Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#251

Post by DavidBradbury » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 3:13 PM UTC

logn wrote: post #117

georgemcbay wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or maybe: 3) you don't want the project to lose its integrity/vision. The dollar amount matters less than finding a fitting buyer at a good enough price.

He said:

> once you have that sort of money, there are only a couple of reasons to run it up any further:

Your reply seems to indicate you didn't read what he said, but instead read your own meaning into it. Your #3 doesn't make sense as a reason to "run it up any further".

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#252

Post by MiddleEndian » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 3:34 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #71

mindstab wrote: post #19

I don't get it. Mojang already made "all the money" from selling minecraft and are largely maintaining it now. I haven't heard if they even have any new games on the way? The space one was cancelled. What exactly is MS possibly getting that could be worth $2B?

Nextgen Minecraft could be a XboxOne exclusive maybe as a launch title with whatever VR/AR device MS is supposedly working on. So, I could buy the Oculus that works only on a super-powered gaming PC that costs more than I make in a month, or the Sony Morpheus product which I'm sure will be great, but Sony won't have Minecraft, they'll have Playstation Home II. MS will have Minecraft. Which one will kids buy? I'm gues…

>Imagine lifting your hand to move a brick and flicking your wrist to toss it.

Sounds incredibly exhausting to build anything sufficiently complicated. At that point I may as well become a mason.

I'd also prefer not to be trapped to one platform. I really hope this doesn't happen.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#253

Post by arcatek » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 3:42 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #234

bpyne wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Minecraft dev culture in 2014 in general feels exactly like microcomputer dev culture in 1985, speaking as a guy who was there. Version control, whats that? Why would I want to open my source code, free software whats that? We don't need standards or APIs we can just hack it into working, one piece at a time. What do you mean a development methodology or strategy, we just start coding? If you find a bug, its your fau…

Déjà vu ;)

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#254

Post by jonknee » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 3:58 PM UTC

oliwary wrote: post #232

georgemcbay wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe he wants to get into angel investing? 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…

He likely already has a couple hundred million dollars in the bank. He made $100M just in 2012...

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#255

Post by Guvante » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 4:00 PM UTC

arrrg wrote: post #236

Guvante wrote: post #89

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.

Hey, I said that with the 10,000 (PC) copies. (With the 10,000 number that hasn’t changed for years I mostly wanted to make clear that, while not exactly growing, Mojang doesn’t seem to shrink, either.) 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 th…

I didn't mean to say "this is how you value Mojang". I just meant to say "here is how you get numbers that make $2 billion not just FU money".

Determining the value of IP is incredibly complex and something I would love to avoid having to do.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#256

Post by Guvante » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 4:01 PM UTC

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #175

Guvante wrote: post #89

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.

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.

Both 8% and 5% are fairly standard.

You chose one, I chose the other.

The much much bigger problem is how many years?

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#257

Post by Tiktaalik » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 4:03 PM UTC

I'm surprised by this news because I feel like most game developers would usually pick ~100 million in income for a few years and total creative freedom over a much larger number and having to do the bidding of a corporate giant.

What makes the most sense to me is that Notch is completely tired of Minecraft, never wants to touch it again, and he wants to hand it off to someone completely. Even though he hasn't been directly working on the project for a long time now, he must still get dragged in enough that it's an issue for him.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#258

Post by refurb » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 4:13 PM UTC

deciplex wrote: post #188

TrevorJ wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on . Not even gonna bother to ask you to back that up.

He probably won't, so I will (somewhat, he's definitely exaggerating, but probably not as much as you think): http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/09in12ms.xls Effective tax rate plateaus at around a half mil in annual income, then starts going down again after around five million. I couldn't find any hard data about brackets above that. Didn't Mitt Romney pay around 15%? Then there's my all-time favorite quote, of Leona H…

Mitt Romney also gave a huge amount of his annual compensation to charity, which reduced his tax rate substantially.

The big reason why the rich guys can lower their tax rates is because they can use investment losses to offset taxes. It's not a loophole, just a tax deduction you can optimize.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#259

Post by nl » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 4:15 PM UTC

Filligree wrote: post #248

nl wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Um... so, the FTB launcher?

Mildly similar I guess, but non self-hosted, and you don't download anything.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#260

Post by cbd1984 » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 4:15 PM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #227

berns wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The best way to do that is to educate young girls so they grow up into women who don't want to just pump out kids. It happened in the West, it can work elsewhere.