People Make Games made a video about this Infiniminer/Minecraft story and they interviewed Zach Barth. When Microsoft was reviewing the 2.5B Minecraft deal, Zach was working for Microsoft and was on those meetings.
I watched an interview in which Zach said that he gave infiniminer away for free because he didn't think anyone would want to pay for such a game. Ironically Minecraft is the video game that has sold the most copies.
My understanding is that Minecraft exists because Zach refused to takes Notch's suggestions on how to improve it.
So Notch wrote Minecraft, a better version, and sold it. And it worked out really well.
Infiniminer might have sold, but it wouldn't have sold as well as Minecraft.
And Minecraft then brought traffic to Zach (via people wanting to learn about Infiniminer) to drive sales on his other games, which seems to have worked out well in the end.
From the article: Since the game’s release, in 2009, Minecraft has sold in excess of twenty million copies, earned armfuls of prestigious awards, and secured merchandising deals with LEGO and other toymakers. Last year, Persson earned over a hundred million dollars from the game and its merchandise. Persson—better known to his global army of teen-age followers by his Internet handle, Notch—has a raggedy, un-marketed charm. He is, by his own admission, only a workmanlike coder, not a ruthless businessman. “I’ve never run a company before and I don’t want to feel like a boss,” he said. “I just want to turn up and do my work.”
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He sounds like a modern day Woz, except he was successful despite not wanting to get involved in business. (by that I mean, Woz was successful, but we don't know how he might have turned out if Steve Jobs didn't push him to cofound Apple)
> He's the success story of a brilliant founder that hands off his work to a parent (Microsoft) to do the dirty work.
All Minecraft versions combined have sold over 50 million copies, and the product is on the decline (since people only buy it once). So what "dirty work" did he hand it off for Microsoft to do?
I've been involved in the indie game dev community for a while now, and I was an active member on the TIGSource forums when Markus first presented Minecraft there[0] (he still posted, at the time!)
I remember from day one thinking it would be pretty cool if he could make infiminer with gameplay (at the time, he was talking of a capture the flag mode, and a "defend the castle you built from zombies" mode).
Then he started charging $10 for preorders, which I thought was insane- who would pay money for a prototype that he'd probably abandon within 6 months anyway? (most indie game debs abandon their project- finishing a game puts you in the 0.0001%)
But it actually worked, which surprised me. I finally preordered myself, because everyone was doing it to support him- I think I was order ~11 000 or so. I thought it was insane that he managed to get 10k+ preorders for his small project, and a little something clicked in my head then. Of course, now of over 12 million people have bought the game :) [1]
If Microsoft did anything like that they would be flushing their 2.5 billion dollars down the drain. The community that surrounds Minecraft is why it's worth so much.
>> That's 2.5 instagrams. What do you feel, realistic, too much, too little?
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.
Notch didn't contact Microsoft, they contacted him.
“Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life?” he asked. “Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.”
"Mojang CEO Carl Manneh was sitting at home with his family when he first saw the tweet. Within 30 seconds of his reading it, his phone rang. A Microsoft executive who coordinated with Mojang wanted to know if Persson was serious. “I’m not sure–let me talk to him,” said Manneh.
"While Persson originally wrote the message as a half-joke, the realization that he could disassociate from Mojang took hold. The man who once publicly pledged that he would not sell out to evil corporations now had his head turned.
"In the week that followed, Manneh’s phone rang constantly with interest from Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard and others. Talks with Activision petered out. Persson, cryptically, won’t discuss what happened with EA but says that Mojang ruled out potential buyers “who did game play in a way we didn’t like.” Microsoft, however, apparently passed muster."
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's not clear how Microsoft leverages that into anything other than goodwill.
The best compensation they could do is reach out to Microsoft/Mojang for a job. Being the author of the game engine for a company's product is probably #1 in qualifications.
This is a fearful way to look at things, especially given the context.
Mojang is being sold for 2.5 billion dollars. In reality, Minecraft is being sold for 2.5 billion dollars, because I'm sure Microsoft doesn't give a rat's ass about Scrolls or Cobalt. Notch founded Mojang, and wrote Minecraft.
Notch wants to do the things he wants to do. Of that 2.5 billion dollars, I'm sure he's going to be getting a reasonable portion. A person who goes to school, works hard, and finds a good job making $100,000/year for 40 years, might make 4 million dollars over the course of their life. A Persson who writes minecraft, and then sells his company for 2.5 billion dollars, only needs to to get 0.16% of the sale to be in the same situation as the person who worked for a six-figure salary for his entire life. Given that he was the entire power behind Minecraft, I'm sure he'll get more than a few million dollars out of the deal.
The parable is about striving for excess without considering your needs. Certainly there's an amount of saving for a rainy day that's prudent. But you need to know when to slow down. Sure, if you have a billion dollars you can go and get 2 billion. You can work your hands to the bone and make 4 billion. You can exploit people and make 6 billion. But if you can live a happy and carefree life off a few million dollars, or have a terrible exhausting hurtful life with a few billion, when do you stop?
If you write a game and someone wants to buy it from your 22 person company for 600 times as much money as a pretty-well-off person makes in an entire lifetime, you can pretty much afford to say yes and do whatever the hell you like.
It just happens to be the case that Notch prefers to write games that might never be popular more than spend it talking about getting a massage at a ski resort in Switzerland.
Minecraft’s story is even more impressive than the article makes it seem. The game was not developed by a few people, it was developed by one guy (“Notch”). He hired six people only recently and they started working together around Winter 2010/2011.
He now gets help with the business and support side of running a company but only one of the developers he hired is working on the game with him together. The other developer is getting their next game up and running.
What’s also interesting is that Notch does not want to run the business, at least not at the scale at which it is now. He hired people to do that for him.
Notch is Markus Presson, the creator of Minecraft. He got $2.5 billion in cash from Microsoft when he sold it. In the years since he had a whole lot of controversial tweets, but that didn't' seem to affect him due to his wealth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__Nq2vNcpIo
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