The terms seem pretty generous, though, a completely clean buyout with no requirement that the principals stay for even a little bit.

Now we're starting to talk about mods or being able to write mods for Minecraft some day. As this young, enthusiastic population of users grows up, they will have a lot of buying power and interest in things like the customizations and programming aspects of the game.

It is also a thrill for me, as a parent, to be able to see their young imaginations manifest in a 3D space which I can explore and interact with.

They're missing a huge market... children's birthday party crap.

Stock wouldn't be bad though.

I think it doesn't matter that much. Microsoft stock is notoriously stable for tech stocks, so the difference between an all cash deal and an all stock deal wouldn't be too big after, say, a year or something.

Notch also probably wasn't too pressured to make the sale, so the terms would be understandably in his favor.

If an opportunity to re-invest came along in that window then you'd miss out, microsoft stock is relatively stable but has seen both 'up', 'down' and 'neutral' years where up and down were on the order of 20 to 30%.

On top of that, cash is king, simply put: there is absolutely no uncertainty at all.

Given the option between x in cash and x in stock or a mix or stock and cash you should always go for the cash.

And something a bit less than x is probably still preferable in cash.

I want to do business against you. :P

2009 was only 5 years ago. Money markets nearly crashed, banks went bankrupt, the Fed printed enormous amounts of money, and BTC was invented. With $2.5 billion on the table, I'd first hire a team of lawyers and accountants, and maybe some lobbyists too... then I'd let MS know how I want to receive the rest of the money.

Because currency values don't fluctuate at all...

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EURUSD=X

Centi can designate 100 of something or one-hundredth of something.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centi-

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centimillionaire

http://www.forbes.com/sites/calebmelby/2012/11/12/breaking-d...

"One centillion is a number, which is equal to either 10^303 or 10^600, depending on the system used."

Principles were already gone. Notch never really worked on the game anymore. He stayed around because they wanted him to.

I don't think there's the revenue growth potential in Minecraft like there is in Instagram. On the other hand, Mojang made $330 million in revenue and $129 million in profit last year. They can probably hold on to those margins because their sales system doesn't share revenues with retailers or distributors (or Valve, Google, or Apple for that matter).

The interesting question is whether Minecraft has legs to continue selling for ten or twenty more years. I think it might. I know lots of parents that don't let their kids play video games except for Minecraft. When I pick my kids up from school, I always see a handful of kids wearing Minecraft shirts and carrying Minecraft lunch boxes. It could become like Lego--a toy that's viewed as educational and beneficial by parents.

If I was Microsoft, I'd do two things: First, I'd work on performance and clean up the presentation a bit, especially on the loading screens and menus. Second, I'd roll out a service to make it easy for parents to set up a locked-down server for their kids. You wouldn't believe the number of parents who have asked me for help in setting up a Minecraft server for their kid and his/her friends. I finally stopped showing them because it's too complicated for them to keep running. A service that cost $4.95/month and was reputable, simple, and secure could make a killing.

The margin is interesting, because Mojang supposedly paid Notch personally another ~$129m in licensing fees.

If he has managed to sell the company and will still collect such large licensing fees, he's laughing all the way to the bank. If he sells whatever rights he is licensing to Mojang/Microsoft first, however, then their margin will leap up as their expenses are, in reality, a lot less than they seem due to this arrangement.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-03-19-mojang-made...

I do agree about improving performance and presentation within the game though. My understanding is that there is a lot of room for improvement.

1:https://minecraft.net/realms

edit: downvoted already, new record.

At least I didn't suggest that Microsoft would now have to re-write minecraft in C# rather than in the Java that they love so much there.

With all due respect, I don't find it particularly relevant what one guy said 6 years ago. I don't care whether he created HN or not. He's no longer an active participant.

I'm not!

I reserve downvotes for rudeness and demonstrably wrong/misleading comments.

Personally, I use upvotes to reward new knowledge or an interesting argument in a comment, I don't upvote every comment I agree with, and downvote only if the comment is offensive.

I believe this to be a mythology that "everyone knows is true" although it isn't.

For similar examples, MMORPG players are all 13 year old boys, FPS players in general are all 13 year old boys, there is a perfect 1:1 mapping between WWII FPS and gaming in general...

I'll admit in public to relax I'll log in with my son and we'll work on the big base and rail system. Better than watching TV together. I find rail work to be relaxing exactly like working on a model railroad (obviously you need railcraft mod for this). I like building vast chemical refineries, like a fully automated system where you dump ore blocks in one side, all mixed together, and via AE and IC2 and compactsolars and all that, ingots of metal eventually plop out the other end. I also like multifarming and setting up automated ethanol plants.

From talking to other parents its very fight club where the first rule is we don't talk about it. Kind of like how legos seem to get played with by dad as much as kids, unofficially, although its a kids toy. Like many I have tried to sneak a lego imperial star destroyer past the wife "for the kids", unsuccessfully. Lego seems very expensive compared to when I was a kid...

Well, yes, I'd expect parents and teachers to talk largely about < 16 year olds.

Of course this is all anecdotal.

It's a small sample size, but I think Minecraft is destined to be a kids' game with a minority of adult enthusiasts. (That's not necessarily bad--Lego and Pokemon fit that description, too.)

If MS can nurture the hackers and enable them to create and maybe even monetize their hacks, then it should be possible to keep a core set of fans well into adulthood.

[1] http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/

If they have a solid idea of how they want to use the IP, it makes sense. It also comes with a massive risk though - it will be very easy for them to "be the guys who ruined Minecraft".

I imagine it will need to be something like "stay very hands-off for a significant amount of time to prove that they didnt in fact ruin it" followed by some way of turning it into a link in and value add for their existing products rather than something that they sell expansions/new stand-alones for.

Something like Minecraft being the Tetris/Solitaire of the 2010s or so? It comes pre-loaded with their OS's, create a great experience on surface tablets etc, trying to turn it into "the new Microsoft gives you cool stuff and makes it open for everyone" to position Microsoft as the open alternative to the more closed environments of Google and Apple?

I dont see how the purchase makes sense from a money-making point of view today - the Mojang crew hasn't proven they can do repeated success with new IPs, but I could totally see it making sense from a holistic point of view - successful integration of Minecraft in the Microsoft universe could add significant value to Microsoft as a whole.

Even if they do nothing else.

Minecraft makes a crazy amount of revenue at present without very much effort being put into monetization. If MS did nothing other than to offer paid high quality hosting and other basic features they'd bring in even more revenue. If they developed the game more thoroughly, came out with a sequel, more merch, etc, they'd be rolling in cash.

The most popular version of Minecraft in terms of raw sales is the Pocket Edition which is Android and iOS only, so I suspect MS is seeing an opportunity there.

Repeating the success of minecraft is nigh impossible, it was the confluence of several factors at the right place and the right time. The best that can be hoped for is good stewardship of the minecraft community and client. Unfortunately this isn't the way microsoft thinks about games or products(see halo), expect a Minecraft 2: Creepers Return, Minecraft 3: the Blockening, etc... They didn't spend 2.5 Billion to steward a community.

How long before they port it to C#?

They won't. They'll just take the C++ ports that already exist (Xbox, mobile) and port that to desktops. Or rewrite the whole thing in C++. While C# is MS' baby, it makes no sense to write a 3D game in it (and for everyone who thinks Unity is C# - it isn't - Mono is just used for scripting).

There is quite good reasons not to do everything in C++ if game designers are involved. Unity uses C# for scripting; only the inner graphics engine need be native.

On the contrary, Minecraft is very heavy on the CPU and would benefit from running on native code rather than a managed bytecode based virtual machine environment.

It isn't heavy duty graphics, so you don't need a super strong GPU (it's still quite heavy), but Minecraft is very CPU and memory intensive. Graphics can be fast regardless of the programming language if you unload things to the GPU, but Minecraft requires a lot of CPU side work to prepare the voxel graphics (ie. building GPU vertex buffers, etc from the voxel octree in CPU/main memory).

There are huge potential performance benefits of rewriting it in native code. I don't think that will happen, though.

Here's a recent interesting article about optimizing visibility and minimizing overdraw, in particular for mobile "chunker" (aka. "tile deferred") GPUs. In the end it improves performance but at the cost of even more CPU work.

http://tomcc.github.io/2014/08/31/visibility-1.html

Moving to C++ is always a PITA, I hope this isn't an optimization made so early, especially when there are other things to do.

You use scripting languages to save dev time - Microsoft can just throw more devs at it. They spent 2.5 billion on it - labour is cheap at that scale...

There is a reason why kids prefer lego batman and lego starwars to real batman and starwars.

There is no way Microsoft will let it run like that. They bought it because they have plans for it and those plans will likely collide with the interests of the community. Microsoft is big in the gaming console business and struggling in the mobile market. It seems likely that they'll try to use Minecraft to push those markets.

Even if they won't do it immediately I suspect that they'll eventually make Minecraft exclusive to Xbox and mobile. Meanwhile they'll drop or decrease support for systems they don't like, like GNU/Linux, Playstations, etc. Maybe this will be part of a rewrite or a new huge upgrade (which I guess we can call "Downloadable Content" or whatever it is called in the XBox universe from now on).

And Microsoft will put their game guys in charge of it. And those guys speak a different language than Mojang. They don't care about indie and close community. They care about downloadable content and making new sellable releases every 12-24 month.

I have. Granted it was around 5 years ago so things have probably changed, but it was around the time they were launching the XBox arcade dev kit and they seemed very genuinely interested in indie dev and supporting communities.

Meat Boy certainly seemed to come about in that kind of positive environment.

Not saying that I'm 100% confident that MS won't mess up Minecraft. I've never played it, but have always enjoyed following Notch and his epic trip with Minecraft as I was once a starry eyed indie game dev. I also have a young child who I know will be into it. Everything I've read seems like Minecraft totally failed to learn from id software and valve when it comes to modding. And still Minecraft mods are massive.

It blows my mind. It also makes me think that MS would have to try REALLY REALLY hard to mess it up. If Minecraft has been a success with all the hurdles so far, I figure it is basically an unstoppable cultural entity now.

I have played it but I'm not really a Minecraft person myself. However as far as I know the modding situation isn't that bad because the Minecraft jar can be easily decompiled. The problem is only the lack of a stable API (which seems to be in development though) which means updates can break mods and other mods can break mods. There also doesn't seem to be an official loader or mod list. Thus people are forced to deal with obscure websites and obscure mod makers.

Mojang is not putting any artificial hurdles in the way of modding. Something which I highly doubt would have ever been possible if it had been a Microsoft company.

>There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC/Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android

> How long before they port it to C#?

I beat you there by a while :)

You mean Minecraft.NET Pro?

I take it that is in the hypothetical sense or are you capable of closing $2.5 B deals by your lonesome?

> Microsoft - Mojang deal will do more to get people into (games) programming than a million $ adspend by codecademy would

Definitely. And it will get more developers into the MS ecosystem than any Microsoft Certification tests would.