The HN effect... A pastebin http://pastebin.com/n1qTeikM from https://twitter.com/notch/status/511508557200498688
The HN effect is real but pretty sure it's just a tiny factor in this case.
I'm Leaving Mojang
101–110 of 436 posts
Re: I'm Leaving Mojang
#102For the interested, Notch didn't enter the current Ludum Dare but thousands of mortal coders did, and they'd love you to go play their games!
Re: I'm Leaving Mojang
#103>As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. It has always amazed me how down to earth Notch is. Now, he's going to be a billionaire doing little game jams. It's hard to believe and quite awesome. It's like Bruce Wayne deciding to spend the rest of his life playing with legos.
It's like a guy that got lucky and rich and never has to work a day in his life anymore retiring early and doing what he likes to do.
I'll be honest, I'm bitter and jealous, :(
Re: I'm Leaving Mojang
#104Basically "I was successful once, it was awful". Sometimes I wish he would have just stuck with Minecraft as the only developer and stayed away from the spotlight. Plenty of very popular game creators have done so (Icefrog, Toady One). I really enjoyed the times back when Minecraft was just getting popular and you could tell Notch was adding features that he genuinely enjoyed (Redstone update, for instance). Then he…
Icefrog may have stayed away from the spotlight (which is quite impressive), but DOTA has not evolved how you suggested. He is by no means the sole developer, given that Valve is hauling ass behind that as pretty much their flagship game of the decade.
Maybe it's because Valve is near and dear to the gamers, but I think they've been keeping their community happier than if Icefrog was still running this as a solo job on a WC3 mod. I daresay it has been better for the game too.
Re: I'm Leaving Mojang
#105Heartbreaking to read what we do to people.
Well, there are a lot of dicks online, but I think twitter rage-storms or whatever seem to affect some people a lot more deeply than others.
Re: I'm Leaving Mojang
#106> I don’t see myself as a real game developer. I make games because it’s fun, and because I love games and I love to program, but I don’t make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don’t try to change the world. I think that's the essence of being a real game developer. It's sad that Notch feels this way, I think the majority of old school games guys and girls were just like that. Since it's beco…
It's the ideal, maybe; most 'real' game developers would love to be able to do whatever they want like Notch can, but run into practical problems like making money. Notch / Mojang got lucky, being one of the first 'building' games of its kind and the first majorly successful crowdsourced games. Nowadays, there's dozens of game developers that want to follow in his footsteps, but the competition in the crowdsourced world is just huge, so a lot will never get to a level where they can make a living out of doing what they love to do.
You mention it being a big business and all, but like you say yourself, thanks to Notch / Mojang, the rise of crowdsourcing and self-publishing thanks to platforms like Steam, indie game developers have a lot more opportunities than Notch/Mojang did back when he started out with Minecraft.
Re: I'm Leaving Mojang
#107This is why we can't have nice things. I don't know much about Minecraft or whatever issue Notch is referring to in his post. But I'm always struck by how quickly people snap to emotional argument and response, without thinking about the other side of the question, without thinking about how their response will be read or felt by others. The first step in any dialogue is trying to understand why the other side has sa…
> I don't know much about Minecraft or whatever issue Notch is referring to in his post. But I'm always struck by how quickly people snap to emotional argument and response
Wow!
Re: I'm Leaving Mojang
#108>As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. It has always amazed me how down to earth Notch is. Now, he's going to be a billionaire doing little game jams. It's hard to believe and quite awesome. It's like Bruce Wayne deciding to spend the rest of his life playing with legos.
>It's like Bruce Wayne deciding to spend the rest of his life playing with legos. I like this image. Bruce Wayne's character in batman is always thinking big. He tries to push things in the direction he thinks is right. The idea that someone would have all the power and decide to play with toys makes me worry about the rest of us. I would like to see people like Notch (creative, thoughtful people) having a say in wha…
> I would like to see people like Notch (creative, thoughtful people) having a say in what the future holds.
I don't. I have absolutely nothing against Notch, in fact I have the deepest respect for the guy as a hacker and as a person with, clearly, a lot of personal integrity. However he says quite clearly himself he's just interested in tinkering. Minecraft wasn't a deeply though out, perfectly executed, planned exercise in mass market game publishing. It was an entirely accidental result of pretty much randomly hacking ideas together. He had absolutely no idea what the future held for Minecraft when he produced it. Expecting him to have any deep insights into 'what the future holds' is projecting attributes and expectations on to him that I don't think he'd welcome.
Re: I'm Leaving Mojang
#109I think there are some interesting parallels with J K Rowling. If he releases anything now, it's big news (even Cliffhorse ). He might have to start "writing" under a pseudonym just to get any sense of doing something fresh without intense public scrutiny.
Nah, he's been releasing little side-projects every so often, none of which were seen as the next big thing. Although that space game of his did get a lot of hype, he decided to pull the plug on that one a while ago because it just wasn't going to work (also due to all the pressure from the fans).
Re: I'm Leaving Mojang
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
This, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w , presumably is the "This Is Phil Fish" video referenced ("talking about Phil is talking about fame"). http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PmT... for the tl;dr.
Got a text summary for the phone users please?
Transcript is here: http://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/89201006992/this-is-p...
The timed link in the grandparent post goes to this point in the video (the video uses “I hate Nickelback” as something to compare and contrast "I hate Phil Fish" with):
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On the internet, celebrities are famous only to the people who talk about them, and they’re only famous because we talk about them, and then we hate them for being too famous, and make them more famous by talking about how much we hate them. Could there ever be anything more self-defeating than this?
If Nickelback decided tomorrow that they didn’t want to be famous anymore, they would have to give up the tours, the roadies, the record deals, the billboards… things most of us don’t have. They would have to settle for normal life.
The only way out for Phil was to give up what most of us consider normal life – openly being ourselves on the internet. Because his normal life is what made him famous. Anything Phil says in public is newsworthy. He had to quit or privatize all social media. He had to stop speaking to his friends in public. If he goes to GDC or PAX or IndieCade, even as an attendee, there will be photos.