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Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

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Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#201

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

hugh3 wrote: post #154
Groxx wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is entirely unsustainable, so not much of an argument against working for another company. If they can offer, say, a million per year, what will the ultimate amount he gets be at 20 years from now? 40 years? Reliability has its uses.

Really, there's no way he's going to accept a job offer in the month where he makes $100+K a day. All Valve has to do is sit around and wait three months or six months or a year or however long it takes for the revenue stream to dry up, and then say "So, how about that job, then?" Of course he'll probably be rich enough to never have to work again by then, but an offer of his own uber-well-funded development team wor…

I think that people that don't need to work, but instead do it for the passion of the work are the exact type of people that should work at Valve.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#202

Post by derefr »

ido wrote: post #192
derefr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to imply that Notch doesn't program directly in Java—just that, like a C programmer writing assembler will write assembler with C conventions (like almost always passing parameters on the stack, etc.), a programmer who knows [any other non-Blub language] writing Java will think of things in terms of higher-order functions, duck-types, etc., then just type it in in a way java understands (many small anon…

Let me restate the problem another way: there are many more programmers who only know Java, than programmers who only know [other language X]. Is this little bit of personal opinion by any way confirmed by evidence? I know many more programmers who only know php, actionscript, or perl than programmers who only know java. I know you're not one of the cool kids around here if you don't build compilers in haskell, erlan…

Again, I'm not saying Java-the-language is bad. Java can be the best tool in a programmer's toolbox for many things. But, overwhelmingly, Java schools make Java programmers that only wield the Java hammer on every nail they find.

If your first language is PHP, or ActionScript, or Perl, it is very likely that you picked it up on your own—and thus are interested in the topic of programming in general, and will continue to learn from there, picking up bits of programming theory and new languages as you go. However, if your first language is Java, you learned it in school, because that's what they taught—you didn't yearn for anything more—and then there was a big bubble of EE employers ready and waiting to insulate you from the rest of the programming universe. Straight out of school, you start work for one Java company, and then transition to another, and pretty soon you're 32 and don't know what a combinator is or how you could possibly implement something like the JVM.

Having attended one of these Java schools for a semester, I can guarantee you that no one who graduated from there will ever learn another language. They know what they know, and they're happy with that. That what they know is Java is immaterial, except that that means that only knowing Java, by Bayes' law, becomes a positively-weighted-feature in the detection of these work-a-day programmers who need to be avoided at all costs if one wants to hire in a startup.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#203

Post by barrkel »

studer wrote: post #97
vaksel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

according to that he sold 230,441 copies which comes out to €2,292,887.95 euros. 1 euro = $1.36 USD so that comes out to $3,118,327.612 After all the fees and costs, that's 3 mil before taxes,

His company (Mojang Specifications) is a sole proprietorship, so the tax situation is interesting (i.e. most of it is taxed as personal income, and Sweden has a progressive tax system, and he has to pay insurance contributions as well). I can understand why he's scrambling to establish a real company :)

Indeed, a quick glance at online calculators indicates it's pretty horrific, i.e. that he'd be lucky to see more than 35% of gross, assuming that sole props get whacked for employer taxes too, which I'd expect to avoid a simple loophole.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#204

Post by henrikschroder »

studer wrote: post #131
henrikschroder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) The grandparent argument that being employed would be great because of health care benefits assumes that the creator of Minecraft lives in the US. If he had bothered to read the first sentence of the actual article, he would have discovered that this is not the case. In this place, we read the articles before commenting. 2) What 15% fees? Health care in Sweden is financed through regional income tax.

No, health care in Sweden is not solely financed through regional income tax. Large parts of the social security system are financed through payroll taxes and corresponding mandatory contributions from self-employed people (the latter is called "egenavgift" -- feel free to Google it). But looking again, he's in fact born before 1983, which means that he has to pay pension contributions as well, bumping the total cont…

I'll trust you on taxes and fees for small companies, and I actually had no idea that employment fees went to healthcare, I thought it all went to pensions and unemployment. Thanks for correcting me! :-)

Anyway, I can see how the grandparent comment could somehow be right because of the technicality of how Markus' current company is set up, but his assumptions were still flawed, and he still didn't read the article. And 3 million € is still gonna be a pretty nice sum even after Swedish taxes.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#206

Post by hungh3 »

heresy wrote: post #90
nihilocrat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a similar note, Minecraft is written in... get this ... Java Which seems to be the dorkiest and most uncool language on the planet if you were to ask HN.

It's not the language, it's what you do with it. Everything else is just hot air.

Absolutely agree. Language is the medium, not the expression. What matters is how we use it to express our ideas.

Java is too verbose? So what's Eclipse for? Sometimes, a bit too verbose can be good in terms of maintenance and readability.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#207

Post by nivertech »

nihilocrat wrote: post #39
aresant wrote: post #6

The most refreshing part of this story is that it's not about the Apple / Google / etc App stores. Shows that exceptional indie products can get huge traction on a traditional platform, sort of like Braid on XBOX / PC / etc. That said, also excites me for the future when MSFT's & Apple's standard OS come with a servicable app store baked in.

On a similar note, Minecraft is written in... get this ... Java Which seems to be the dorkiest and most uncool language on the planet if you were to ask HN.

Java is still much better language, than antiquated Objective-C. And you know how many apps are written in ObjC.

When you show a real programmer the path to financial independence, he will code even in brainfuck.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#208

Post by Tichy »

henrikschroder wrote: post #123
studer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public health care doesn't mean that nobody pays for it. Since he's not employed by anyone else, it's part of the ~15% in mandatory fees that he'll end up paying in addition to the ordinary income tax.

1) The grandparent argument that being employed would be great because of health care benefits assumes that the creator of Minecraft lives in the US. If he had bothered to read the first sentence of the actual article, he would have discovered that this is not the case. In this place, we read the articles before commenting. 2) What 15% fees? Health care in Sweden is financed through regional income tax.

Is it really so messed up that even if you have 3 Million $ in the bank, you can not buy health care in the US?

Could you fund a company and buy health care through that company?`I don't understand that system...

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#209

Post by NickPollard »

blasdel wrote: post #126
steveklabnik wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that this should be downvoted, just be aware that there is some truth to this: Minecraft makes my current generation (well, technically last, but the 13" model barely changed) MacBook Pro run hot enough that I cannot leave it on my lap. The only other thing that makes it do this is encoding video; I'm not really sure why, exactly. There is a decent amount of background processing going on, but it's limi…

On the contrary — it's enterely because of the graphics style and atomically destructible environment. Voxels are hard.

Caveat - I've not played minecraft - but I suspect that the graphics are not the problem, but the simulation (the atomically destructible environment and also AI).

Modern 3d games involve using both the CPU and GPU, and most intensive graphic computation is done on the GPU.

Graphical elements like having complex models, shader effects, filter passes etc. all put strain on the GPU, but don't touch the CPU too much.

Game logic elements like destructible terrain, AI, pathfinding, physics, and generally extensive game rules all put strain on the CPU.

Different games have a different balance between the two (but eventual framerate and performance is determined by the slowest side), a highly detailed FPS (say, Halo) is likely to be GPU-bound, whilst a complex strategy or simulation (eg. Minecraft) is more likely to be CPU-bound.

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