I love Minecraft, it is genius, original and tons of fun, but you need at least two points to draw a line, one hit does not a trend make.<p>The game world is littered with 'one hit wonders' but it is very hard to repeat that success, doubly so on the scale of Minecraft.<p>For those that say Mojang is somehow unique, that Notch is the messiah of indy gaming, all I can say is survivor bias. The game industry is chock full of brilliant, passionate peeps who build really original games that just fail to spark the imagination of a large audience for one reason or another.<p>Hope the best for Mojang and co, love their work on Minecraft and hope they can follow it up with something just as unique, but this article is making some big leaps.
Surely this depends on if they can continue to produce smash hits like minecraft.<p>While I love the idea of 0x10c I don't know if it will replicate the success.<p>It's something I find it hard to explain to people who don't understand things like programming and emulators. It could just be too hard to have the sort of mass appeal that minecraft did.
<i>It takes 3,000 employees for Zynga Inc., ZNGA -0.38% the largest social-network game company in the world, to generate at least $150 million in annual operating profit.<p>From an office in Stockholm, a largely unknown company brought in more than half that sum. Its employee count: 29.</i><p>Ugh, this type of statement does a massive desservice to the programming service provider industry.
I just finished talking with a colleague whose six year old loves minecraft and I remember talking with a twelve year old who was similarly obsessed - to the point of knowing the patch numbers and all the details. The community which grew organically around this game is incredible, and that kind of peer-to-peer promotion is priceless.
For the people who criticize Minecraft as an underwhelming gaming experience, you need to look at the game from a different perspective...<p>For a young child, this game has a tremendous lure... it's very simple to visually take in. All of the objects you build with bricks are abstract representations of real life things. For a child, visualizing a castle in minecraft is much easier to process than showing them one in a Lord of the Rings movie.<p>The other thing is that there's really no rules. You can pretty much do whatever you want... build stuff, explore, play the actual campaign, fight bad guys, etc. This is the exact opposite of the 'cinematic' experience most other games try to create. Kids will bec creating their own storyline in their minds.<p>Minecraft is the ultimate game of imagination and kids will eat it up like candy. This is why it's made so much money and has become a cultural phenomenon.
Minecraft isn't WoW (that's a good thing). WoW is pretty much aggressively targeted to make large amounts of money, which is why they're valued so high. Mojang seem to want to make things that are cool and fun, more than they want to set up large subscription bases, add on packs and so on. Could Mojang become a billion dollar company? Sure, maybe. Anything can happen. Is it a good comparison between them and Blizzard? I'd say no, they seem to have distinctly different goals.<p>You know what's cool, being a company that is happy making things rather than being a billion dollar company and dealing with the headaches of stock price related soothsaying.
For those having trouble getting past the paywall:
<a href="http://wsjwap.mo2do.net/s/4150/388?articleId=SB10001424127887323807004578282142065371984&fullStory=fullStory" rel="nofollow">http://wsjwap.mo2do.net/s/4150/388?articleId=SB1000142412788...</a>
This link works: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323807004578282142065371984.html" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732380700457828...</a>
> Sales occur digitally rather than through brick-and-mortar stores ...<p>This isn't true. I bought the Minecraft (activation card) for my son through Walmart.
I think one real lesson here is that super-shiny high end graphics are not what counts. The gameplay is by far the most important ingredient in any game's success.<p>More than ten years ago back when I playing Counter-Strike (CS still being immensively succesful btw) I was using a "low poly" mod: this would replace the models of the players with models made of fewer polygons (the head became a cube, etc.) because it would give me a faster framerate.<p>And the shitty graphics didn't matter: the important thing was the gameplay.<p>If you can have both great gameplay, great graphics and great perfs, go for it.<p>But if you have to choose and want to get succesful: cut down the graphics budget. That's not what's going to make your game succesful.
It just goes to show that social proof is extremely powerful. 1. Create a really crap game that's not really a game.
2. Create a site with a bullshit stats page showing how many geeks are supposedly buying it and how fast.
3. Spam about it on geeky sites.
4. Watch all the geeks throw money at you as they try to prove that they are geeky enough by buying a sandbox game that they "totally get."
Mojang, I salute you.