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WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion

online.wsj.com

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Re: WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion

#31

Post by bstar77 »

For the people who criticize Minecraft as an underwhelming gaming experience, you need to look at the game from a different perspective...

For a young child, this game has a tremendous lure... it's very simple to visually take in. All of the objects you build with bricks are abstract representations of real life things. For a child, visualizing a castle in minecraft is much easier to process than showing them one in a Lord of the Rings movie.

The other thing is that there's really no rules. You can pretty much do whatever you want... build stuff, explore, play the actual campaign, fight bad guys, etc. This is the exact opposite of the 'cinematic' experience most other games try to create. Kids will bec creating their own storyline in their minds.

Minecraft is the ultimate game of imagination and kids will eat it up like candy. This is why it's made so much money and has become a cultural phenomenon.

Re: WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion

#32

Post by cookiecaper »

buerkle wrote: post #30
mbesto wrote: post #27

It takes 3,000 employees for Zynga Inc., ZNGA -0.38% the largest social-network game company in the world, to generate at least $150 million in annual operating profit. From an office in Stockholm, a largely unknown company brought in more than half that sum. Its employee count: 29. Ugh, this type of statement does a massive desservice to the programming service provider industry.

And it ignores the thousands of people writing mods for minecraft.

With something close to absolutely no support from Mojang, even though they've appropriated some of the community's features.

Re: WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion

#33

Post by nicpottier »

I love Minecraft, it is genius, original and tons of fun, but you need at least two points to draw a line, one hit does not a trend make.

The game world is littered with 'one hit wonders' but it is very hard to repeat that success, doubly so on the scale of Minecraft.

For those that say Mojang is somehow unique, that Notch is the messiah of indy gaming, all I can say is survivor bias. The game industry is chock full of brilliant, passionate peeps who build really original games that just fail to spark the imagination of a large audience for one reason or another.

Hope the best for Mojang and co, love their work on Minecraft and hope they can follow it up with something just as unique, but this article is making some big leaps.

Re: WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion

#34

Post by mmahemoff »

bstar77 wrote: post #31

For the people who criticize Minecraft as an underwhelming gaming experience, you need to look at the game from a different perspective... For a young child, this game has a tremendous lure... it's very simple to visually take in. All of the objects you build with bricks are abstract representations of real life things. For a child, visualizing a castle in minecraft is much easier to process than showing them one in…

Is it really a child's game? I got the impression it had pretty broad appeal especially as it's programmable.

Re: WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion

#35

Post by jiggy2011 »

wsc981 wrote: post #12
jiggy2011 wrote: post #4

Surely this depends on if they can continue to produce smash hits like minecraft. While I love the idea of 0x10c I don't know if it will replicate the success. It's something I find it hard to explain to people who don't understand things like programming and emulators. It could just be too hard to have the sort of mass appeal that minecraft did.

It will be very hard, perhaps impossible, for Mojang (or any other company) to replicate the success of Minecraft. But I don't think 0x10c needs to be as successful as Minecraft is. As long as they can make at least a little profit on 0x10c all will be fine. From what I've seen and understand about the game, I think 0x10c will certainly be profitable. The nice thing about 0x10c will be that in a way it's another sand…

It will be profitable, but it needs to be extremely profitable to justify a $1 billion valuation on the company.

Re: WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion

#36

Post by jiggy2011 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #11
jiggy2011 wrote: post #4

Surely this depends on if they can continue to produce smash hits like minecraft. While I love the idea of 0x10c I don't know if it will replicate the success. It's something I find it hard to explain to people who don't understand things like programming and emulators. It could just be too hard to have the sort of mass appeal that minecraft did.

> It's something I find it hard to explain to people who don't understand things like programming and emulators. "It's a space game where you have to build your own computer. Unless you don't want to, in which case you can download one of, like, a million that people have already worked on for months and years."

It depends how big a chunk of the game is dependant on the programming aspect. Since it is inherently multiplayer it's quite possible that people with technical skills will dominate the game.

Re: WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion

#37

Post by bstar77 »

mmahemoff wrote: post #34
bstar77 wrote: post #31

For the people who criticize Minecraft as an underwhelming gaming experience, you need to look at the game from a different perspective... For a young child, this game has a tremendous lure... it's very simple to visually take in. All of the objects you build with bricks are abstract representations of real life things. For a child, visualizing a castle in minecraft is much easier to process than showing them one in…

Is it really a child's game? I got the impression it had pretty broad appeal especially as it's programmable.

It definitely has tremendous broad appeal, but I think the characteristics I mentioned above is what puts it into this category of it's own. Notch has done an amazing design job of baking in advanced gameplay without affecting any of the accessibility.

Re: WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion

#39

Post by justinhj »

nicpottier wrote: post #33

I love Minecraft, it is genius, original and tons of fun, but you need at least two points to draw a line, one hit does not a trend make. The game world is littered with 'one hit wonders' but it is very hard to repeat that success, doubly so on the scale of Minecraft. For those that say Mojang is somehow unique, that Notch is the messiah of indy gaming, all I can say is survivor bias. The game industry is chock full…

I've been working on video games for 20 years and from my perspective Minecraft is not a one hit wonder, it's the coming of age of a genre. It reminds me of when I first saw Doom running. It was graphically beautiful for the day and a real technical accomplishment. Although it was by no means the first FPS, it was a huge hit and drove a lot of other companies to go into the genre. That industry has peaked today with Call of Duty being a $1b franchise.

With Minecraft, Notch took some really good games and put them together in a way that had much more Universal appeal. I wouldn't be surprised if the genre expands and matures and takes 15 years to play out. I think it's likely Mojang will lead that process.

Re: WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion

#40

Post by c-oreills »

ben0x539 wrote: post #16
dwerthen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the same thing could have been said about Minecraft, having little to no mass appeal, before it became a huge hit, no?

Lightning never strikes the same place twice, etc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod
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