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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

#341

Post by sprkwd »

ChrisRR wrote: post #320
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,…

I feel like the Bayonetta voice actress has really brought this kind of behaviour to light recently. People who have minor contributions to large franchises and then think that their part was way more influential than it was.

What happened with the Bayonetta voice actress?

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

#342

Post by mort96 »

LightHugger wrote: post #326

It is hilarious that he criticizes notch for being weird on twitter right before going on a bizzare telling of his mushroom fueled hallucinations. Like, let people be weird, if you're going to be so weird yourself.

Telling a story about your bizarre mushroom fuelled hallucinations is a cute kind of weird, tweeting in support of QAnon shit and other alt-right stuff is a not-cute kind of weird.

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

#343

Post by [deleted] »

iepathos wrote: post #192

The person who really got screwed in all this is poor Charlie, the agent. Here he is managing deals for Julian getting a percentage of those deals and Julian it sounds like is not making much, so Charlie probably isn't making much off Julian either. Julian goes and basically gives away his most successful work to ruthless Mojang and Charlie gets nothing for it at all because Julian keeps Charlie in the dark. Charlie…

[deleted]

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

#344

Post by Ekaros »

thomasz wrote: post #25
ipaddr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to him? The story mentions vegas but is otherwise vague

He got incredibly lonely, lost all his friend, and got ostracized over posting some alt right and Q shit on twitter.

I thought he went deep in with the far left crazies. Must have happened after that.

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

#345

Post by TeMPOraL »

chronogram wrote: post #146
dcow wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I need to stop. The more I brood over what I just read the more unbearably frustrated it makes me . I want my time back. I am sorry if I'm being overly harsh. This one really hit a nerve.

I understand. I spent a good few minutes reading the blog because it got so many HN points and also felt mild disappointment over the waste of time.

One thing I learned about HN that I don't even think about anymore is that upvotes are only weakly correlated with the quality of the submission itself - they usually reflect the interest in the topic revealed by the headline, or signify there's good HN commentary, or both.

IIRC, back before the "favorite" feature was introduced, people would use - and some still use - upvotes to bookmark interesting threads.

Second thing I learned is to always at least skim the comments before opening the submission itself, to gauge whether the latter is even worth it. Quite often it isn't. Here I thought it is, but the text was so long and... off somehow, that I got back to comment thread and read it more carefully, and now I know why it's off and that it's not worth it (for me personally) to read it more carefully.

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

#346

Post by Jochim »

vkazanov wrote: post #227
operator-name wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit sad because I think many here are missing the lesson to be learnt - artists want to be treated as artists (with emotion rather than rationality). When you treat them as cold hearted rational contractors, this kind of mess occurs. I'm reminded of a similar event with the Doom soundtrack https://medium.com/@mickgordon/my-full-statement-regarding-d...

Knowing some superartistic and talented people, I generally agree. But Mick's case is very different. Mojang did pay, the guy did write, it's just that the guy wanted more than there was there in the informal agreement. Mick Gordon did sign, idSoftware did not follow the contract, failed to pay on multiple occasions and did not even try to come back to reason in the longer term. Then there's the whole OST story, whic…

What did Mojang pay for though? That appears to be the point of contention.

It sounds like Mojang threw £20k at the author without understanding or articulating what that payment entitled them to.

At a later point they realised they didn't own the actual work itself and tried to strong-arm the author into giving them that ownership for effectively nothing.

At the time Mojang appears to believe that this could be an issue during due diligence. With the amount of money on the table, even offering a life changing sum to the author would have had a nearly imperceptible affect on the overall balance of the acquisition.

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

#347

Post by 3np »

iepathos wrote: post #192

The person who really got screwed in all this is poor Charlie, the agent. Here he is managing deals for Julian getting a percentage of those deals and Julian it sounds like is not making much, so Charlie probably isn't making much off Julian either. Julian goes and basically gives away his most successful work to ruthless Mojang and Charlie gets nothing for it at all because Julian keeps Charlie in the dark. Charlie…

Sounds like there was no exclusivity agreement.

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

#348

Post by loup-vaillant »

nmfisher wrote: post #111
asperous wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he actually received $20,000 that still seems like a lot? Especially in a world where freelance writing is $0.01-$0.50 (pre-GPT3). And it sounds like at the time it was good money for the artist. I get that he feels like he was given a small amount relative to the great success of Minecraft, but I would hope he also realizes that it was risk free cash.

That was my reaction too, 20,000 (euros) seems quite decent for a tiny freelance engagement, and just skimming the contract, that all seems bog-standard, too. If he didn't think the money was fair, he shouldn't have accepted it. I expect Mojang would have simply pulled the plug and gone with someone else if he had done so. This really just smacks of sour grapes that Mojang was sold for squillions and the author feels…

> just skimming the contract, that all seems bog-standard, too.

It is, and that's the problem. From way down the post:

BEGIN QUOTE

Copyright law was originally brought in to help artists make a living. But over the past century, corporations like Disney, Sony, Universal, and Microsoft, have lobbied hard to twist those laws out of shape. Now, the vast power imbalance between rich corporations and poor artists (particularly when negotiating) allows the corporations to stripmine the copyrights from artists, and keep the artists poor. To see how, just look again at the contract I refused to sign. It’s astonishing that such a mafia-shakedown, you-will-never-see-your-kid-again contract is legal; that it is considered a standard way to treat an artist, rather than greeted with gasps of horror, and treated as a crime. This is why none of your favourite comic book writers and artists own any of their creations. This is why Alan Moore, who created Watchmen, cannot use his own characters in his own work. This is why the original blues musicians, whose talent transformed global culture while creating a hugely profitable industry, died broke. This is why, even today, for every $1,000 of sales in the modern music industry, the average individual musician gets $23.40.

END QUOTE

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

#349

Post by Ekaros »

cobertos wrote: post #312
Jarwain wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm super curious on this too. I imagine at least a couple community managers and a PR person. So much of game dev is your community. Maybe a branding artist. Web dev for the website/java applet integration. It sounds like they were pretty well structured capital wise so definitely someone in payroll/accounting. But that's _still_ not 25.

I suppose someone had to be running servers, payment systems and so on as well. It is not exactly trivial to distribute and process as many copies as they sold.

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

#350

Post by 3np »

erklik wrote: post #313
operator-name wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit sad because I think many here are missing the lesson to be learnt - artists want to be treated as artists (with emotion rather than rationality). When you treat them as cold hearted rational contractors, this kind of mess occurs. I'm reminded of a similar event with the Doom soundtrack https://medium.com/@mickgordon/my-full-statement-regarding-d...

> artists want to be treated as artists (with emotion rather than rationality). That doesn't make any sense. When you treat people with "emotions" ... this is the issue. Emotions are unclear, confusing and are different for everyone. Treating people based on emotions and feelings just results in inequality and confusion for everyone. This the perfect example where if treated it as a rational and business transaction,…

The author makes the same point, in more than once place.
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