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Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

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Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#171

Post by JamesBarney »

ekianjo wrote: post #131
javert wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet Bill Gates has a hard time finding enough qualified people to wisely manage the money he is giving away. For example, if he has someone in charge of spending money on medical research, don't you think there is a point (a few billion) where they just don't know what else to spend money on? I mean, there are only so many medical researchers in the whole world. Of course you can always just throw money away/at peo…

> I bet Bill Gates has a hard time finding enough qualified people to wisely manage the money he is giving away. That's hardly surprising. Managing money is investing, and wise investment requires a lot of skills, market information, and connections. There's only so many good investors out there.

I don't think managing a charity successfully and making savvy investment decisions are similar. Investing outside of angel investing/accelerators is fairly close to a zero sum game, and there are many more excellent opportunities from a societal investment perspective in charities than in investing.

Not investing as a whole is a zero sum game but specifically increased levels of investing sophistication and savvy.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#172

Post by Houshalter »

arjunnarayan wrote: post #144
Houshalter wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much would taxes take out of it though? An offer of 2 billion dollars is not equivalent to getting 2 billion in your bank account.

For US citizens/residents with billions, taxes are pretty much a constant 25%, since 1. almost everything is capital gains (which comes to 23.6%). Note that this was 15% under GWBush, so it was even better back then. 2. You can avoid state taxes by relocating to WA/TX (If I recall correctly, this was Bezos' motivation for starting Amazon in Washington). A lot of billionaires live in 0% state capital gains tax states,…

Notch is Swedish isn't he?

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#173

Post by lotharbot »

otakucode wrote: post #122
Chinjut wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that the one-trick pony nature of the gaming business is more reason to take a big payout upfront. $2bn is fuck you money for the rest of your life. Who knows if the Minecraft IP will even be worth anything a few years from now?

And who knows if Minecraft will grow in complexity and interconnection to the point where instead of having websites, every company has a Minecraft world? Who knows if Minecraft won't become the online world from Snow Crash? In my own personal case though, the second I had anything worth $2 million I would sell out and retire. I just want to be able to feed myself and shelter myself and I'll gladly do independent res…

MineCraft has sold over 50 million copies at $7 (pocket edition) to $27 (PC edition) each, plus merchandise. Even after expenses, I'm pretty sure Notch's personal cut is in the nine-figure range. Easily enough to be independent for the rest of his life.

(I'm with you on "sell out at $2 million" in general, though. For the area I want to live in, which I coincidentally already live in, that'll last a lifetime.)

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#175

Post by ThrustVectoring »

Guvante wrote: post #89
Mandatum wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it fair to say that once you achieve "FU money", numbers start to lose their value? I can't imagine being able to say "no" to something like that. Although likely for something like Minecraft, it'd be stock options/cash mix.

It is important to remember that PV calculations are pretty easy to do, and help bring the FU money back to reality. For instance if Minecraft sells 10,000 copies a day (as someone else said) that is $100m a year. Assuming other platforms add up to the same that is $200m a year. At an 8% interest rate that is worth $2.5 billion assuming it continues forever. It is worth $1.3 billion if it only happens for 10 years.

8% interest on present cash is high.

Anyhow, the easy rule of thumb for converting between income streams and present value is simply "multiply by 20". In rough numbers, it $1/year is worth $20.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#176

Post by nl »

freshyill wrote: post #112

My kid loves it, but I'm the one who has to deal with the mods and the shitty YouTube videos and ad-filled garbage forums made by a community that's somehow never heard of GitHub. Hopefully Microsoft can reign in all of that crap and make the game less of a nightmare to maintain.

Oh yes!!

See my previous comments on this exact problem[1].

I'm actually working on a server app thing to make this easy. The idea is pre-configured sets of mods which will work together, installable with a single click. I have various techniques to constrain the resources used by mods so they don't kill other servers on the same machine, too.

The mod part isn't ready yet, but on-demand Minecraft server provisioning is working well.

People on HN probably aren't the real market since most here can wade through the horrors of incompatible mod versions etc, but my contact details are in my profile if anyone is interesting in testing it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903685

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#177

Post by ThrustVectoring »

math0ne wrote: post #94

As an avid minecrafter since the early days I can't help but see this as a good thing. The mod community is what has made mc what it is, but it gets no support from the developers. Minecraft has been so wildly profitable but the company is set up in a way which Mojang the developers get a tiny portion of the profits to re-invest in development. Notch essentially diverts all the money into his own pocket while leaving…

It makes a lot of sense to me. The barrier to expanding Mojang isn't money, but trust. It's very difficult to turn money into trustworthy, talented people who share your artistic vision. Throwing more money at it doesn't help - it attracts the sharks as much or more than the people you're looking for. People you trust can help, but it's hard to go from trust-to-implement-vision to trust-to-vet-people-for-trustworthiness.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#178

Post by jamespitts »

unknownian wrote: post #88
jamespitts wrote: post #38

Remember the Bungie acquisition? Remember why Microsoft wanted Halo -- to give XBox a killer-app? As much as I dislike indie shops getting sucked up into starships... let the well-funded VR wars begin!

Are there any other successful examples, esp with Microsoft? Halo seems like a wildly popular outlier.

In the early days of personal computers, killer apps were a luck-driven factor in the success of platforms. VisiCalc in the case of the Apple II, and Wordperfect in the case of DOS.

Observing how killer apps are crucial, the makers of risky, new platforms have since attempted to load the dice in their favor. This is particularly the case with game consoles.

Just look at how Nintendo and Sony line up games for their consoles, these literally make or break it for them.

It wasn't an acquisition, but Office was the preordained killer app in the early Mac days. Apple pulled MS in with unparalleled access to their new machine in order to get Word/Excel out in time.

Later, as we all know, Windows became the main platform for Office apps, and Office on the Mac was seriously neglected. So what was one of the first things Steve Jobs did upon returning to Apple? He persuaded his old friend Bill Gates to promise to get an updated version of Office on the Mac. This turned what seemed to be sand into concrete.

I'm forgetting what the original killer apps were for the iPhone, but I'd guess that, like MS with Office, Apple focused on their own music, photo, and chat apps.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#179

Post by nl »

simoncion wrote: post #137
makomk wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bukkit's dead now anyway. The entire development team decided to call it quits due to legal uncertainty and general exhaustion, then Mojang announced that they weren't allowed to do that because Bukkit was actually owned by Mojang and had a special deal which meant there were no legal issues, contradicting what they'd told people who asked privately. Then one of the main developers got pissed about the fact that he'd…

> This didn't stop Mojang from arguing that he had no legal right to do so, though. They're really keen on the whole free labour thing. My read on the situation is this: 0) Bukkit people reverse-engineer MC code. MC code is non-GPL'd. 1) Bukkit people release RE'd MC code under GPL. In order for the Bukkit folks to be able to relicense their code, they would have had to add a couple of steps, and rewrite step one: 0.…

My understanding is that Bukkit people didn't reverse engineer the Minecraft code - they decompiled it. That's a problem.

(Apologies if this is what you meant by "reverse engineered" - it isn't clear)

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