I've had Minecraft since before the pre-alpha days. I think I had a pirated copy of Alpha late in 2010 and some time in 2011 or shortly thereafter I actually bought the game. I might have easily sunk 1000s of hours into this game. I think I played the ending only once, in Creative Mode, to see what the fuss was about. I never cared for the ending, because to me Minecraft never had an ending. We had a Survival server…
What do you mean by "gaslighting" there?
I understand "gaslighting" as "manipulating someone so as to make them question their own reality."
The main takeaway here is that you definitely should not interact with a corporation as anything other than rational economic actor, because while people have motivations, corporations only have one: money.
I think you are sort of missing the point. Read what the tattoo he got at the end of the story says.
I'm no literary critic and I don't know how many people finish Minecraft and how many get to read the poem but $20K for that seems a pretty good deal (and the exchange of emails and payment sound like some kind of contract). I'm sure others working on other parts of the game, graphics and gameplay (which have become very well known outside the game) put in far more work for less. If Microsoft replace the poem, I'm no…
> the exchange of emails and payment sound like some kind of contract Beware that this is very dependent on jurisdiction. There are places where such informal agreements are completely non binding. IP laws vary quite a lot as well. So your intuition might be completely wrong. Just sorting this out would be a nightmare (the author was working in Germany for a Swedish company; which law should apply? Then there is Micr…
Well, Microsoft's legal team obviously came to the conclusion that the emails and payment were at least sufficient to grant Mojang a license to the artist's work. So there's that. They could have been wrong, sure. But absent further legal judgement, I'm willing to side with the decision reached by the team of lawyers over random Internet commenters.
It would not be too hard for Microsoft to argue that they did come to an agreement with the artist to transfer the rights in exchange for 20,000 euros, so they do now own the copyright to the End Poem and will sue for damages if the artist reneges on the deal and starts claiming it's public domain. I hope they don't, but they definitely could. It would be a PR nightmare though, and there's not all much to be gained e…
without a contract how do you propose they could do that?
For legal purposes, verbal agreements can be contracts, plus here there's an email trail that includes what very much looks like an acceptance of terms by the author.
Contracts, eh? Three people got a cut of the $2B buyout, some random contractor doing a bit of writing for the game isn't going to get anything. I made the game _playable_ for a huge number of people by optimizing the save format (MCRegion) and doing the first implementation of Unicode text, probably affecting the exponential growth rate a bit, but I understand that my contribution amounted to a few weeks of work, ex…
These small but meaningful contributions to successful companies can be amazing resume builders too.
Did you read the ending text? It's incredibly long. Are you claiming that people have the entire thing tattooed on themselves? I definitely can't see it fitting on a coffee mug in any readable fashion
Yeah he is claiming people have it tattooed. Reading the story shows you one such image. A Google search also validates the claim.
To be fair, some people make tattoos with all kinds of silly things, the bar is pretty low. One can argue that whatever the ending text was, someone would make a tattoo with it eventually.
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 ma…
It's more complicated because he's one of the latecomers : by the point he was asked to do this work Minecraft had already been released and was already a massive success.
I don't see how that's relevant, other than pointing out that his part of the creation was fairly minor, which I haven't disagreed with.
I'm going to charitably guess you didn't read most of the post. He did move on. He is at peace, finally. He's the opposite of a diva and has humbly accepted that his reward for his work doesn't take monetary form.
At peace? The fact that he wrote this long post shows that he is not at peace. And it's not like it was just a vent piece that he didn't expect to get attention, he posted a link to it on /r/minecraft.
> The fact that he wrote this long post shows that he is not at peace.
Nitpick: technically/scientifically, facts do not have volition.
I'm sorry to say this on this site but this post is unmanageably long, I can't bring myself to read it fully. Also, the entitlement and disregard for the work of others is unbearable. This is one of the most low key infuriating posts I've ever seen about something that could've been somewhat sympathetic to.
I'm not sure I've ever met someone with this level of entitlement and whining. You missed out - I get it, that sucks. But you were paid $20,000 for a shitty poem. That's most people's dream.