$250,000-a-day Minecraft strikes indie game gold

Having picked it up a few weeks ago, the game is an odd blend of open-ended creative sandbox, epic-scale exploration and survival horror. It taps into that feeling of opening up a bin of Lego and not having a specific model instruction booklet. Its feature-set is still very fluid. Yet it seems to out-do Civilization's "one more turn". This is a game where if you picked it up tonight at 7PM and started out, you'd hear your alarm clock going off in another room as morning rolls in.<p>The game has essentially gone viral at this point. Multiple webcomics are covering it. There's decent coverage on social news sites. Industry rags have picked it up. Industry veterans (I have a friend at Disney Interactive, and another at BioWare) have absolutely taken notice, Valve in particular. Some review sites are seriously considering it as their "game of the year" candidate. This weekend the website (and authentication service) collapsed under load. With some outside help it's up and fine after some refactoring and offloading things to S3. Today he cracked 25,000 unit sales for the day, or about $340K USD in gross revenue.<p>Yes, he. Until very recently, it was basically a one-man show. There's a few dedicated folks coming on board now, but that's what's humbling. Today, Markus eclipsed my day's compensation in just 88 seconds.

Minecraft has been a huge success, but $250,000-a-day is a little misleading. The site was down for the last few days due to mentions from Penny Arcade and elsewhere (PA ran two comics on Minecraft, which is insane exposure to a huge gaming audience). Notch turned the downtime into a free-to-play period, but you couldn't <i>buy</i> Minecraft while things were down. The $250k/day number actually represents a few days of sales pressure, but it's still awfully impressive...

I spent 12 years waiting for Starcraft II. I bought the collectors edition. I played to Diamond rank and beyond. But the day I started Minecraft was the last day I played Starcraft II.<p>This game is really good.

I attended MinecraftCon 2010 in Bellevue back in August.<p><a href="http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/08/31/wherein_bbot_gets_rained_on_with_nerds/" rel="nofollow">http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/08/31/wherein_bbot_gets_r...</a><p>It was scheduled maybe a month ahead of time, and <i>located</i> days ahead of time, and <i>held</i> in the middle of a field, in the rain; and still a about hundred people showed up. Just to see Markus.<p>Minecraft fans are dedicated, I'll give them that.

A few minecraft related comics:<p><a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/17/" rel="nofollow">http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/17/</a><p><a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/20/" rel="nofollow">http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/20/</a><p><a href="http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=292" rel="nofollow">http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=292</a>

The initial game with the day cycle and the monsters coming out at night is genius. Really taps into a primal light-and-shelter instinct. Also the light management with cave exploration is great.<p>However, once I figured out a wooden shack with a door built in a couple of minutes completely thwarts the AI enemies, I lost most interest. The setup is player against the world, but the world doesn't know how to do anything you'd need a huge stone castle or a massive trapped dungeon to fight against, so the great build system feels a bit pointless now.<p>Got to hand it to the author for making excellent core mechanics from a very simple set of ingredients. I hope he can keep up working on the style and figure out enemy mechanics you actually need serious constructions to fight against.

Here's something that illustrates the sort of thing you can do in this game: a 12x5 LED display built in-game[1]. Reminded me of the Dwarf Fortress Computer[2].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&#38;t=24213" rel="nofollow">http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&#38;t=24213</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.geekosystem.com/dwarf-fortress-turing-machine-computer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.geekosystem.com/dwarf-fortress-turing-machine-com...</a>

"Perrson cites games such as Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper and Inifiniminer among key influences on Minecraft's anything-goes nature and blocky 8-bit style."<p>Blocky 8-bit style? Those graphics would have been cutting edge in 1993, almost a decade after the heyday of 8-bit systems.

Of note: Notch seems to be a regular in the LD48 (<a href="http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/</a>) competitions. (<a href="http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/notch/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/notch/</a>)<p>I'm, um, an irregular. (Entered twice, finished once.)<p>Here's his screen-capture timelapse for the last one, which was a bit over a month ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629810" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629810</a>

Holy. Shitballs.<p>My hat's off to this man. Perhaps the thing I envy most here is the fact that this guy's achieved this doing what he loves. According to his personal page, he's been building games for many, many years, and has entered dozens of small competitions. He seems to genuinely love building games, and would almost certainly continue doing it regardless of money.

A word of warning: Highly addictive, and not in a good way.

I really hope the fellow behind Dwarf Fortress sees this success and starts charging a small amount for his releases.<p>I think the following DF has (despite its rough state) would provide impressive revenue and allow him to bring on employees to help build his game while earning him a comfortable living.

It really does feel like Minecraft has made a new genre of game here, something that genuinely deserves the name "sandbox" because other than the bedrock way down below every single piece of the world can be dug up and manipulated.<p>It manages to tweak every single one of my addicting-game buttons, and even if no new features get added I'd happily rate it my Indie Game of the Year or possibly even Game of the Year.

So, uh.... anyone for an HN SMP server?

Can someone explain the appeal? I normally enjoy indie games with low-end graphics like Dwarf Fortress or Adom.<p>My first impression as I logged into a server was a giant landscape of multicolored blocks devoid of any meaning whatsoever. There was no survival horror element I could make out in 30 minutes of playing.<p>I decided to try building something only to be bored of drawing something block by block, like being a pixel artist that had to waste 10 seconds every time you wanted to zoom out. Then I tried following someone around who was also not doing anything interesting. I attempted to dig a bottomless pit under him until he presumably logged off, and at that point I also logged off due to boredom.

Looking for a comment that has "is Sims for men and hackers" in it.

I think it is inaccurate when it says "sales grew to over 6,000 a day during this period." The sales when the Paypal account was locked HAD to have been ~$44k/day (or around 4,700 sales per day after taking fees imposed into consideration) as he said he had around $800,000 (USD) on September 10th (starting around the week of August 22nd).

I just paid $13 and discovered the 'classic' game has been suspended?<p>I downloaded the alpha and it's....pretty basic. I understand that it's just an alpha and shouldn't expect anything fantastic, which is fine.<p>But I'm unable to play the game (I think, unless I've overlooked something). Any ideas?

Great idea. Kudos to the creator. I've heard about the game few weeks back, but assumed it is some sort of a viral copy of a Starcraft hack. Also C64 graphics &#62; New "photo realistic" games...

After reading it is written in Java, I remembered Yegge's Wyvern and how he wished he had written it in Python or something.<p>I wonder how many lines of code this is...

My only worry is that the newly rich author won't work on this fantastic project anymore.