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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

#101

Post by JoshTriplett »

javert wrote: post #92
berns wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helping others. There is no limit to that.

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…

Diminishing returns does apply to some problems, but there are enough researchers in most areas to justify investing hundreds of millions or billions, and for that matter you can fund research grants for students to expand the number of people in that field.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#102

Post by readerrrr »

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…

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 open now, than it will ever be at Microsoft.

minecraft re-written in C with a good rendering engine

How do you think they got it running on PS4. It was completely ported to C++.

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 a very small staff to work on what is prob the most profitable video game franchise in history. Just from a very basic business standpoint this seems to make very little sense to me.

That is simply not true. Do you have any data to back that up?

what is prob the most profitable video game franchise in history.

Nitpick, but Minecraft doesn't make it on the top 10.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#105

Post by tstactplsignore »

javert wrote: post #92
berns wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helping others. There is no limit to that.

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…

No, this isn't really true. The NIH's budget is 30 billion a year, and that funding is already incredibly competitive. Private universities, other government sources such as NSF, NASA, and DoE, and private institutions then in addition spend an amount that dwarfs that number. On top of all of that, the last 6 years have seen cuts, layoffs, and an enormous amount of work go unfunded in the life sciences.

Only about 16% of proposed NIH grants alone are funded each year- we can immediately see from that data that funding all NIH grants in just one year would probably take well over $100 billion.

The life scientists of the U.S. could find a use for Bill Gate's entire fortune in a few years. Not that dropping $80 billion on across the board medical research wouldn't be incredibly, enormously beneficial, but the infrastructure and manpower in the medical sciences are there to be able to absorb it and put it to use.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#106

Post by nickstinemates »

GuiA wrote: post #73
NDizzle wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see multiple kids wearing creeper shirts every day as I walk my daughter to elementary school.

Like for Angry Birds- what percentage of these are china town knockoffs?

I buy them for my son for $8 at Target. So, maybe some of them?

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#107

Post by wsinks »

Hominem wrote: post #100

For people under a certain age, minecraft is the Internet. If handled correctly, it will be Facebook, email, Skype and damn near everything else to an entire generation of users. Notch didn't really see it. He created the metaverse.

Woah. That's why I got such tingly feelings when I first started playing.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#108

Post by zanny »

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…

Minetest is most of this : http://minetest.net/

The flat game is a voxel engine that does mostly what MC does. It is written in C++ and is a billion years more optimized than the desktop Java Minecraft client. It is also open source.

It has an actual modding API, and has a bunch of mods like mobs and home decorations, etc, but nothing on the scale of the Minecraft mod scene (which is kind of insanely stupid, since you have to decompile the Java binaries of MC to mod it at all).

I do think the Minecraft mod scene is at its own dead end. Mojang iterates slowly on the game if at all, and its proprietary nature prevents true collaboration. It is a real shame all the effort is being poured into Minecraft at this point.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#109

Post by Houshalter »

georgemcbay wrote: post #33
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.

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…

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.

Re: Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

#110

Post by Pyrodogg »

Cogito wrote: post #96
Pyrodogg wrote: post #6

The Minecraft modding community just had a ridiculous few weeks with the various dramas surrounding Bukkit (a popular, extensible server mod). I can't wait to see what the reactions are to this news.

I'm in many ways sad I stopped working regularly on Bukkit. My involvement started to wane a couple of months before the 4 founders got acquired by Mojang, mostly because I got a Real Job. I was there just as it was starting, and helped (what seemed like) a lot with the early dev work and community management. Mostly it was just fun hanging out with the team (primarily EvilSeph and Tahg, but of course Dinnerbone, Gru…

Better, if you still have contacts, I encourage you to reach out to some of those devs involved. Otherwise, read wisely.

It seems that Bukkit had just been going on too long under it's quasi-relationship with Mojang. Semi-blessed but not supported (and still technically illegal). Energy drained to a point where the developers realized that as fun as Bukkit was they might like to work on other things after so many years.

This point has been almost entirely lost on the reddit lynch mob. They've only been focusing on the secondary event, the DMCA take down and it's effects. This was also significant, but I don't think people appreciate that even if Bukkit were still up and, like you said, "devs [...] keep adding features [...] upgrading", the very heart of the project was already walking away.

I really wish Bukkit would have been able to find a better footing to build atop of than relying on distributing Mojang's code sans license, putting them in a legal bind. If they would have had that technological footing early on, I think Mojang would have actually been more legitimately supporting of more of their efforts. Instead, they only turned their eye to the violations, and skirted the issue leaving it ambiguous.

Eventually the ambiguity without change got to the core team and they decided to close up shop.

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