I don't play Minecraft but my kids do, and I don't think they know Minecraft has an ending? I certainly didn't. I always thought Minecraft was this unlimited platform where you build things with no specific purpose, for the pleasure of building, like an infinite Lego set.
That said, the rant, while much too long is interesting and explains well the misunderstanding between business people and artists. Some artists are good at business (Picasso) but most aren't because they speak a different language, and because, like this guy, they cultivate and probably enjoy ambiguity, or the protection and shadows it brings.
If he wanted more than $20k he should have asked for it then, but I think the appeal of putting your writing in front of over a hundred million people and a $20,000 check was "enough" compensation for the work, at the time. But resentment grew as the game continued to succeed.
To me this feels like it was written after seeing the Doom music story...which is entirely different as the music of the first (new) doom game was a huge part of its success. This is literally the opposite as the text was tacked on after the game was already successful (Just not yet at its peak success.) And in some ways feels like it is inviting MS lawyers to intervene, but he has much less of a standing.
There is no real ending in Minecraft. "The End" is just the name of another dimension - where of course you have to battle the big bad dragon and get the "end credits" afterwards and so on. But the dimension is literally just called "The End" and is indeed just a pun - you can mine, build, explore, and play there just like in the Overworld or in the Nether, and go back & forth between the three at any time.
In fact, most of us consider visiting The End as the real beginning of the game - exploring it gives you access to two items (shulker boxes and the Elytra), that we consider about as fundamental and essential to the game as the pickaxe or the crafting table.
"Wait what? You can craft a pickaxe? I've been punching rocks all this time!"
You probably know what The Nether is, that hellish looking place you access by making a portal. Reaching The Nether is progress, by getting there you get access to stuff you didn't have before, sure you can do whatever you feel like in Minecraft, but by getting there you can do more stuff than before because you have access to more stuff.
By defeating the Ender Dragon you are free to roam The End (which is the name of the whole place) and thus you finally gain access to everything the game has to offer.
To the extent these have a definite ending, it's not the ending intended for Minecraft.
Take Star Factory, you're not going to kill monsters and build up until you can take on a dragon, you're building a factory to make stars. You start with basic materials like an unlimited supply of wood and gold and you've reached the end of the game once your systems are just making stars automatically from your materials.
The modern game actually has a bunch of stuff "after" the ending when played straight up.
But she straight up does not UNDERSTAND a game like Sim city, or rim world. Why would anybody "play" that, is her perspective. It doesn't have a sufficiently, singularly clear narrative, flow, goal, beginning and an end. We talked about such games a few times and I have not really succeeded in moving the needle - not in her being interested in such games, but even remotely comprehending their existence or allure.
I guess it was my wife's friends that felt minecraft really needed an ending :-)
Now, you can start with a toy (like The Sims or a regulation basketball or a pencil, paper, and dice) and create a game around it by applying rules, goals, and objectives. They may be defined by others or you may be creating the game in your own mind -- either way the toy is a piece of equipment used to play the game, it is not in and of itself a game.
Your wife may not enjoy electronic toys like Sim City or Rim World, but perhaps you could pique her interest by working together to come up with games that the two of you could play using those toys?
We engage in many other "pointless" pursuits: beauty, love, culture, civilization, and indeed, life itself. Everyone "plays" for a different reason, and that makes us human.
The entire post reads like really sour grapes from someone who believes his contribution is way more important than it is. He thinks he deserves a significant higher chunk than what he was paid.
He also acts like he has a leg to stand on and is magnanimously deciding not to bring the hammer down. No. He's going to get laughed out of the lawyer's office. It's not even going to sniff a court. I can imagine what happened.
Markus and Carl were talking with their lawyers about what was needed to facilitate the Microsoft deal. Mojang's lawyers notified them to cases like this, where there's an unsigned contract floating about. They said, get that signed so Microsoft doesn't potentially pull the deal over potential issues. Microsoft, in their due diligence, also had their lawyers combing over Mojang's contracts, assets, and liabilities. Microsoft came across this contract, meetings were had, they found out about the email chain, etc. And Microsoft's lawyers decided this was not an issue. So at that point, Mojang didn't care. Because they didn't have to.
Markus and Carl didn't tell this guy about the deal because it wasn't his business. He was an artist contracted for a bit of poetry. For all intents and purposes, everyone at Mojang considered their business with him over.
But I don't believe this would stand up in court. There was a verbal agreement before he signed a contract. He was paid for his one-off contribution; I don't know how much work he delivered or how many hours he put into it, but 20K is half a year's income for some people, not to be sniffed at.
This has come up recently as well in some drama about voice acting on the one hand, and video game soundtracks on the other. Normally you get paid for the time spent, or the amount of your contributions used. But in the case of the voice actor, they decided the normal amount - or as it turned out later, a chunk well above the normal amount - wasn't enough and they threw it onto the internet.
But in the end, I think this is just a business transaction - one part of one part of the game, paid for with a five figure sum. The author neglected to do his due diligence and neglected to review and sign the contract in a timely fashion. Mojang and Microsoft may be susceptible to a lawsuit because the author never surrendered the rights to his work until now, but his unwillingness to cooperate while accepting payment for work delivered won't work in his favor.
And while he gave the text up into the public domain, I don't know if this holds up in court; iirc, copyright law only applies if you defend your copyright. Which means that if the author's copyright is voided, then Microsoft's copyright for Minecraft and all it contains might take over, and they might sue him instead. I'm not a lawyer or versed in copyright law, so this is just fantasizing.
iirc, copyright law only applies if you defend your copyright.
Copyright always applies and is automatically assigned at the time of creation. Belongs to the author by default unless created in the context of some other agreement (e.g. work for hire)
The same can certainly be said for everyone else involved in this. Notch made off with 1.7 billion dollars for a few years of work - that's a disproportionate reward for the level of effort.
But if the poetry author wanted a disproportionate reward for their level of effort, they should have asked for it. It's business at the end of the day - they didn't write it for art's sake, they wrote it for a contract job. And it's not a particularly great poem that will be featured on poetry.com, IMO
I inherited a server hosting and came across the ending by accident. It was a moment of "What? I can win Minecraft?". Kids were "Yeah. Winning is boring."
I know basically nothing about the life of artists in general, but this interests me. Where can I read about this? Would appreciate a link that deals with the business side more than a general biography. Thanks.
All that is to say that if my interpretation is correct then Julian is legally entitled to do what he wants with the work including selling it to someone else or in this case release it under a creative commons license.
> However, in some circumstances, for example when copyright is not dealt with in the contract to commission the work, courts may be willing to find that there is an implied licence allowing the commissioner to use the work for the purpose for which it was commissioned. This does not necessarily result in a transfer of ownership. Instead, the commissioner of the work may only get a limited non-exclusive licence. This situation demonstrates the importance of establishing who owns copyright through a contract.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ownership-of-copyright-works
That is the move by Mojang that I didn't understand. They were about to be paid 2.5 billion. Why not offer 1 million for the signed contract? They could easily afford that, and with his financial troubles at the time, Julian would probably have signed it.
And he'd have missed out on his subsequent personal growth, and we wouldn't have gotten this beautiful story, and the universe wouldn't have gotten the End Poem, but Microsoft would, and the world would have been more normal, predictable, corporate. But he would have been able to eat and pay rent.
Because they believed (erroneously or not) that they already had paid for the thing the contract was about, and were offering a "peppercorn" payment for the signature itself to make the exchange complete.
Maybe. Maybe not. People say these kind of things, but it is often a retcon aimed to help them deal with some emotion.
Maybe he would have asked his agent to agree on a deal. The agent would have got him a tiny percentage and he would have spent the money to bring something wonderfull to the world. During which process he would have attained even more personal growth.
Totally made up story, but so is the hint that if he would have had a contract he would have missed out on personal growth.
As Marcus Aurelius wrote sometime around 170CE:
>It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. ...
>So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.
Personally, I don't think that stoicism is a good fit for modern times, because it conflates virtue with foregoing strong emotions, and leaving other people to their mistakes.
It does have its share of worthwhile lessons though, and if you dig a little deeper you'll find that it encourages guiding and explaining when people are wrong, rather than getting upset with them about perceived moral or practical failures.
Julian's story is more a story of a misunderstood artist caring more about the art than the money, mistaking contract work for friendship, struggling with the consequences, hating himself for it, and finally coming to terms with it.
That seems to happen quite often. People forget that it's impossible to be friends with someone who's employing you without some major conflicts of interest on both sides.
Given the blatantly deliberate blocking to get the OST done and getting a moron to ghostwrite it makes me think id deliberately decided to ruin Mick's reputation so the fans would eat him alive and then they went for straight up libel to complete it. Marty Stratton, what a complete piece of shit.
Blowing it off with a token amount just says "this is a tiny formality, a dotting of an 'i'".
If I were offered that out of the blue, I'd be wondering what true value I'm holding to make that signature so important.
(Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft on nothing related, and love Minecraft the game.)
IANAL but I think Microsoft is in the clear here because they bought out Mojang but they couldn't for example use the ending (or derivative works of it) in a spin-off game because Mojang couldn't have done that either and they have no standing to go after anyone reproducing the poem as a whole or in part.
In fact, the poem now being CC0 grants Microsoft more rights than they had, except it's still non-exclusive, meaning the same rights are granted to everyone else too.
Though to be perfectly honest, if I were them, and they needed something like that, I'd hire Julian to write it. Or maybe ask him to write it for free after giving him a massive donation.
Torry ended up suing and they settled out of court, so I guess that's a win.
Julian didn't read the contract when he first got it, because he apparently didn't care.
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.
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 entitled to some of that. Legalities aside (the absence of aa signed contract may be a problem) but I don't feel he is morally entitled to anything more than he's already received.
I honestly suspect the €20k figure was, "Let's offer him a big enough number so that we don't have to be distracted by negotiating this." And then began the long-winded and self-important wall-of-text emails.
Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code.
Developers are accustomed to giving up all artistic agency and authorship, and those who can’t bring themselves to do so give up on being developers. (I’m partly in the latter category.) Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.
The guy got £20,000 for some pages of babel. He should be elated.
The definition of “keep” in that sentence is the principal question of copyright, isn’t?
That is to say, if I produce a physical object at someone’s behest, I have to completely give up on the result in order for them to have unrestricted use of it, for reasons of physics. There are no such reasons for texts, computer programs, and so on, unless imposed artificially by law.
(I’m not going to call something good just because it’s the natural state of things, but neither am I going to automatically consider something reasonable just because it’s the law.)
For example, if I’m employed as a teacher, a good portion of my work is producing notes to give lectures from or to hand out to students, so that’s partly what I’m being paid for. Yet it’d be pretty normal for me to then publish them in some form, for money or not, without my employer trying to lay claim to them.
Even a developer who is employed by virtue of his experience in databases is generally not precluded from publishing a book summarizing that same experience for others to use.
> The guy got £20,000 for some pages of [babble]. He should be elated.
I don’t know anything about his situation, but a freelancer’s budgeting always has to account for the time spent waiting or searching for the next gig; being paid fabulously for a job that occupies your every waking hour for a month, then spending the next two sucking on your thumb (and recovering from the overtaxing sprint you’ve just had) is pretty normal, and on average the money ends up much less abundant than you’d guess just looking at the numbers. (Unless you’re Brandon Sanderson and can finish a novel a year, I guess.)
But there is definitely a lot of consulting where you're working more or less full-time to stay current, market yourself, etc. and when you do get work the day rate may be eye-watering--but those jobs may be short and/or infrequent.
When I was an industry analyst, in addition to our regular subscription clients, we did present at company events, did a la carte consulting days, and things like that for which we got about $10K per day. But we didn't have a lot of those.
There are, I believe, a non-negligible number of companies who will write software for you, to a specification, and grant you a (sometimes non-exclusive) license to use that software but absolutely will not give you the copyright. Pretty sure there's a lot of IT companies, for example, that UKGOV contract to which do this.
Get the tax payer to pay you to build a product and then continue looting the public to rent it out perpetually.
Well, it's less common for fiction but if you're working for a company and writing content you're almost certainly giving up any rights.
If you're ghostwriting without credit, it's not explicitly spelled out but the way it works is they'll slap it on their copyrighted website, possibly under someone else's byline. And they'd reasonably expect you not to publish the same thing verbatim somewhere else.
Though you also have cases where cross-posting is at least tolerated.
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
Honestly, that's true at a lot of levels, not just the poverty level. It is said if you want to make a million dollars running a recording studio… spend three million dollars. If you want to be a million dollar rock star… invest (or have your family invest) ten million. It's like that.
It's like, you can wear rags, or you can wear a suit, or you can wear a Superman cape. Would you like to for-real wear that Superman cape, to be the hero? Well, you can, for real. And it will cost you everything, more than you could imagine.
I read this guy's essay in part because he WAS the Minecraft Story Guy, not because I thought he'd have good arguments. That's what he earned, and that's what it cost him (didn't sign up for his mailing list tho :) )
After he dies (assuming I don't go first) I'll remember things about his words. After Markus dies I won't remember a thing about his money (though I'll remember things about the game he made, he's not so different in that respect). I won't remember a thing about the Microsoft lawyers no matter whether they win or lose, whether they enjoin this guy from public-domaining what they see as their employer's property. So in a sense that thing didn't end up being their property and that's the writer's point.
It all gets into philosophic realms, and that's where poets live, not lawyers.
You have to at least put a floor on that thing or you fall completely afoul of the common meaning.
My rule of thumb would be less than $1 million spent before the first public release ? (Which I assume makes Minecraft indie ?)
Now another question is whether you can even call indie those games being advertised and distributed by Steam (or any other platform) where developers are overwelmingly dependent on that platform for like 95%+ of their sales (including keys from third party websites still for that platform) - because dealing with advertisers and distributors was also an extremely important part of the job when games still came in boxes !
> the game they worked on for a few hours
Voice acting is a hard job, and it takes more time than a “few hours” to get good at it. If you think anyone can do it certainly you can just pay an anybody to do it.
He submits a bill for $200,000. It is itemized as such:
- $1 - Fifteen seconds of labor; striking with hammer
- $199,999 - Knowing where to strike
So it takes a long time to learn how to take good pictures, and therefore every picture you take after being good should be worth 5k USD or something? that's not how things work at all.
> Voice acting is a hard job,
So all other jobs are easy? That's again pretentiousness at play.
The ending is like the smile on Mona Lisa in my opinion. You can probably pay someone a few hundred dollars to paint that smile ...
The reason is because in most cases (this is ~1 decade old personal research/opinion) unless specified the client is paying for access and use to the final product you make, not necessarily for anything else. This is the sane thing though, but in business in many cases you might want to also receive the blueprints, source code, assets, copyright, etc. This might be "obvious" depending on the industry and case, but that means it's not obvious at all in a general sense.
For example here, the company (and that might be why Microsoft backed up) might be happy with just being able to use the work, even if they don't have an exclusive contract or are the copyright holders of that particular bit. I do agree that it seems Mojang had implicit permission at least to use it, but not exclusive/full copyright/etc.
> I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt.
By accepting this premise, these are examples of when he expected to be treated as a friend, but was instead treated as an outsider. As for the legality, I don't think a vague agreement can clarify if the work is licenced or if the licence was transfered.
Of course, I'm sure they were friendly in their discussions, there's no point in being actively hostile to the people you're working with. But the idea the relationship extended anything past a game developer and a contracted writer seems to be entirely in the author's mind.
It certainly feels a bit like he was feeling lonely and needed to see this as a friendship. I'm sure there was a deep artistic connection, but that's not quite the same thing as a friendship. It's awkward and frustrating when only one side sees a relationship as a friendship.
Select snips:
> I just misunderstood what was going on.
> Now, Carl didn’t do anything wrong here. Carl is not the baddie either. He was a CEO, and major shareholder, behaving the way a CEO and major shareholder is supposed to behave. The misunderstanding was all mine.
> But that anger was of course misplaced. If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me: my life, at that point, after all those years, was the direct result of all the decisions I had made over its course, and those decisions involved prioritising art and deprioritising money, again and again. (As Robert Louis Stevenson dryly put it, “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.")
> Again, I have to calm down and remind myself, and you, there are no bad guys in this story. Do not hassle Markus, or Carl (or even Microsoft) about this. I’m sure they didn’t even think of it as “tricking” me; that’s my perspective, not theirs.
> He was projecting his motivations onto me, in the same way I had been projecting my motivations onto him. Mutual misunderstanding.
> Most of the fault there is mine (I am a deeply flawed guy)
> But that anger was of course misplaced. If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me: my life, at that point, after all those years, was the direct result of all the decisions I had made over its course, and those decisions involved prioritising art and deprioritising money, again and again. (As Robert Louis Stevenson dryly put it, “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.")
But the reality is that _all_ of the misunderstanding comes from him. There is no "mutual misunderstanding", Mojang understood the conversation perfectly well.
The author asked for an offer, Mojang offered $20k, and the author accepted. It's not reasonable to expect Mojang to "understand" the author is going to hold some grudge about believing they deserve more than the offer they accepted without negotiation.
The correct response from the author would be something along the lines of "I am entirely at fault, all of the misunderstanding was on my side, Mojang/Notch/Carl did nothing wrong".
Instead the author reminds us at every turn about how Notch gave bonuses to all the Mojang employees but not him, how they're such a great guy for not getting lawyers involved, and how they're turning their work into a "priceless gift" (despite being paid $20000 for it).
But at the same time it's pretty clear he was jealous of all the money he didn't want to talk about, and that he saw himself as a partner rather than a contractor.
It is what it is, everyone involved probably learned some form of lesson, and I don't see why we need to create villains or victims in this story.
More fundamentally, it takes two to tango. Just because the perspective of Mojang is the more common one in the industry doesn't make it the more "correct" interpretation. It's very much a two-way street and it's on both parties to make sure they understand each other when things are not explicitly spelled out and agreed upon.
Mojang, at a minimum, paid for a license to use the poem in the game. They wanted to have this on paper because it would make the deal with Microsoft easier, but they would have been right about that fact either way. The author, on the other hand, believes they are in a situation where Microsoft has no right to use the End Poem despite the fact they accepted $20k for it.
I mean, ignore all the stuff about friends, blah blah, Carl has apparently signed them up for whatever the defaults are under (based on other comments) UK IP laws?
”The misunderstanding was all mine.”
> We just didn’t understand each other, because we were playing different language games.
The author collectively places the blame on poor communication from both sides. But the reality is that all of the poor communication was entirely from his side, and he knew in advance he struggled talking about money and had an agent for that very purpose.
There's also this whole weird subsection where he describes things the universe did to him as if he has no agency in his own actions and where he ended up in life.
I'm usually on the writer's side in these kinds of things, but I have to agree. I've played dozens of hours of that game and have never even considered that it might have an end
For what it's worth, this often comes as a surprise even to many German creators who are not aware of this because intuitively if you get paid to create something "for" someone, you sell them your rights to it. But in reality that requires an explicit contract spelling this out. A typical example is professional photographers actually only selling you prints of the photos they take for you, or a design agency not giving you the source files for designs they create for you.
In fact, though now my memory is hazy and so I speculate more wildly, not even most kinds of employment grants copyright to the employer. Exceptions being software developers and teachers, I think.
Of course, because in germany you can not transfer your copyright at all, unless you die. ;)
Without being nitpicky you are still right in the way you meant it: There is no automatic usage right afaik. (And also google results agree: eg https://likvi.de/blog/urheberrecht )
You can however grant an unlimited, transferrable, exclusive license, which for all intents and purposes is like "transferring copyright".
Your nitpick isn't entirely irrelevant though. This is why Germany does not recognize public domain dedications and why CC0 is necessary.
(Though copy rights themselves might also be treated as actual rights, rather than a temporary monopoly, an exception to the normal state of everything being in the public domain that prevails in the common law countries ?)
The author appears to be Irish, but living in Germany.
Notch’s choice to make it hard to skip/speed up the text scrolling suggests that he thought it had disproportionate value.
I don't understand what this guy is complaining about to be honest.
I don't think so? He does say he has had hurt feelings. Do you mean you don't understand why he has hurt feelings?
20k is a very reasonable sum for this kind of gig.
For me he sounds greedy and yes it sounds like he complains (a lot)
At a $15M valuation, the work was worth $20k to them. At a $2.5B valuation, the work was $20k to them.
> And I finally got round to reading the original contract, the one I didn’t sign.
> And… Jesus Christ. It was worse than I’d even imagined. It was horrible.
> 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.
So the fact that he kept the money does say that he agreed to write the piece for that amount of money, but it doesn't say anything about under which terms, and the terms is where they disagree. The money transfer says nothing about what rights do Mojang have over the piece and what rights the writer have over the piece.
It sounds like an awful, muddy mess that would take a great deal of time and money to litigate if the author decided to take that path. Without an explicit contract, even determining which court (and which nation) has jurisdiction for this kind of international transaction sounds like a nightmare.
I agree that in most jurisdictions I have any familiarity with, some kind of contract likely exists for usage of the text, but that is a fundamentally different question from ownership of the text. And I imagine that the text has subsequently been used by Mojang and Microsoft for other purposes, which may or may not be found to be covered by the original agreement.
In short, it's exactly the kind of ambiguity that big corporations hate when it comes to intellectual property.
Microsoft would remove his poem and nobody would read it ever again. He can only lose.
No, because he retained the copyright. If he won against Microsoft he would a) presumably get a lot of money (financial win), b) strike a small blow for the little guy against megacorps (moral win), and c) still be able to release the poem as CC0 or whatever he wanted (win).
Ah, if only we were paid proportionate to how hard we worked. Stay-at-home moms and janitors would be billionaires.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-gbacsUKpc
P.S.: I am a father that works remote from home. My girlfriend is a stay-at-home mom. Our daughter spends most time at school. Honestly, my girlfriend has a pretty relaxed life. I take care of the money and we got a small house, so cleaning the house really takes little time (I even help in weekends vacuum cleaning and evenings doing dishes). In daytime she has many hours to spend as she sees fit. And in evenings often as well.
Just gonna say it, the game was better without the rushed ending anyway and the amount it sold before it had one is testament to that.
Which is super interesting! The most successful game dev of all time was only 20% actual game devs. As if it's not about making the game but about everything else (comms, community engagement)
This might help talking about fairness when in fact MP3 build the foundation of streaming music. ;)
Same goes for iPad silhouette girl: contract work, nothing else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_advertising
Or the nike logo, or...
It is hard. There won't be so many George Lucas opportunities: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/george-l...
That's why I think MS did not need to pay him off; they thought they had a license, even if they didn't own the IP. And that's also why it's totally legit for him to republish his own work under a free license.
Where do you see that? I went back and re-read the section and it still seems to say that the negotiations failed and no agreement was reached.
I don't think that's a contract. We need an offer and acceptance (and consideration). More broadly we also need adequate specificity to determine the essential terms.
Here there were two essential terms: 1) the author would write a poem for use in Minecraft, and 2) Minecraft would pay consideration.
Stepping through the rounds:
1. ... skip prior rounds ... 2. Minecraft demands that Julian accept Minecraft's first offer. [This is not an offer because it does not specify the essential term, consideration.] 3. Julian agrees to accept Minecraft's first offer. [This is also not an offer, because they still have not indicated what the consideration will be.] 4. Minecraft offers $20,0000 in exchange for the poem. [This is the first offer.] 5. Julian refuses to sign. [This is a rejection of the offer.]
At some point, contract or not, he agreed to take the money and do the work.
However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement.
> So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending
Did the twenty-five staff put in 5x or 6x the work? It seems likely. I understand that to some the end story may be deemed to be essential to the experience and talent was required to write this story - but that attitude just undermines the hard work of everyone else involved. Who knows how much effort those staff members poured into perfecting things that were essential to the experience that made Minecraft?
> Bear in mind, here we were a couple of weeks before the official launch, and Minecraft was already a phenomenon: in its unfinished state, it had already sold five or six million copies, in beta, at $15 a copy. So it was, at that point, already a hundred-million-dollar game, but with no ending
It certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff.