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Maybe. On the other hand, people do things every day for the love of it that get little traction in the market place. It seems more likely this confluence is just a coincidence.
I wonder if it might be a requirement (or nearly) for run-away successes though, while obviously not sufficient for it.
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I suspect that the Lightweight Java Game Library is seeing a spike in downloads.
I hate Java and I haven't done any game development since I was a kid, and I thought, "Hmm...I should check that out!"
It's in C\C++\.NET but also has bindings for Python, D, and Ruby. http://www.sfml-dev.org
If you want to do 3D but aren't up for writing OpenGL, check out OGRE3D. Open-source and former Diablo 2 developers from Bizzard North released a game called Torchlight with it recently. http://www.ogre3d.org/
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Valve couldn't even offer him anything near 100k/day
Which is entirely unsustainable, so not much of an argument against working for another company. If they can offer, say, a million per year, what will the ultimate amount he gets be at 20 years from now? 40 years? Reliability has its uses.
Of course he'll probably be rich enough to never have to work again by then, but an offer of his own uber-well-funded development team working on whatever the hell he feels like might well be tempting if he's the kind of guy I think he is.
Then again maybe he'll take the money and retire to bonk supermodels in Tahiti. Who knows?
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Public health care doesn't mean that nobody pays for it. Since he's not employed by anyone else, it's part of the ~15% in mandatory fees that he'll end up paying in addition to the ordinary income tax.
I think the parents point was that health care in Europe is substantially cheaper than in the US. We pay similar rates of tax to in the US, but get Healthcare in that as well.
I bought it a few weeks ago but only played twice (no time). My first time playing the demo I immediately was struck by several opportunities 1) converting 2D images into 3D minecraft world for artists and lazy people 2) Connecting 26 adjacent worlds to have a fluid adaptive minecraft universe. As users move from one world to the next it pulls in the data from the next set of adjacent worlds (no crossing lag). Folks…
cough Second Life cough
Seriously, we had that exact idea implemented around 1997 -- and it even supported multiple authentications (anonymous worlds, versus worlds with user accounts) all transparently. And it could even do VRML, crowd control, dynamic downloads (so you could link to new worlds), and a built-in world builder.
It seemed that we had thought of everything... And then management took over.
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On a similar note, Minecraft is written in... get this ... Java Which seems to be the dorkiest and most uncool language on the planet if you were to ask HN.
It's not the language, it's what you do with it. Everything else is just hot air.
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While I agree that this should be downvoted, just be aware that there is some truth to this: Minecraft makes my current generation (well, technically last, but the 13" model barely changed) MacBook Pro run hot enough that I cannot leave it on my lap. The only other thing that makes it do this is encoding video; I'm not really sure why, exactly. There is a decent amount of background processing going on, but it's limi…
It's pretty difficult to do language performance comparisons based on a single game. Dwarf fortress, another great indie game involving mining and crafting, is written in C++, has no 3D (it's simply a 2D grid), and uses up a lot of CPU. That doesn't mean that C++ is slow. It means we have no idea how much these custom indie game engines have been performance tuned, and how much logic is being performed in the backgro…
The most refreshing part of this story is that it's not about the Apple / Google / etc App stores. Shows that exceptional indie products can get huge traction on a traditional platform, sort of like Braid on XBOX / PC / etc. That said, also excites me for the future when MSFT's & Apple's standard OS come with a servicable app store baked in.
On a similar note, Minecraft is written in... get this ... Java Which seems to be the dorkiest and most uncool language on the planet if you were to ask HN.
Java is a painfully verbose language that does not trust me with any power tools. When I work in it I wind up cursing its name approximately twice per hour. But the combination of Extreme Portability and Libraries For Absolutely Everything and maybe a little bit of Everybody Understands It often draws me in anyway.
I don't love it, but sometimes it is the right tool for the job.
The most refreshing part of this story is that it's not about the Apple / Google / etc App stores. Shows that exceptional indie products can get huge traction on a traditional platform, sort of like Braid on XBOX / PC / etc. That said, also excites me for the future when MSFT's & Apple's standard OS come with a servicable app store baked in.
On a similar note, Minecraft is written in... get this ... Java Which seems to be the dorkiest and most uncool language on the planet if you were to ask HN.
On the upside, it allows him to do rapid development, and you can even try Minecraft in the browser.