Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

From http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/djlsz/notchs_answ...

4. Shock-value asks- How do you like Java as a language? In what ways is it a positive and in what ways is it a negative compared to a lower level language like C/C++, especially as related to the development of Minecraft? Alphakamp asked a wonderful followup question- Do you think you will stay with java or will you ever restructure the code base with a different language?

I love java! I'm a bit worried now that Oracle owns it, and they haven't exactly shown any great interest in the client side of it. Sun used to speak to me all the time, even way back when me and Rolf made Wurm Online, but Oracle hasn't said a word to any game developer as far as I've seen. The biggest technical advantages with java is that the development speed is extremely fast with almost no compilation times and an excellent code hot-swapping in debug mode. The disadvantages is a slightly lower speed than C/C++, and less than perfect support for OpenGL. The LWJGL guys have done a great job with the binding, but java still suffers from rather large per-call overhead in JNI. Or in English; OpenGL calls are slow in java.

He lives that way by choice. He could make more money than he's making, by charging for more of his products. Though it sounds like he's about to begin having an overnight success any day now, since he seems to have started making products for sale on a more regular basis, and he seems to have become pretty good at what he does. He's smarter than me, it took me a good ten years to reach that point, and he's only ~five years into his chosen profession as a game maker.

I currently live on about $40k/year, but I've had years where I lived on credit cards for months at a time (I don't recommend it; too much stress; but I had the house with mortgage and everything and thought all that stuff was important; I know better now, and could squeak by on $15k/year if I was willing to live like the regular folks and park in one place for the whole year). In the past decade, my best years tax return showed income of $85k and my worst showed income of about $8k, with most years being closer to the low than the high. I've been on a very steady upward trajectory for the past four years (with the first year running Virtualmin being the $8k year, where I lived mostly off of savings from the $85k year, which was the year previous).

My definition of "pretty good living" is that you get to do the things that matter to you and you don't go hungry or go without medical care, and don't have to think much about money. My definition of "pretty good living" does not necessarily include a McMansion in the suburbs, an SUV and a sports car and a motorcycle in the three car garage, 52" television in the "media room", etc. I know plenty of those guys, and I'm way happier than they are. You can make more money working for others, in the short term (and sometimes even in the long term, though I suspect my net worth will cross those guys by a dramatic margin sometime within the next five to seven years).

You know, lately I've been thinking about the languages I learned this past few years. As of now, I'm nowhere nearly good in any environment thanks to my stupid brain following the "language love boat" preaches.

Couple days ago I decided to shut my eyes off articles that compares programming languages and decided to stick with Java and Ruby. I don't plan to learn 10 different programming languages for the rest of my life unless I happen to get an offer in a company where they would want to train me in their technology. I have no plan to be a software developer for the rest of my life because that is a bottom-line job. It's useless really. Especially when there are too many effing opinions in our industry such as:

- We prefer young people (remember, y'all going to get old at some point, you'll be out of the game soon)

- We prefer TDD, Scrum, and Agile (those of you who dislike TDD will be crossed out from this list)

- We only do games (those web developers are out)

- We only do web-development (don't know HTML/CSS/JS? get out)

- We only do internal IT (you're a software product guy, you won't last long here)

- We do "Digital Social Media Marketing Branding SEO" (you're just a PHP developer, go make something)

- We do SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle Financial (you're not qualified even though you know .NET)

- We do embedded (web developer and enterprise developer, the door is right there)

- We only use Apple (not an Apple fanboy? doesn't worship Jobs? out please)

I'd rather spend my time learning the business domain, leadership, management, networking and how to live a life and achieve happiness than learning LISP, C, C++, HTML, CSS, Python (I know a few things about Python but by no means I can be qualified to work in a startup that uses Django).

I don't want to be 50 years old hacker unemployed (due to age) and have no social skill to convince people that I'm still worth. Besides, I want to have a retirement that doesn't bother my kids's financial situation.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to learn and master a programming language and the ecosystem (libraries, tools, the community, etc)?

It's a life choice that I decided and I don't think you should look down at other people choices.

And therefore not that interesting to read about on a news site. You don't see that many articles about factoring quadratic equations, either.

The map is not bounded, it's generated as you approach the boundaries. It's only limited by your disk space to hold the map.