Several items from the article jumped out at me, such as:
"Everyone at Mojang was made the same offer: whoever stayed on board for at least six months after the sale would be rewarded with two million Swedish crowns, approximately three hundred thousand dollars, after taxes."
While it pales in comparison to the payday Mojang's founders received, I'd be happy to get that much. Especially if:
"The three founders were yet to make anyone else a shareholder in the company, not even those who had been with Mojang from the start. This meant that the massive profits generated by Minecraft still went straight into their pockets, even though Markus himself hadn’t done any actual work on Minecraft for over two years now. ... Many no longer regarded Markus, Carl, and Jakob as their equals, as part of the team, but simply as management. Mojang had long since ceased to be anything but a workplace."
Sounds like if you were a working stiff at Mojang, your options were simply "find a new job" or "enjoy a $300,000 bonus after 6 months of continued employment". Compared to what had been happening, this sounds like an improvement.
I can't blame Mojang's founders for selling the company; hell, I'd do the same when offered that much money. Markus (Notch) can spend the rest of his life quietly making games mostly to amuse himself. That sounds like a dream. But when I read something like this:
"When Microsoft sent a delegation for its first official visit to Mojang in Stockholm, Markus wasn’t around. Few if any of his employees knew for sure, but it was rumored that he’d just returned from a few days in Vegas with Jakob. Either way, he was either too tired or too uninterested to show up in person. The task of representing Mojang to its new owners fell on Carl."
and:
"The day before, Markus had put in his last day at work. Several others were in the office as he stood up to leave. He hesitated, not sure how to say goodbye. So he decided not to."
...I can't help but think, "geez, what an ass." You've got your big payday, but you can't even be bothered to see the thing through or say goodbye to some of the people who helped make your big payday happen?
This is only one side of the story, of course, and as rilita notes elsewhere in this thread this is largely a promotion for a book. After reading this and having watched Minecraft's lack of progress over the last year (compared to its previous 2), I think that perhaps the acquisition by Microsoft may be the best thing that happened to the game.
> perhaps the acquisition by Microsoft may be the best thing that happened to the game.
I can't believe I'm saying this - as a previously long time avowed Microsoft hater (I used to be an Amiga user - it's in my blood...) - but I agree. My 6 year old son plays a lot of Minecraft, both the PC version, mobile version and Xbox version, and it's just amazing how stagnant the official versions are compared to the thousands of mods my son watches reviews of.
It also boggles my mind how little has been done to enable extra paid content, given how incredibly excited he is about texture packs and skins and mods. For the PC version there's a thriving eco-system that Mojang was not part of. For the other versions there's a very limited set of extra content for the Xbox version (which we now have all of...) unless you want to go through the hassle of storing maps on an external storage device and modding it on a PC.
Who knows yet if Microsoft will do much more with it, but they can hardly do less.
Part of why minecraft is so stagnant goes straight back to the original awkwardness mentioned in the article- Seemingly everyone with power in the minecraft system stops communicating, gets overly defensive about something, and causes the rest of the community to splinter, while forcing them to rebuild everything to avoid IP claims.
" it's just amazing how stagnant the official versions are compared to the thousands of mods my son watches reviews of."
Preach it, fellow parent and Amiga user! :D
It's like Mojang hit upon success and didn't know what to do next. From an outsider's point of view, by late 2013 the company didn't seem to really have any vision or direction besides arranging the next Minecon. That year saw the release of versions 1.6 and 1.7, which both contributed greatly to the game's content and replayability.
Then 2014 rolled around, and it took pretty much the entire year for Mojang to release one version that added a couple of blocks, flags, and still didn't contain the long-requested and (supposedly) long-worked-upon Plugin API for modders.
Makes you wonder where Minecraft would be today if they had kept their initial energy and focus.
The Forge and FML 'mods' are effectively the defacto modding API at this point. Sure, something official might be released, or maybe MS will do what Mojang should have done and somehow integrate this project in to the core; however at this point the modding community has momentum.
Given the demographic here on HN, we probably all dream of being in this situation. But I honestly have no idea how I'd react. I'd probably take the money and run, too.
I worry about these things sometimes. I have a few subcontractors working part time for me. I'd prefer to make them employees, have our own office together. But I also wonder how that would change our rapport.
I started out on my own specifically because I was dissatisfied with the way business was operated at all the places I had been before. But when reading stuff like this, or about O'Rielly Press, or Valve, it makes me wonder if it's possible to maintain ones ideals. The me that exists right now would hate to be the person that was the cause in another person of the same sort of anti-jumbo-corp feelings I harbor.
There is this article about Notch sharing $3M with employees previously - can't imagine there being that many employees, and don't know how equal the sharing was.
Which strikes me as pretty awesome, because with that much money you don't really know what to do with it -- except maybe outbid Beyonce for a very very expensive house (which strikes me as excessive and better used elsewhere).
And if true, it is a nice gesture on the part of Notch. Because none of us outside of Mojang (and likely only a handful within Mojang) know the full story, I wanted to temper my criticism Markus a bit. It's easy to demonize a guy who strikes it rich and moves on to other things.
It will be interesting to see if he has a public Act II, or if he will essentially retire to obscurity.
>. ...I can't help but think, "geez, what an ass." You've got your big payday, but you can't even be bothered to see the thing through or say goodbye to some of the people who helped make your big payday happen?
I hear you, and I had the same reaction initially. But honestly it probably stems more from a complete lack of social skills and empathy for other biological entities than some air of entitlement or disregard. He probably just doesn't get how people feel, didn't know how to negotiate the social aspects, and found it easier to simply slip away.
Plus, how do you say goodbye in that situation? How do you not just completely break down from the overwhelming emotion of it all? Pride, guilt, relief, worry about the future, probably worry about all the remaining employees... I think anyone would be hard pressed to keep a stiff upper lip at a time like that.
> After reading this and having watched Minecraft's lack of progress over the last year (compared to its previous 2), I think that perhaps the acquisition by Microsoft may be the best thing that happened to the game.
I don't follow: why is it a good thing that the game has suffered a lack of progress?
I think the implication is the Minecraft had stalled under Mojang, and that hopefully Microsoft can get things going again. Which is usually the opposite of what's expected when a large corp buys a small shop.
"Everyone at Mojang was made the same offer: whoever stayed on board for at least six months after the sale would be rewarded with two million Swedish crowns, approximately three hundred thousand dollars, after taxes."
While it pales in comparison to the payday Mojang's founders received, I'd be happy to get that much. Especially if:
"The three founders were yet to make anyone else a shareholder in the company, not even those who had been with Mojang from the start. This meant that the massive profits generated by Minecraft still went straight into their pockets, even though Markus himself hadn’t done any actual work on Minecraft for over two years now. ... Many no longer regarded Markus, Carl, and Jakob as their equals, as part of the team, but simply as management. Mojang had long since ceased to be anything but a workplace."
Sounds like if you were a working stiff at Mojang, your options were simply "find a new job" or "enjoy a $300,000 bonus after 6 months of continued employment". Compared to what had been happening, this sounds like an improvement.
I can't blame Mojang's founders for selling the company; hell, I'd do the same when offered that much money. Markus (Notch) can spend the rest of his life quietly making games mostly to amuse himself. That sounds like a dream. But when I read something like this:
"When Microsoft sent a delegation for its first official visit to Mojang in Stockholm, Markus wasn’t around. Few if any of his employees knew for sure, but it was rumored that he’d just returned from a few days in Vegas with Jakob. Either way, he was either too tired or too uninterested to show up in person. The task of representing Mojang to its new owners fell on Carl."
and:
"The day before, Markus had put in his last day at work. Several others were in the office as he stood up to leave. He hesitated, not sure how to say goodbye. So he decided not to."
...I can't help but think, "geez, what an ass." You've got your big payday, but you can't even be bothered to see the thing through or say goodbye to some of the people who helped make your big payday happen?
This is only one side of the story, of course, and as rilita notes elsewhere in this thread this is largely a promotion for a book. After reading this and having watched Minecraft's lack of progress over the last year (compared to its previous 2), I think that perhaps the acquisition by Microsoft may be the best thing that happened to the game.