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I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

theeggandtherock.substack.com

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Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#291

Post by ngc248 »

mcv wrote: post #267
ohbtvz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he asking for nothing? Half of the post is about how Mojang got millions then billions and he got nothing. If he's not asking for what he considers to be his share of the pie, then I don't know what the whole post is about.

It's emblematic for his entire inability to talk about money. He didn't want to talk about money, but he also didn't want his agent to do it for him. He has some highly idealistic beliefs about how money is not important, but he struggles to pay rent. I love his story, I sympathise, and I want Microsoft, or Notch, or Mojang, to just give him a million dollars. But I can also see that his financial struggles are mostl…

>>> I want Microsoft, or Notch, or Mojang, to just give him a million dollars.

Why just give someone a million for no reason. It ain't beans we are talking about money here.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#292

Post by Jarwain »

lelanthran wrote: post #220
cobertos wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentions that there were only five people actually on the actual dev team _at launch_? Notch, C418 (music), Jeb (only coder at launch), Kristoffer Zetterstrand (ingame paintings), and him (ending). He said only 25 people were staff at the time as well. I am truly curious who they were and what their roles were.

> He mentions that there were only five people actually on the actual dev team _at launch_? How would he know? From his own account, he was nothing more than a contract supplier who supplied one single thing. He claims that they were friends, but his own account of the whole mess shows that that isn't true.

It was reasonably public knowledge at the time, iirc. The dev team was not very big at launch.

That said, I'm kinda curious about what roles the other ~25 staff had in such a small team. HR and legal and such I guess?

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#293

Post by whywhywhywhy »

whatshisface wrote: post #48
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #41

That's a lot of anger, negativity and bitterness, and entitlement (one of the game's creators for writing the ending text?). Reminds me of the kid on the cover of the Nevermind album and other people that are kinda tangentially connected to something massively successful, but not connected enough to benefit materially, and they let that define who they are and ruin their lives. Could have been a neat personal story,…

How can you call asking for nothing entitlement?

I read between the lines and don’t think that’s what’s happening at all here.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#294

Post by LudwigNagasena »

zimpenfish wrote: post #276
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s weird that people don’t behave “rationally” in the crude sense of that word[1]. But it seems really weird to be happy about your tax rate going up. Consider the alternative: for example, you could give the money to charity that works in developing countries. So there seems to be two explanations: (1) Either you consider yourself prodigal and want an authority to take care of your spending for you.…

> Consider the alternative: for example, you could give the money to charity that works in developing countries. Why not both? I am happy for my tax rates to go up - indeed, I will vote for any political party that advocates this - and donate to developing countries (and also food banks in the UK because we are shamefully bad at being a developed country.)

> Why not both?

Because you cannot spend the same money twice, obviously. Labor and resources are finite.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#295

Post by mort96 »

Kiro wrote: post #287
mort96 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is, undoubtedly, one of the people who worked on a part of the game, yes. That counts as "helping create the game". And claiming to have "helped create the game" is not the same as claiming to be "the creator" of the game.

It absolutely reads as if his contribution is significant enough that he should be be considered one of the creators. > giving money to back-office staff who had just arrived in the last year, and had zero creative input into the game [...] I had helped him create the actual game The way he puts down regular employees, making it sound like his poem is obviously more important than whatever a mere employee does.

Yes, he considers himself "one of the creators of Minecraft". Because he is one of the creators of Minecraft; he created a part of the game. He doesn't consider himself "the creator of Minecraft", as you claimed.

You can think he puts down regular employees and makes himself seem more important than is warranted. You may think his contribution is tiny compared to the contribution of people who marketed the game or made the website. I may even agree. But that's not what I take issue with. I take issue with you misrepresenting his words by claiming he thinks he's "the creator of Minecraft", which is completely unfair.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#296

Post by emptyfile »

Jarwain wrote: post #272
ohbtvz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he asking for nothing? Half of the post is about how Mojang got millions then billions and he got nothing. If he's not asking for what he considers to be his share of the pie, then I don't know what the whole post is about.

To me the post is about how he wrote a story for a friend, that friend didn't treat him like a friend, and how he was hurt by that. It sounds like the post was about letting him vent his pain and frustration and reach some level of emotional catharsis, as well as officially releasing the story to the public domain.

No post body was provided.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#297

Post by simmerup »

operator-name wrote: post #197
true_religion wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it seems clear that he was not a friend. The people, who slaved away for months or years as employees to build the game may have been friends. That would explain the outsized compensation they all got. However, he was just a contractor found via twitter who wrote a few pages of text for the ending credits. They really did not think of him as a friend, and when he was done with work they never contacted him aga…

But once again, why the focus on compensation? It's a pretty small section of the article that's after the frustration with Carl. Once again speculating, but the author didn't want to be treated like "just a contractor", and nor did that seem like how the relationship started out. Even as a contractor, I personally feel Notch could have reached out with happy words at a minimum - instead the author got silence.

Notch probably dealt with tons of temporary contractors during the development of the game. He doesn’t have to keep life time commitments to all of them surely

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#298

Post by theharrychen »

Many of the commenters are so quick to discount the value of the End Poem, but from the replies of the writer's tweet it's pretty clear that many players have read the poem and been positively impacted by it. https://mobile.twitter.com/juliangough/status/16004656735571...

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#299

Post by bowsamic »

Karellen wrote: post #282
bowsamic wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you think it's socially acceptable to be a flawed person? Flaws aren't something we excuse just because people express them. Expressing them doesn't absolve you of them. They are still there, as flaws, and therefore people react to them as flaws.

Do you have no flaws?

Of course I do, but I don't expect people to excuse me of them or ignore them, just because I say them. The OP isn't expecting that, but other people in this thread are expecting it on his behalf. I don't even think the OP wants people to excuse his flaws, like people in this thread seem to want to insist on doing.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#300

Post by Jarwain »

widforss wrote: post #86
dcow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a case, especially one presumably of this profile, then many firms would take it for no up front cost with an expectation of some cut of the damages.

But he doesn't have a case, does he? He wrote the piece _for_ Minecraft and accepted the payment as such.

It depends on those initial emails and what was agreed upon. Assuming no information was left out and he truly said "The contract was for a comprehensive buyout, signing away all my rights forever, which was exactly the thing I’d told Carl that I never did with my work", it could be presumed that what he was paid for was essentially just a license to use his work for the Java game.
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