231–240 of 273 posts
Great! I'm going start writing a Clippy mod for Minecraft so I'm zero-day prepared for the purchase. In this mod, Clippy runs around dropping random notes that give players worthless hints about how to play the game. "Did you know . . .!"
That stopped being funny 10 years ago. Microsoft will also close the game for any modding so...
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.
I don't have any "FU money", but it seems very likely to me that once you have that sort of money, there are only a couple of reasons to run it up any further: 1) You have "Big Plans" that need funding (eg. Elon Musk) 2) Running up the numbers as a life gamification to "beat" your peers, or just because you can't stop chasing yourself, like one of those freak beast weightlifters that looks like a space monster but is…
He briefly though about investing into Psychonauts 2, but dropped out when he realized how much money was involved ($18m). [1] With a couple of hundred million dollars on his bank account he could get interesting and novel AAA games that would never get funding from traditional publishers made.
He even mentions this in [1]: "Perhaps in some distant future when I’m no longer trying to make games, I could get into angel investing."
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/04/exclusive-minecrafts-notch...
All these comments saying it's a good thing™ that Microsoft will buy it make me a bit sick. Have you forgotten so easily? It's MICROSOFT. Here are some other users' comments that sum it up: - Sorry, you can't build any more wood blocks today! Would you like to buy an extra 10 wood blocks for 99 Mojang bucks? - You Died! (Respawn for $2.99?) Next thing you know they release sequel as an exclusive for their shitbox It'…
That's more EA's MO, to be honest. I don't see Microsoft going heavy with microtransactions. Microsoft is more about bone-headed, tone-deaf "synergies". They'll undermine the franchise trying to use it to promote other projects no one cares about (e.g. Kinect, for a start), and you can forget about PC being the primary platform for it going forward (or it will only be available on Windows Store). But, they won't char…
No more mojang/mc accounts all auth will be thru live.microsoft.com.
No more java, next version will be dotnet only.
No more ingame chat but skype will be integrated.
Pocket edition works great on my android phone, that'll be the first thing to be "fixed", although the 0.5% of the population with windows phones will now be able to run minecraft.
I've only run it on my linux desktop, although I'm told it runs on Windows I don't have 64 bit windows set up so it runs out of memory. Whatever it'll never run again on linux and possibly macs.
As you imply the UI will have keyboard/mouse removed and you'll only be able to use kinect.
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.
Thank you Freshyill and JWN! I nearly ripped my hair out trying to keep the Minecraft, Forge, and the JVM in sync version-wise for the Pixelmon mod. I tried upgrading just one of them and the Pixelmon mod silently failed. Of course the forums are a Wild Wild West of inconsistent solutions that make me feel like Druidic incantations would be just as effective.
Its a really retro game, and I'm not talking about block graphics. Culturally and technologically its like something out of shareware game programming on a C64 in the 80s.
The crazy thing, is in 2014 there's a lot of people making a lot of money telling us that doesn't work, but just like 80s software development, it really DOES work. Maybe not well, maybe lots of heads pounding on desks in frustration, but it works surprisingly well.
If you're in the modern dev community it does feel like visiting a museum or an Amish community, very deja vous.
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> Of course you can always just throw money away/at people, but it won't do any good. "Give a man a fish" vs. "teach a man to fish." Yes, throwing fish at the poorest is the right thing to do. Malnourished children grow with diminished intellectual capacity. Then it is too late to teach them to fish.
Better teach the people not to produce children if they can't nourish them.
Look at the recent US drought - were people wrong to have had children ten years ago? How were they to know that some areas of the US were going to be in severe multi-year drought?
Why is it different if you change "the US" to some other part of the world?
Have a read of "Too Poor To Farm" which explains some of the problems very poor people face, and explains some of the reasons why very poor people have children.
http://www.irinnews.org/report/94947/lesotho-weather-extreme...
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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.
But Mojang’s revenue and profit are public: http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/20/5531046/minecraft-mojang-pr...
$322M revenue, $128M profit. However, I’m not sure whether that profit number is the correct one to assess the value of the company and IP.
If I understand this potential acquisition correctly, Notch seems to want to sell everything (company and IP). I think the company is currently set up so that Mojang pays Notch licensing fees for the Minecraft IP. That could potentially be a large part of their revenue. If Microsoft acquires company and IP they obviously don’t have to pay those licensing fees anymore.
Mojang is only a 40 person company, labour has to be their by far biggest cost, and I really don’t think a 40 person software company (that doesn’t really do any marketing, by the way) costs nearly $200M to run per year.
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If someone could get control of minecraft that was willing to invest in it's development amazing things could be accomplished. Imagine big budget lego minecraft expansions You don't understand. The whole point of Minecraft is user created stuff. In a Lego-like world, for profit expansions are not needed. The mod community is what has made mc what it is, but it gets no support from the developers. Minecraft is more op…
This article indicates that of $316M revenue, 130M was paid to Notch, $57M was spent on other costs and expenses, leaving $129M profit for Mojang. That doesn't seem tiny. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-03-19-mojang-made...
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…
If someone could get control of minecraft that was willing to invest in it's development amazing things could be accomplished. Imagine big budget lego minecraft expansions You don't understand. The whole point of Minecraft is user created stuff. In a Lego-like world, for profit expansions are not needed. The mod community is what has made mc what it is, but it gets no support from the developers. Minecraft is more op…
Won't you return the favor?
The whole point of Minecraft is user created stuff.
And that's why it never should have been closed-source. It is foolish of users to build their worlds in a closed universe, where a 3rd party could wipe them out on a whim with a forced update.
But we should forgive those users for building on unstable ground: they are children, after all.
Yes, Minecraft has captured the imaginations of a generation of children.
Captured is the operative word.
Minecraft is more open now, than it will ever be at Microsoft.
I need not (and won't) point out that this doesn't mean [...]
Anyway, +1 for Minetest. (You might like it!)
Minecraft is the best selling video game of all time, with over 15 million copies sold for the PC (54 million copies across all platforms), and it has over 100 million accounts registered. It is possibly the only successful indie game that has never integrated with Steam, and that has a very young userbase (based on my experience) which, given their ages, probably isn't part of Steam's userbase. All of these aspects make it a great strategic acquisition if Microsoft wants to make a new and successful game marketplace and platform for Windows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
... and in a month a new game comes out and minecrafters realise this is what minecraft should have been all along ...