scottydoesntknow: The announcement comes courtesy of Mojang's Owen Hill, (that's former PC Gamer web editor Owen Hill,) who has detailed why the sale took place

"Minecraft has grown from a simple game to a project of monumental significance. Though we're massively proud of what Minecraft has become, it was never Notch's intention for it to get this big.
"As you might already know, Notch is the creator of Minecraft and the majority shareholder at Mojang. He's decided that he doesn't want the responsibility of owning a company of such global significance. Over the past few years he's made attempts to work on smaller projects, but the pressure of owning Minecraft became too much for him to handle. The only option was to sell Mojang. He'll continue to do cool stuff though. Don't worry about that.
"There are only a handful of potential buyers with the resources to grow Minecraft on a scale that it deserves. We've worked closely with Microsoft since 2012, and have been impressed by their continued dedication to our game and its development. We're confident that Minecraft will continue to grow in an awesome way.
"Minecraft means many different things to millions of people across the world, and to each and every Mojangsta. We feel that this is the best way for everyone - you guys included - to benefit." BECAUSE THEY PAID US 2.5 BILLION DOLLARS!

FTFY.

they ended their official announcement on mojang with a note about how much they were paid.

penny arcade nailed it though.



/and today i learned you can simply paste images straight into the comment window. what wizardry is this?

redflag: kagemaru026: enjoy your dinosaur, fellas.

Exactly.  Has no one learned yet that buying a finished product is not really a valid business strategy when it comes to software, particularly software marketed to children?  In two years time, kids won't give a crap about minecraft; they'll already be on to the next thing that has caught mass appeal.  Of course there are exceptions to this, and maybe Minecraft will be one of them, but I honestly cannot see MS getting their 2.5 Billion back out of this investment.  Once they try to monetize, people will just move on to the next "free" service/game.

the realms thing seems to be doing well, as a paid monetization.

i wouldn't be shocked if minecraft expanded on hosted servers as a paid service, either with a cheap ms-administered server service or hosting player-admin'd servers for a nominal fee. sure it runs the risk of turning minecraft into something of an MMO but there are a lot of servers trying to do that anyways...

Stile4aly: Saiga410: Up next to be sold, KSP.

Shut your whore mouth.

i dunno, squad would finally have the money to have the staff to rewrite the physics engine to run on the GPU instead of on one CPU core like now.

and they could bring in proper multithreading.

and maybe redo the aerodynamics altogether.

and they could afford to make roverdude the head of parts development(that guy is freaking brilliant)

nekom: cirby: Of course, with the effective size of the Minecraft maps, it's possible they could start hosting a "real"-sized world with a few hundred thousand (or more) concurrent residents, with a monthly fee...

I did the math on the world size once, this is going to be dated as more people have bought it since, but if every single person who ever bought the game were given equal space on a single map, each person would have an area the size of Luxembourg.

that's more space than i've used(or seen) on most maps.

i don't get those single player games where they have a playable map area larger than the state of new york. there's ridiculous amounts of resources right under your feet. what kind of insane projects are you getting into that you exhaust what's available in a ten or fifteen chunk radius in a couple months?

i mean, okay i kind of get it, my wife builds to a ridiculous degree, and inhumanly fast - her village that turned into a city was pretty epic and required strip-mining literally every resource of a patch of world something like 200 blocks by 200 blocks, to bedrock(i did the math, somewhere north of 3 million blocks went into this construction) as well as repeated clear-cutting of a really massive forest. the whole project wound up burning out her video card by the end.

i just don't have the rapacious appetite for construction that would require effort like that. i guess my playstyle is centered more around working in concert with the surroundings, and efficiency.

though a 200x200 hole some 60-70 blocks deep is pretty cool. at first i thought it was a chunk error or a graphics glitch. then i fell into it instead of walking onto the terrain and having it load.

farkeruk: B.L.Z. Bub: Minecraft isn't free now. What do you mean "Once they try to monetize"?

Sure, they can monetize it, but how many people are there left that don't own a copy but want to? It's already the biggest selling PC game ever at 16m copies. That's around say, $300m of revenue. To make $2.5bn, they're going to have to sell 128m copies of Minecraft.

Now, Microsoft might think they can make some revenue from say, monthly subs to servers, but the server stuff is open enough that you can run a server on a home PC or Amazon EC2. And if they try and shut down the openness, they'll kill off a lot of what makes Minecraft interesting for crafters, like being able to run a program to put a giant wall in a map rather than tediously clicking for hours. If they try and shut that stuff down, people will just find something else.

And honestly, I already feel a bit like it's run its course. I think it's very generational, and the next group of kids will have their own thing. That thing may not even be other sandbox games like Terraria or Starbound.

One suggestion is that it's about getting onto Windows Mobile, which sounds like the knuckleheaded decision Microsoft would make, like people are going to ditch their Android phones that already have Minecraft so they can have a Windows phone with Minecraft.

from what i've been hearing within the community, the realms service seems promising. a lot of people would fork over the very nominal amount to have a fully supported and hosted server that they don't have to manage the minutae of. so long as it stays open as well, keeping it about choice..