A cultural phenomenon, “Minecraft,” is the third best selling game of all time, with over 16 million players on the PC alone, and over 54 million players across all platforms. In 2009, Swedish Indie developer Markus “Notch” Persson released the first version of his randomly generated sandbox game, which he originally called “Cave Game,” and this simple game took off in a big way. From grassroots, Minecraft erupted, over the course of only a few years becoming one of the most popular games of all time, captivating players of all ages, and making millions of dollars for Notch and his fellow developers in the process. In the history of gaming, no game had ever so rapidly grown, and gained such widespread popularity, let alone an indie game. Which is why it comes as such a surprise that Minecraft, being such a resounding success on both a critical and monetary front, was purchased by mega-corporation Microsoft for 2.5 billion on September 15th, 2014.
This leaves a pile of questions for both fans of the game, and those invested in the gaming industry in general — first of which being, why would a game so successful be sold so suddenly? The most obvious answer would be money, however, it’s doubtfully so simple, and as an answer to this particular question it has quite a few holes. Minecraft has been an extreme success for its developers, innovative and captivating, but cheap to make, and at a big profit. Even without official numbers released, total income is easily in the millions, in fact, the game earned over 10 million dollars in 2013 alone. Sure, 2.5 billion is a lot of money (that’s an understatement), but we have other reasons to doubt that Notch would be willing to sell to the Microsoft for simple greed.
In the past, Notch has criticized Microsoft, and in fact turned down an offer to have the game included with windows 8, he felt when it came to Microsoft and gaming, developers got the bad end of the deal. He’s also criticized other similar grass roots projects for selling out to mega-corporations, for example, when the group funded virtual gaming headset the “Oculus Rift” was purchased for 2 million dollars by Facebook, Notch cancelled all future deals to release a version of Minecraft compatible with the Oculus. What would cause Notch to so suddenly go against his own morals and sell out to Microsoft? The answer lies on a more personal level.
Microsoft’s offer to purchase Minecraft served as an easy way out for Notch. To put it simply, Notch was trapped within Minecraft, or rather, within the success and popularity of it. In a statement released by Notch, he says “I don’t see myself as a real game developer. I make games because it’s fun, and because I love games and I love to program, but I don’t make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don’t try to change the world”. When Minecraft started, it was a simple game for the simple purpose of being a project that Notch could work on, complete, and release. He liked making games, so he made, them, and showed them off, and moved on. In the case of Minecraft however, he could not move on. The game gained an unprecedented amount of popularity, and happily Notch continued to work on it, release new versions, and enjoy the attention it gave him. As the game grew more popular, he started his company Mojang and hired some developers to help fine tune the game and keep up with demand. But as Notch said, he liked making games, not a game. With the popularity of Minecraft at such a high, he couldn’t work on anything else. As we saw with projects like “Ox10c” which Notch was forced to drop. The game sapped away his time, and he had to continue making it for the sake of his fans, whom he corresponded with on a regular basis. Even more straining however, was the position the fame put Notch in.
Notch became an idol, a figurehead, the man at the heading the “indie game movement”. He was beloved by all indie gamers, and was who all indie developers aspired to be. People looked up to him, but at some point they lost sight of the fact that he wasn’t some god or saint, he was a human like you or I. Over the years on twitter, Notch slowly became less open and friendly, and kept to himself more. He couldn’t make a simple statement without angering his fans, getting insane amounts of hate mail and even death threats. Notch had a sort of golden haze around him to these people, and whenever he stepped out of that haze and spoke his actual mind, if they disagreed they’d get mad and lash out at him. This came to a head several weeks ago when Minecraft’s EULA agreement changed(or rather, was more strictly enforced), and despite having almost nothing to do with it, Notch took the brunt of the anger from fans. Death threats, rape threats, personal bashings, the works, Notch was on the receiving end of complete and utter hatred from those who used to idolize him, for something he had almost nothing to do with. If Notch wasn’t already considering selling to Microsoft, this incident was what pushed him over the edge. Notch didn’t sell the game for many, he sold it because personally he couldn’t take it anymore. Notch put it best – ” It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.”
There are more questions out there, that at this point sadly don’t have answers. How is Microsoft going to make a profit from this deal, what does this mean for the indie game scene, what will Microsoft do to Minecraft? Was this the first in a line of indie game acquisitions by mega-corporations, or a onetime deal to take the weight off an overworked developers chest? Only time will tell, so for now it’s best that we sit back, wait, and see what the future will bring.