprehensible is that after an update some of your settings may be reverted back from "off" to "on". Sure this is not a big deal for someone with a bit of technical knowledge but most people don't have that.

Compared against my Fedora 23 KDE Spin:
1) My 2600 packages which include the OS, GUI and lots of packages such as LibreOffice, The Gimp, Handbrake, Chrome, Firefox, some serious maths packages, video display software such as VLC and MPV Media Player as well as a host of other packages too numerous to name here, add up to 9.1GB. Even Linux Mint with it's base ISO install (including LibreOffice and The Gimp) is about 5.1GB. What on earth has Win10 got in that 9.4GB base ISO install that does not have an Office or photo editing suite?
2) My fully customizable KDE display is also very nice and while it does not use tiles (very subjective here) it is very functional and IMHOmuch more flexible.

As for installing Fedora it took about the same as it took to install MS Win10, but configuring for security was so much easier in Fedora (again subjective).

Personally, I would rather use Fedora since I have full control, however, there is nothing inherently wrong with Win10 if you lock it down but this is beyond the capability of most users.

Re:who did what, now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also Macrovision -> Rovi -> I think they're changing it again but I can't remember what to, so good work, guys!

Re:who did what, now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Minewatch Call of Battlecraft

Re:who did what, now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, even in this alternate universe, nobody gives a shit about Mineborn.

Re:who did what, now?

[JediJorgie]

THIS.... none of those were simple renames. Software evolves and all of those products went through a great deal of change over multiple transitions.

Re:who did what, now?

[SharpFang]

The full scale of the problems doesn't begin to show up until you begin to use win10 as a power user.

It's an okay system for a secretary for using MS Office and maybe an invoice program.

It's a bad system for a developer who needs to write embedded C, crosscompile for 5 different embedded platforms, support 20 various embedded protocols, often involving weird hardware plugged into the PC. The backwards compatibility modes are dodgy at times, the system poorly manages a large number of programs including multiple IDE,

It's an absolutely abysmal system for someone working in show business. Imagine your laptop driving the scene lighting and sound system starts a mandatory round of updates mid-way through the concert.

Re:who did what, now?

[Anonymous Coward]

whatever. a browser is a browser. lots of programs have been rebuilt from scratch by other companies and they've retained their old names because it's worth something. It is common knowledge that microsoft changed the name of their web browser to edge because of internet explorer's extremely poor reputation.

Re:who did what, now?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if they've changed the code when they do the EXACT same thing and have the same use. Point is microsoft changes their names of their programs over and over to get clean break from the negative connotations attached to their shitty software. A brand name with value doesn't get ditched so easily microsoft abandons theirs.

Re:who did what, now?

[Anonymous Coward]

A great deal of change and their software is still shit.

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Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note the top two selling games of all times are about placing blocks.

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Minecraft is popular because it is written in Java. If it had been written in C++ it would not be nearly this popular. Reason? Modpacks. There is no official interface for creating modpacks, but because it is Java, it is quite easy to do so. And this has caused various modpacks to appear where you can ride dragons, fight new enemies, encounter gas explosions, magic etc. It is the same thing what extensions did for Firefox.

Minecraft is still poorly written regarding how to create additional content (command block interface is horrible), but still simple enough for big group of people to be able to do so.Youtube also plays a big part in this as it is full of videos about different maps, modpacks and servers.

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah that vile c++ language. how dare it actually expect programmers to know what they're doing..

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note the top two selling games of all times are about placing blocks.

Minecraft gets multiple sales from the same people, though. Kid has it on a PC, then it became available for iThing as well as Android. Yup, that's three separate purchases for the single account for variously crippled versions. Then as Billy Mays would say, "But wait, there's more!" It's also available on consoles, so, yup, another sale.

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the modpacks are made by people who don't really know what they're doing, and they're flawed all over the place. I don't want to run J. Random Kid's modpack if he can't free his memory properly, and writing code properly--going through a reasonable amount of code review, checking it deeply, that's something that takes a lot of time and talent. Java and C# open the gates to people who have neither. And like any art form, that lets in a bunch of people with a lot of new creative ideas.

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

This was also the cause why the original Doom (written in C++) never got any mods.

http://www.moddb.com/games/doo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, those are all fairly recent rebuilds from scratch. Mods back in the old days were content mods (new graphics, but using existing functionality cleverly); even total conversions like the Aliens one that seemed to have dialogue triggers just had entities that "saw" the player, played dialogue as their wakeup bark, and immediately died. No coding, no EXEs.

Re:Blocks?

[Opportunist]

Sorry, but the fact that it's written in Java is, if anything, detrimental to its success. What makes it so great is that it can be modded, you identified that one correctly, and there are many other examples of games that are mediocre at best that had a lot of success mostly because they're easily modable, but Java is not the reason for this.

If anything, you could say that it was lucky Notch coded it in Java because he didn't think of making it modable and owing it to Java it can be modded easily. Well, not as easily as it COULD be if he actually created it with modding in mind in a sensible language instead of this memory hog clusterfuck, but yes, in a roundabout way, Java made Minecraft a success. But saying that Java is the reason is about as sensibly as saying the unsanitary conditions in Flemming's lab were the key to his discovery of Penicillin.

Re:Blocks?

[cyclomedia]

Plus it runs like a dog on anything but a monster PC. While the console edition (being a native port) runs fine on my Xbox 360. When MS acquired it I was hoping for a native DirectX C++ port (with mod compatibility, magically somehow), but all they've managed is porting pocket edition to Windows 10 App Store. Meh

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Minecraft is popular because it is written in Java. If it had been written in C++ it would not be nearly this popular. Reason? Modpacks.

About 28% of all Minecraft servers are unmodded. I don't know how many that are playing singleplayer with mods but I suspect it is similar.
It all boils down to your definition of "nearly this popular" and how you are willing to interpret the numbers.
The ones playing without mods would probably still play the game without mods being possible.
I don't think all the people playing with mods would have abandoned the game without the mods. Some might have gotten tired of it, but a lot of the players probably just think the game is more fun with mods but could do without them.

In my opinion it would be a reasonable estimate that the player number would be half of the current one if mods weren't possible but I don't think that would have made an impact on sales since most people that are playing modded started out without them.

Re: Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a trip over to the Reddit feedthebeast, a mod-development community centered around the mod loader Forge. These guys continuously complain about how every recompiled MC version means all the mods need to be ported by hand, and many are quitting now that their packs have to move to 1.9 (and 1.10 pre reserve was just announced). The community is littered with abandon ware.

Mojang promised a modding API with hooks and never delivered. The modding community still plows on with known bugs, memory and FPS issues, and Java's awful garbage collection with more than 4gb RAM allocation.

Besides, my money is on Minecraft 2.0 rewritten in .Net. You will still have reflection to hook into anything, and MS can make it just proprietary enough ... Maybe they will package it with Windows11.

Re: Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ms-pacman was an awesome mod of pacman for the time! Patching the roms with 8 byte overlays iirc.

Re:Blocks?

[CastrTroy]

I have an AMD box with an integrated GPU and Minecraft runs just fine. I'll admit, it runs pretty slow on some of the laptops I've seen with their sorry excuse for graphics processors, but on any basic desktop chip it will run just fine.

I think the problems are more to do with bad coding than anything to do with the language it is written in. On a slow computer you can see the tunnels that are miles away from you get drawn before the ground right in front of you. Why do they even bother drawing the tunnels you'll never end up seeing anyway?

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, the tunnels miles away from you are *loaded* first, you don't see 3D games "drawing". Any GPU can render Minecraft at 30FPS+ at normal detail level, even a crappy one from 2003. Even an iPhone 3GS. It's your disc that's slow, and that's lagging the background map loading. So the tunnels are drawn because you can see them, because as far as the renderer knows there's only empty space between you and the tunnels, because the other chunks aren't loaded yet.

Re: Blocks?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Turning Pac-Man into Ms. Pac-Man took more than 8 byte overlays.

If the update had been released in 2016, the sequel would have been called Pac-LGBT.

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion it would be a reasonable estimate that the player number would be half of the current one if mods weren't possible but I don't think that would have made an impact on sales since most people that are playing modded started out without them.

I think there's room for debate here. I purchased my first account regardless of the mods. However, without modding, I would not have subsequently purchased 3 more accounts for my kids. I don't know if my experience and reasoning is common among others, but if it is the estimate could have considerable variance.

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why FeedTheBeast is a thing. They consolidate lots of mods that aren't total crap into (mostly) working packages that can be updated.

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be great to see a C# port, just to mess around with.

Re:Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's so comfy to run Minecraft on a laptop in the middle of winter! Just be sure that your AC adapter plug doesn't fall out.

Re:Blocks?

[thegarbz]

Minecraft is popular because it is written in Java.

Did you really just say "Minecraft is popular because it's {Insert thing 90% of the population don't know about, and the remaining 10% don't care about}"
Did you really just say that? What were you hoping to accomplish with that comment?

Re:Blocks?

[JediJorgie]

What makes it so great is that you are given a basic set of tools and allowed to play however you like.

I bought it back when it we less than $10 USD and have never really used any mods except for Opitfine.

Being in Java was important because it let a one man team release it to the world on Mac, Window, and Linux with very little platform specific work.

Re:Blocks?

[JediJorgie]

> yeah that vile c++ language, how dare it make it so easy for even experienced programmers to create buffer overflows.

FTFY.

Re:Blocks?

[moxsam]

Minecraft is a CPU hog, you don't really need a good gfx card, but a beefy CPU with a lot of single-threaded power.

Re:Blocks?

[pnutjam]

If you can't see very far, it's really easy to get lost..
voice of experience...

Re:Blocks?

[Xest]

I've heard this a few times, there must be something really odd going on with the game because my 2008 2.83ghz quad core with 8gb of RAM handles it without breaking a sweat at 1080p and above default settings for draw distance etc.

I'm not saying you're wrong, because I know someone else mentioned this once before that they had problems with a PC far more powerful than mine, but I'd argue that it doesn't inherently need a powerful PC, it's just that there is something that causes poor performance on some systems that's never been fixed.

"Minecraft did acquire Mojang"

[Anonymous Coward]

And I thought I was bad during my coffee-less mornings. I sometimes wish I had your easy job Mr. or Mrs. Editor.

Perfect for VR

[Anonymous Coward]

Minecraft on GearVR is some of the best 3D presence on Mobile VR yet. Room scale Minecraft on HTC Vive is on another level entirely.

Re:Perfect for VR

[gl4ss]

room scale? soo.. like 7x7x7 blocks?

Re:Perfect for VR

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, not 7 blocks tall. The player fits in 2-high but not 1-high, so you could reasonably call a block a meter. Unless you're in some commercial building with really high pipes and vents and stuff, and no drop ceilings, I don't think you'd get much higher than 4 blocks high, and even that might be pushing it.

Re:Perfect for VR

[Anonymous Coward]

Minecraft rooms built 2-high feel a bit cramped, maybe as if you were a basketball player or a tall person in heels. You can walk normally, but any obstacle will require you to crouch to pass over it and you can't jump without banging your head.

Industrial spaces in Minecraft often build 7 high but that's to allow for pipework on the ceiling / under the floor of the layer above, you might want to run two types of pipes, e.g. ducts + conduits if you have MFR and AE1 and to allow for complicated multi-block machines like reactors or smelteries.

Re:Perfect for VR

[jawtheshark]

The Minecraft block *is* defined as being 1m x 1m x 1m. As for 2m feeling cramped, that is most likely true in reality too. Most rooms in modern houses, are 2.4m in height (in my basement it's 2.1m, the rest of the house 2.4m). Incidentally, I make my Minecraft rooms, 3 blocks high, and use half slabs on the top half of the third block, making my Minecraft rooms 2.5m high. This does not feel cramped and Endermen cannot enter/teleport in those spaces.

Re:Perfect for VR

[Anonymous Coward]

room scale? soo.. like 7x7x7 blocks?

Sorry for lack of clarity. Room Scale VR, allows you to walk around in Minecraft like the holodeck. The HTC Vive gives you a 10.6ft x 10.6ft "room" you can walk around in. (About 3x3 Minecraft blocks). Movement in the Vive is done by teleportation rather than typical gamepad because of nausea. It's also a bit of a hack as presently the HTC isn't officially supported. It's not ideal for "playing" the game, but it's superior for "experiencing" the game. You really feel like you are on top of a mountain, or inside of a mine. The Room Scale VR gives a very natural feeling of using your body to peek around corners, crouch or even just sit on a cliff side and watch the sun set. The GearVR version lacks to positional tracking of the Vive, so your interface is a traditional gamepad. It's a little more nausea inducing and doesn't feel nearly as "real" (i.e. feeling of presence) because you only get rotational tracking of your head.

Hope that clarifies, here is a video that shows the experience, but honestly watching a video about VR doesn't come close to what the experience actually feels like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-HMJz94ulw

FUCK EUROPE

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm loving that the EU will soon cease to exist. Europeans are too stupid and racist to solve even their most basic problems. Fuck Europe.

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[rochrist]

As opposed to this dumpster fire of a country.

Microsoft Owns Mojang

[bughunter]

Waiting for news on how MS will monetize Minecrack.

My 12 yo son is a Minecraft addict. On weeknights and weekends he pouts if he can't play. He's even got me into playing weekends on private servers and paying for his Realms account. Waiting on news on how they're turning the game into profitable accumulated player data.

I just know they'll turn my minecraft model of the Geisel Library into profit, somehow.

Still trying to figure out how to make it dance.

It will have to involve Redstone, I'm sure...

Re:Microsoft Owns Mojang

[Anonymous Coward]

I just know they'll turn my minecraft model of the Geisel Library into profit, somehow.

Dude, you can't just say something like that and not provide a link to some images of your model. Come on man, deliver!

Re:Microsoft Owns Mojang

[Anubis IV]

Waiting for news on how MS will monetize Minecrack.

He's even got me [...] paying for his Realms account.

Well, I know at least one answer to your question...

But they're making it in a load of different ways. Direct sales, DLC skin packs, Minecraft Realms operations, licensing deals, accessories like shirts and hats, and the list goes on. Even if the average selling price for each copy of the game was just $10 (which is far less than the actual number), they'd have made over $1B from direct sales alone.

Re:Microsoft Owns Mojang

[Anonymous Coward]

Waiting on news on how they're turning the game into profitable accumulated player data.

MCPE just updated. It added call, identity, and contacts permissions...

I still don't get Minecraft's appeal, though.

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I'm not fully human. It seems so fucking tedious, like Second Life Nursery Edition.

Re:I still don't get Minecraft's appeal, though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Minecraft is a source of infinite blocks for building infinite whatsits. That's what it is at its core. If you don't like playing with blocks at a fundamental level, you're simply never going to enjoy minecraft to its fullest.

Earth

[Anonymous Coward]

My dream is to play a Minecraft world that is a 1:1 mapping of Earth, with proper terrain and biomes. I did find a map called Earth long time ago but it was really scaled down and not very realistic (still impressive, though).
I wonder if you could modify the chunk generator to download from Google Earth and generate realistic chunks on the fly...

Re:Earth

[reboot246]

Good luck finding a village in that world.

Seriously, I wish villages would spawn in all of the different biomes using no mods - mountain villages, forest villages, ice plains villages, etc..

Re:Earth

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that would be cool, but what if you spawned in the Sahara and wanted to get to Japan? It'd take you MONTHS to walk there.

Good ole Daggerfall's map was supposedly the size of the British Isles and while you had various forms of faster transport, it was quite a chore to get places by just walking.

Re:Earth

[JediJorgie]

MCPE just got a new river-biome village.. so progress is happening.

Re:Earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I think you'd have to have a teleport area to take you to various destinations. Something where you could drill down from, say, North America -> USA -> Detroit to whatever level of accuracy is appropriate.

Minecraft did acquire Mojang?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could someone please feed the editor algorithm more training data? What a ridiculous typo.

Re:Minecraft did acquire Mojang?

[Anonymous Coward]

HD stands for Head Dot.

This is what will keep MS afloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly this is probably what will keep MS relevant on the consumer side after all their bungling and losing the desktop to the tablet and phone.

Re:This is what will keep MS afloat

[The-Ixian]

MS has never really been a consumer focused company. I would say that this is their entrance to the consumer world more than anything.

As far as keeping the company afloat... well, that would be Azure. Minecraft is a drop in the bucket.

Re:This is what will keep MS afloat

[Anonymous Coward]

From someone who works for Azure, I can tell you that Azure is not keeping the company afloat. It is still incurring a lot of ramp up cost as it continues to expand. Look at profits from bundling Windows with new PCs and sales of Office for the primary root source Microsoft's deep pockets.

Re:This is what will keep MS afloat

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess neither of you ever heard of the X-Box then.

Re:This is what will keep MS afloat

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

It's that thing that failed to compete against the Intellivision and Colecovision, isn't it?

Re:This is what will keep MS afloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because the Xbox platform is only used by the enterprise, right? :P

Re:This is what will keep MS afloat

[Anonymous Coward]

So no profits from Windows on desktop (or office because of google docs etc), I guess as the new version is free and works well on old hardware, so less new OEM licenses as well. Office on the workstation, as well as Windows is probably the major source. A lot of that is going on citrix and being outsourced where I'm at with the intent to move to either a Linux desktop or just keep everything on an old version of windows until they decide what to do (windows 7, we just moved off XP a couple years ago!), and this is Fortune 500.

Special Chinese Version?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to ask, what will be different in the Chinese version. Will there be a government in the game that tells you what to mine and build? Smog? Or maybe contaminated soil?

And will players of the 'western' version who tunnel too far going to suddenly end up in the Chinese version? That might be cool?

Haven't released a sequel?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would a Minecraft sequel entail, really?

IMHO, vanilla has its own bit of charm and elegant simplicity. ....and then there's the whole mod scene (which I hope MS doesn't ruin, either intentionally or unintentionally).

Re:Haven't released a sequel?

[UnknownSoldier]

There are TONS of ideas that could be done. Anyone who reads /r/minecraft will be aware of them.

i.e.

* Separate the geometry from the texture, so you don't have to wait for half-block, stair, equivalents of a new material
* Shared / Co-operative building
* Steam Workshop
* Actual magic
* Actual quests
* New block types. i.e. Think Lego

Re:Haven't released a sequel?

[JediJorgie]

I don't think there will be a sequel.. Think the focus will just switch to the MCPE code base. It is already shared across multiple platforms...

Sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was under the impression that Minecraft was free. I didn't spend a dime when my kid tried to rope me into playing it (was too mind-numbing for me). I'll have to ask him if he's ever spent a dime on it.

Re:Sales?

[JediJorgie]

Their has not been a legit free-to-play version available since the demo a few years back. Lots of hacked versions, but many of them have trojans too.

Missing From the Above:

[Anonymous Coward]

Minecraft Pocket Edition 0.15.x beta is finally out to customers who didn't pay money for realms today. It adds permission to access my calls, my identity, and my contacts, on a program that does not call people or send email. It is asking for my XBox Live login before enabling all features.

Of all the companies Minecraft could have been sold to, why Microsoft?

Re:Missing From the Above:

[JediJorgie]

Parrents have been asking for this. They do not want their kids playing on unmonitored public servers so MS is rolling in the code to let you play people on your XBox friends list.. or whatever they call it.

When did Microsoft change their name?

[ScienceofSpock]

Minecraft did acquire Mojang almost two years ago...

I think what you mean is

Microsoft did acquire Mojang almost two years ago...

nice fail..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Minecraft did acquire Mojang almost two years ago"

And that is JUST the game...

[gosand]

Microsoft didn't just get the game, they got the rights to the BRAND. Minecraft merchandise is huge. I know, I have three kids who love it.
What I like about it is that my kids all share 1 account... they don't go out on servers to play, they just build worlds and do all kinds of stuff locally. I even set up a server for them, but they don't use it. They just open their worlds up to LAN access and have fun.

I also like that it is set up (currently) so you buy the game and you are good. No paying for upgrades and things like that. Hopefully Microsoft won't change that, I was bummed when I heard they bought it. But there are tools like MultiMC that are fantastic. You can easily create instances for different versions and load mods with a few clicks. It makes taking backups for them pretty easy.

Personally - I don't get it. But they sure do, and love it.

For the Java modding elite....

[Anonymous Coward]

Try out 'Terasology'. It requires a lot beefier hardware than minetest (which I personally preferred while I still played. It will run on any hardware from a p3 with 512 megs and an R300 on up, and MAY run on older hardware, although I think older OGL support 2.1 may have been broken during the shader upgrades a number of years ago.)

Raspberry Pi

[spectrum-]

I just wish they would put a bit more effort into rekindling the support they had for the Raspberry Pi platform. There are quirky hacks to get the full version to work but it shouldn't have to be that complicated.

Cheap Cheap Cheap

[TiggertheMad]

They didn't buy it for the game, they bought it for the brand. You are just adding up sales for the individual games. What about all the merchandise? What about MC2, MC3 and MC4? (They will be made eventually after MC has been milked to death.)

2.5 billion is a steal for a globally recognized brand. Disney bought Star Wars from Lucas for 5 billion, and if they don't make that back before the decade is out, I will eat my hat.