What leads you to the conclusion minecraft has cost 20x more.

It's been under some form of heavily active development since 18 November 2011. (though it was in development by Notch since 2009 and he quit his job and lived on the revenues at that point)

At that time there were 25 employees, all living in Stockholm Sweden, the cost of a developer there in 2011 is roughly 60-75k SEK/mo (lets say 60).

(25x(60x12))x9 = 15M SEK in Salaries.

Not including: marketing (usually more than half the total cost of making a game), build servers, distribution servers.

To put that into context: Final Fantasy IX is on the list of most expensive games ever made and cost 40M EUR.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

The output of your computation can't even be the right order of magnitude. (That's just 1.5M EUR).

Massive seems to take three years per game, and according to Wikipedia has 650 employees. It's pretty hard to see how you get to 20x from there.

Although it might cost more than most games over time, Notch wasn't initially rich when he started developing it, right? V1 was pretty frugally created.

(Genuinely curious)

I'd love to hear an insider's opinion on: Why aren't more games developed like Minecraft? Bootstrapped, slowly crafted over years rather than months, soft launched, minimal marketing, iterated on, etc.? Why is "pump out and hype an AAA game as inexpensively as possible" the only option Serious Game Companies™ go with?

There are but that's survivorship bias.

Most Indies (early access on Steam) either never come out of early access or come out relatively Luke-warm.