Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft

For people without children, here are some quick notes on the situation in kiddieland:<p>- My son is 7. We bought iPad edition first, shelled some more for PC edition last month, and I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;ll be forced to buy more in the future if MS puts a price tag on it.<p>- I spend a fair amount of time during weekends for deciphering the modding world, trying to find something called CraftBukkit, learning to mod, finding launchers, finding maps shown on some Youtube video etc. because the son is mad about it. BUT, he&#x27;s spending hours trying to learn JS (ScriptCraft on Bukkit) just to make an exploding arrow. I truly believe this is analogous to C64 days back then.<p>- School started today, he&#x27;s moved to another school this year. The first thing he asked to his news friends was about Minecraft. Then he advertised how PC version is superior to the one on iPad.<p>- My 2 yo daughter knows what Minecraft is, tells she&#x27;ll play Minecraft when she grows up.<p>- While we were shopping for school supplies last week, saw two people asking for Minecraft licensed school bags for their kids.<p>- We live in Turkey.

That&#x27;s 2.5 Instagrams, or 0.33 Nokias. What do you feel, realistic, too much, too little?<p>Personally I feel this makes (much) more sense than instagram, these guys have a very loyal following, a tremendously strong product and actually make money.<p>Congratulations to everybody on the selling side in this deal, too bad it had to be Microsoft but with amounts like that there are not too many companies on the acquiring side.<p>Does anyone know if this was stock &#x2F; cash &#x2F; a mix?<p>edit: this Microsoft - Mojang deal will do more to get people into (games) programming than a million $ adspend by codecademy would<p>edit2: right now (16:43 my time) microjang.com is still free<p>Wonder how long it will take before that is a registered domain.<p>edit: microjang.com is now no longer free.<p><pre><code> Registrant: Microjang Development (DR is US) PO Box 100439 NY, NY 10163-4668 US (UNITED STATES)</code></pre>

There goes all hope of Minecraft being released as open source.<p>There was a blog post from several years ago from Notch saying that after he made enough money with the game, he would &quot;probably clean it up and release it as open source&quot;. Oh well.<p>Instead now we have the DMCA-infighting and an atrocious modding community that hosts their binaries on shady file upload sites, their &quot;project page&quot; in a forum thread, make their measly money from adfly-like sites and have never heard of Github.<p>So much wasted potential. Anyhow, congratulations Microsoft.

I have been trying to understand why Microsoft would buy Minecraft. Even though Minecraft is really important, and wildly successful, but the price tag for a game studio with one successful game is rather odd, considering it is unlikely Minecraft will sell millions of copies more (it is already the most sold game ever made). This is a long shot, but it may explain it:<p>If Microsoft is trying to build its own Steam competitor (which given Valve&#x27;s current strategy to make Linux an alternative gaming platform to Windows, makes sense), then Minecraft is the perfect acquisition to start it up, for a number of reasons. It is the best selling video game of all time, with over 15 million copies sold for the PC (54 million copies across all platforms), and it has over 100 million accounts registered. It is possibly the only successful indie game that has never integrated with Steam, and that has a very young userbase (based on my experience) which, given their ages, probably isn&#x27;t part of Steam&#x27;s userbase. All of these aspects make it a great strategic acquisition if Microsoft wants to make a new and successful game marketplace and platform for Windows.<p>Anyone else has any other idea why the 2.5 billion price tag?

Very peculiar seeing this news after Notch was so critical of the OculusVR sale to Facebook.<p>Seeing as I bought my premium Minecraft account on 8&#x2F;1&#x2F;2010, I must be due some sort of equity for supporting him at such an early stage.<p>edit: Oh, and what do you think will become of the old alpha&#x2F;beta&#x2F;release builds? I&#x27;m thinking about going ahead and archiving them all in case access to them is revoked. Not sure if I&#x27;m being too paranoid, but I much preferred the simpler versions without all the distractions like XP, hunger, and those weird tall black guys.

&gt; He’s decided that he doesn’t want the responsibility of owning a company of such global significance<p>&gt; The founders: Notch, Carl, and Jakob are leaving<p>Yeah, that&#x27;s exactly what I suspected when the rumors started. Markus doesn&#x27;t really want to run a company, so he&#x27;s cashing out and doing his own thing. Good on him.

I could see this being a huge play for young developers by Microsoft. They have been positioning themselves as a platform agnostic services provider, investing in or purchasing cross platform development frameworks, and opensourcing a lot of their technologies (e.g. C#, .NET, Rosetta, OWIN). Now all they need are developers to adopt their technologies.<p>Minecraft has a huge modding community and a lot of first time coders are getting into the scene because they love Minecraft. Imagine Microsoft ports Minecraft to C# or possibly C while maintaining full support for all existing platforms. Then go about developing a great API&#x2F;SDK for modders and making it incredibly easy for anyone to download Visual Studio and the Minecraft SDK.<p>They just introduced an entire generation of developers to MS technology.

I&#x27;m trying, but I just don&#x27;t see any good coming of this. The comments from Mojang seem incredibly naive, everything is going to change.<p>First people to make money on this will be lawyers. There&#x27;s going to be a blizzard of copyright takedown notices going out to every unlicensed (most all) Minecraft merchandise and spinoffs. The offline fan ecosystem is going to get slaughtered.<p>Mostly I&#x27;m just sad for all the kids. They love Minecraft, and this won&#x27;t end well.

I think this just demonstrates the power of the internet&#x2F;social networks and an increasingly interconnected world.<p>Notch creates a small game on his own, improving on Infiniminer, it catches the imagination of an entire generation. Without the internet and social networks this would have never happened. Without this game having a multiplayer mode added (which happened fairly early on) it wouldn&#x27;t have happened. I wonder what it would be like it Doom was first released into a similar environment but maybe it&#x27;s a little less universal.<p>People in their bedrooms recording themselves playing video games speak as loudly, or more loudly than traditional media. PewDiePie has 30 million subscribers - he can make any game just with a mention.<p>It&#x27;s interesting now our networks are concentrating and distributing influence, power and wealth. Nothing I could have predicted and I&#x27;ll enjoy seeing what comes next.

Be interesting to see how MS deal with YouTubers.<p>Shutting down Etho, Yogscast, etc is likely to lead to hordes of 13 year olds <i>hating</i> MS for ever.<p>Maybe there&#x27;ll be an MVP programme for YouTubers? &lt;&#x2F;s&gt;<p>I just hope MS can sort out modding: a sane mod interface would make many people very happy.

That Mojang is worth 62.5% of Star Wars is a testament both to Minecraft&#x27;s value and how much Lucas destroyed Star Wars in the last 20 years.

&gt; There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC&#x2F;Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android versions of Minecraft to stop. Of course, Microsoft can’t make decisions for other companies or predict the choices that they might make in the future.<p>Linux is absent, but I wonder if they lump that in with &quot;PC&quot;.

I&#x27;d feel much better if they would clarify the term PC. As a long time Linux user and Minecraft fan; I&#x27;d hope the Linux client continues to thrive similar to the way the Skype client has after the Microsoft acquisition. The fact that the list uses the term PC instead of spelling out &quot;Windows,Linux,etc.&quot; worries me some.

Holy crap, 2.5 BILLION? And on top of that Notch and Jakob (and Carl) are leaving? I understand Notch&#x27;s decision (as he has been doing his own thing), but I did not imagine Jakob or Carl leaving.

Seems to me like the most sensible tech purchase in a while, PE ratio is a bit more normal and it has massive and sustained traction amongst young people. It remains to be seem if M$FT will fuck it up, but that&#x27;s a different question.

The thing I can&#x27;t wait to see is how Microsoft intends to recoup the cost in FY2015 like they say they will. From what I read Mojang only made ~$300 million off Minecraft last year, so where is the other $2.2 billion going to come from in the next 9 months? I will be surprised if there isn&#x27;t a big write-down on this purchase come July.

Worse kept secret ever.Good for Notch and everyone else though, a well-deserved cash out and completely understandable. Notch never striked me as a guy who wanted to run a big company like Mojang in the first place.

&gt;What about the other editions of Minecraft? Will they stop being developed?<p>&gt;There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC&#x2F;Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android versions of Minecraft to stop.<p>So what is happening to the Linux edition that has been fully supported since day 1?

One of the things you need to understand about these deals, and deals like it (Nokia), is that Microsoft is using trapped overseas cash to make these acquisitions.<p>(If they repatriated this cash to the US instead they would lose something like 40% of it to taxes)<p>Its a good time to be a foreign (to the US) company.

TL;DR: We don&#x27;t know Microsoft&#x27;s plans. But don&#x27;t worry, everything will be fine.<p>Yeah, right. It&#x27;s MS we are talking about. MS don&#x27;t even hide their mindset here:<p><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/sept14/09-15news.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;news&#x2F;press&#x2F;2014&#x2F;sept14&#x2F;09-15n...</a><p><i>&gt; Minecraft fans are loyal, with nearly 90 percent of paid customers on the PC having signed in within the past 12 months.</i><p>That&#x27;s MS for you. DRM to be expected.

&gt; Microsoft acquired Mojang for a smooth 2.5 BILLION dollars.<p>Impressive.<p>I hope that Microsoft won&#x27;t disrupt Minecraft&#x27;s development (e.g. like they did with Skype, making Linux a third-rate platform - which should not happen since Minecraft&#x27;s coded in Java).

With $2.5 billion, you could buy 3 blocks of gold:<p><a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+cubic+meter+of+gold" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input&#x2F;?i=1+cubic+meter+of+gold</a> == $765 million.

One thing that needs some explanation is the fact that because Minecraft predates Mojang, at one point Mojang was only licensing the Minecraft trademark from Notch (even though Notch was the majority owner of Mojang). (If you look at the bottom of minecraft.net you will see: &quot;Mojang © 2009-2014. &quot;Minecraft&quot; is a trademark of Notch Development AB&quot;)<p>I hope that MS&#x27;s lawyers were smart enough to make sure they were actually buying Minecraft and not just a license...

$2.5 billion and the founders get to walk. That is impressive. No golden handcuffs.

Coming soon, Minecraft 2.0! Exclusive to Xbox One.

Well, this will be an interesting ride. At least now Notch will have enough time and money to fund that Psychonauts sequel!

A copy of the blog post if the site is down: <a href="https://archive.today/TbJQh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;TbJQh</a><p>Xbox announcement: <a href="http://news.xbox.com/2014/09/games-minecraft-to-join-microsoft" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.xbox.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;games-minecraft-to-join-microso...</a>

Notch went from having trouble with Paypal over a poultry $750k to being a Billionaire. That&#x27;s awesome.

Well, there goes a ton of support for the current Forge-related modding community.<p>&quot;Take care everybody. rm -rf .minecraft MS free for 20 years. Not starting now!&quot; <a href="https://twitter.com/minecraftcpw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;minecraftcpw</a>

He&#x27;s a bit disingenuous.<p>Don&#x27;t care about the money at all? Open-source it and let it thrive.<p>Care about the money a bit, but really want the game to survive? Want the community to have faith in its future? Sell it to Valve for $25m or something on the condition that an API gets built. If it&#x27;s worth a fraction of its sell price, Valve would have jumped on it.<p>But instead, it got sold to a company devoted to closed source software and killing its game purchases. And Notch got a fat check for it.<p>Listen, I can&#x27;t judge him, and I won&#x27;t. The game is great, and he built it. But every action in this says it&#x27;s about money, while none of it shows a care for the game. We&#x27;ll see how it pans out, but history tells us to be suspicious.

I can&#x27;t see this being a good thing for anyone that cares about Minecraft at all. I wonder how long it&#x27;ll be before:<p>1) The older Minecraft binaries suddenly become unavailable for download which will effectively kill many launchers, mods and modpacks<p>1a) Microsoft aggressively uses DMCA notices to kill off the modding community when the modding community tries to work around #1 by hosting the binaries themselves<p>2) Microsoft adds unnecessary integration with the win32 API via JNI to Minecraft in order to make it Windows-only despite the fact Minecraft is written in Java<p>2a) More aggressive DMCA usage to kill off the community attempting to work-around #2<p>Those are just off the top of my head but I&#x27;m sure I can come up with more not too far-fetched scenarios.

I think the most significant part is that the founders at Mojang are leaving:<p>&gt; The founders: Notch, Carl, and Jakob are leaving. We don’t know what they’re planning. It won’t be Minecraft-related but it will probably be cool.

They&#x27;ll probably create a market. Right now mods&#x2F;skins are for the most part being given away for free. I think the obvious thing to do is allow mod creators to sell at a profit if they wish.

Is this the first product Microsoft will own that&#x27;s written in Java? They support it on Azure but I&#x27;m not aware of them selling a software product that&#x27;s based on Java.

Ran some math with friends. Minecraft is from 2009, so it&#x27;s 5 years old. <a href="https://minecraft.net/stats" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;minecraft.net&#x2F;stats</a> says it&#x27;s sold ~16M pc and mac copies and the front page says at $27. That&#x27;s about $432M in its entire life [assuming everyone paid full price, which they didn&#x27;t, there have been loads of deals over the years]. Now that doesn&#x27;t take into account mobile and console. For android the $7 pocket version is reporting 5M which is $35M. I don&#x27;t have numbers for iOS and console but I can&#x27;t really imagine they come close to PC and Mac. And as my friend reminded &quot;Well I&#x27;m one if those 5m and I paid $0.10 [for the android version]&quot;<p>I have a hard time understanding where they get the $2.5B valuation considering its revenues. Another friend thought advertising: &quot; heck, even brand recognition - if they put &quot;Microsoft Minecraft&quot; on the title, I&#x27;m sure that&#x27;s comparable to a few superbowl ads &amp;tc&quot;<p>So we ran that math.<p>&quot;the average cost of a 30-second advertisement was around $4 million&quot; - wikipedia [ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_advertising" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Super_Bowl_advertising</a> ] &quot;Super Bowl XLV, played in 2011, became the most-watched American television program in history with an average audience of 111 million viewers &quot; - wikipedia. 16.7M people have bought minecraft [mincraft.com&#x2F;stats pc and mac] + 5M for android. That&#x27;s still a fraction of a super bowl ad (like 16%) or ~$670,000 value in super bowl advertising terms. Except I suspect anyone actually in advertising would say the value of a finely crafted 30 second video advert massively beats your company name under a game title.<p>Regardless of quibbles, the advertising potential seems off by many orders of magnitude. also as was mentioned: &quot;Is brand recognition something ms has a problem with?&quot;<p>So where is the $2.5B coming from? Especially when the gamesutra article [ <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/225611/Minecraft_studio_Mojang_has_been_bought_by_Microsoft_for_25B.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamasutra.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;news&#x2F;225611&#x2F;Minecraft_studio_M...</a> ] has them saying they think they can recoup the full value in 1 year!

Personal statement by notch - <a href="http://notch.net/2014/09/im-leaving-mojang/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notch.net&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;im-leaving-mojang&#x2F;</a>

Mojang&#x27;s new roadmap starting next sprint -<p>Minecraft kart racer, brawler, side scroller, kinect game, store.minecraft, themed COD maps, Forza tracks, minecraft 2 pre-order beta access

No one has mentioned merch or licensing yet here.<p>I would offer an educated guess that Minecraft is&#x2F;was the single most valuable indie game IP outside of actual game sales.

I like this quote from Gruber:<p>&quot;It’s almost impossible to overstate just how big a deal Minecraft is for my son and his friends.&quot; [1]<p>My son is 8, and he and his friends are CONSUMED by the game. I wonder how Microsoft is going to leverage this fact for reaching new users...<p>[1] <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/07/25/minecraft" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;linked&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;25&#x2F;minecraft</a>

&gt; The founders: Notch, Carl, and Jakob are leaving. We don’t know what they’re planning. It won’t be Minecraft-related but it will probably be cool.

I look forward to a post from MS about their plans. I still believe that with a proper modding API minecraft could quadruple its current impact.

Very interesting that my 8 and 10 year old sons two weeks ago declared Minecraft boring after 3-4 years of all that they could consume play.

Ok, everyone here is bashing Microsoft and making doom and gloom predictions but let us think about what the possible benefits could be:<p>* A bigger development team that could optimise and speed development of minecraft improvements<p>* Maybe actually make an official, well-designed, modding API.<p>I agree that the scope for them screwing it up is huge, but lets try to think at least a little bit positive.

&gt;There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC&#x2F;Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android versions of Minecraft to stop. Of course, Microsoft can’t make decisions for other companies or predict the choices that they might make in the future.<p>Translation: MS hasn&#x27;t killed them yet, but probably will soon.

I find it amazing that there wasn&#x27;t a clause tying Notch and the other founders to the company, at least for a transitional period. Usually when you buy a games company it isn&#x27;t the product you buy so much it&#x27;s the creative talent. But to counter my own argument, few games companies have a product as strong as Mojang.

I hope they won&#x27;t ditch cross-platform and go for Windows + Xbox only. Or try to make &quot;Minecraft 2&quot;. Damn

Ludumdare is bigger than Y combinator now.

I hope that a clr port of minecraft would be out soon. Modding minecraft with java is not an option for me as it is way too verbose. I am trying to use clojure but getting it to work with the gradlew custom buildscripts used by minecraft forge is very painful. Modding minecraft with F# sounds fun....

Not clear to me exactly what Microsoft is buying here. As far as I know the development studio Mojang is tiny, maybe a few dozen people. Minecraft itself has a huge community, and made a lot of money, but it&#x27;s not clear how Microsoft leverages that into anything other than goodwill.

So, MineCraft 2 will be an X-Box&#x2F;Win8 tablet exclusive made by a AAA development studio, I suppose.

This makes me sad. I see that there is the potential for good to come from this, I don&#x27;t think it will happen. At least Jeb is staying. There might have been some pretty big problems for Minecraft if he didn&#x27;t stay.

I keep reading the lego comparisons but i think that&#x27;s staying a little too inside the box. Block for block, if you will. A better comparison is &quot;Minecraft is the digital equivalent of playing in the sandbox&quot;.

Perhaps Microsoft has a similar project in the works, and instead of fighting over IP and copyright, they just bought the company. Like Intel or Cisco buying innovators to avoid patent litigation.

Did Minecraft ever take on any VC money? I think not, so this 2.5b is very, very different than the stuff you see here. Not comparable to Instagram in net profit for the founders.

&gt;There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC&#x2F;Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android<p>Confirmation that the Linux version has been killed then

First thing to do: ditch Java; port the game to C#.

All I can say is that my daughters are so lucky that Games for Windows Live is dead and won&#x27;t be integrated into Minecraft.

Hope they don&#x27;t decide to bundle it with Windows. My kids will have zero productivity for their whole life.

&gt; <i>Everything is going to be OK.</i><p>Yeah, with $2.5 bil in the bank, I&#x27;m sure it will.

More power to you, Mojang employees, and may you see many happy returns.

Think Microsoft-VR.<p>Billions in VR-device&#x2F;console sales secured via platform exclusivity. See Halo(Bungie)&#x2F;Xbox etc. Games dictate console sales.<p>Minecraft will actually be a lot more effective. Massively popular among every demographic. Smart move and good timing.<p>Hats off to New-Microsoft.

Well, it was fun while it was lasted. Being on OS X, I&#x27;m not going to pretend that Microsoft will support us for any longer than they have to.

The skype effect is near

Minecraft 2: now with Micro-transactions, Achievements and More!!

Next steps:<p>- Replace Mojang&#x2F;Minecraft account with a Microsoft Account, use it to login<p>- Minecraft installer comes with Bing<p>- Minecraft ported to C#, Java version discontinued. Name changed to Microsoft Minecraft 1.0<p>- Minecraft servers can only be run in Azure, legally