I don't get it. Mojang already made "all the money" from selling minecraft and are largely maintaining it now. I haven't heard if they even have any new games on the way? The space one was cancelled. What exactly is MS possibly getting that could be worth $2B?
I can only assume that MS are going to insist on a sequel with all of the 'NextGen' trappings we've come to expect from them. Minecraft2: MasterChief Edition. With Kinect! And day1 DLC! And product placement... (Use the new MTN DEW powerup to double your building speed! Feed your animals DORITOS to improve their stats!)
Good for Markus and the Mojang guys though... they built a multi-billion-dollar empire out of nothing. It's real indie-games success story. An inspiration to the rest of us! Congrats!
There's two obvious monetization strategies that I can think of.
The first one they're already doing: that's a commercial server hosting service (Minecraft Realms).
The other one is bringing mods to the console versions as paid DLC. Mods are popular on PC (but miserable to install and maintain) but I don't know if there are any modding options for the console versions. At least the Android Pocket Edition doesn't seem to have any modding options.
Well, there's a third strategy but I don't think they'll go that way. Pay real money for getting some in-game goods or consumables. I don't think this would work very well, because it seems like people really like grinding for hours in search of the elusive diamond blocks. I certainly do :)
I was just thinking that a kinect interface could be really interesting... Not that I'd use it personally, but it could be fun for kids to interact with.
Not sure what it's written in, or how difficult of a port to Unity would be (another possibility).
Stop this MS h8 shit m8 if anything, MS will bring some stability to that company. Right now it's just a bunch of children making shittonnes of money for an indie games accident. They didn't work for it, they got lucky. Notch just prefers to be a little bitch on Twitter over everything while spending his 10mil a year on holidays.
Anyone who can bring accountability to Mojang will be a good thing.
The ability to make a popular game franchise exclusive to their gaming hardware. Just take some money you would have spent on advertising and dump it into buying some franchises for exclusivity.
Also since Mojang is a European company MS can no doubt use some of it's $90+ billion stockpile of money outside America without getting hit for taxes.
But minecraft already released on ps4. Unlesss MS buys and takes back the minecraft of ps4, there is no exclusivity. This move will make MS face a shit-storm. The gamers are not taking well to tomb raider (timed) exclusivity. It is accepted that you can have exclusive gaming franchise. But you should not most certainly take a multi-platform and try to make it exclusive.
It’s not growing, but it’s also not exactly shrinking (I remember obsessively checking those stats years ago and they always hovered around 10k), and hasn’t for years. Minecraft might be a different beast than other video games, truly more like Lego than video games actually. There are always new young people you can sell the game to and with constant maintenance for free that might just work out.
That’s even ignoring other platforms and merchandise – or however much Minecraft Realms (their server hosting service) makes or how much potential that has.
The believe that they already made all the money seems completely wrong to me.
When you release something that, on day one, already has 'dated' graphics, you don't have to worry about keeping up with the latest graphics cards or poly-counts or anything of the sort. Its just about the game. Like Legos there are countless others, The Game of Life (Milton Bradley, not Conway) has been around since the 1800's. The beauty of this is that you've never completely saturated since kids are coming of age every day and growing into the game.
>> ...truly more like Lego than video games actually...
Which is really funny considering what Lego did in the video game space - they made video games where many things were made of Lego, but there was no "building" involved at all.
That’s only the PC version, not including console versions, their online service (they rent servers), merchandise and Mojang’s other games (which aren’t very successful at all).
I think the large difference between revenue and profit is mostly down to licensing fees that Mojang has to pay to Notch. At any rate, it seems unlikely to me that a 40 person company could cost nearly $200M to run per year, especially since I really struggle to come up with any significant costs besides just labour (and even if every employee costs half a million per year that’s still only $20M). But I obviously don’t actually know this for sure.
Nextgen Minecraft could be a XboxOne exclusive maybe as a launch title with whatever VR/AR device MS is supposedly working on. So, I could buy the Oculus that works only on a super-powered gaming PC that costs more than I make in a month, or the Sony Morpheus product which I'm sure will be great, but Sony won't have Minecraft, they'll have Playstation Home II. MS will have Minecraft. Which one will kids buy? I'm guessing the system with Minecraft. This all could be as soon as next xmas or even 2Q 2015.
Even if we ignore the VR/AR stuff, Minecraft with Kinect would be loads of fun. The Kinect's killer app may not be been dancing games. It could be world-building games. Imagine lifting your hand to move a brick and flicking your wrist to toss it.
...and thats on top of revenue MS would make on more traditional Minecraft monetizations. Look at how Disney is re-invigorating the Star Wars IP. Suddenly new movies and games are coming out. We're finally getting a third Battlefront and upcoming movies that seem under the aegis of more... competent creators than the recent prequels (Sorry George!). People are more excited than ever about an IP, that frankly, has been treading water for the last 20 years. MS could do something like that to Minecraft, which always seemed more than a bit under-commercialized.
Minecraft is not ideal for VR in the near future because it's a game where you run around which causes simulator sickness for a significant percentage of the population.
VR is better suited for other types of games, especially those were you are inside a cockpit and your avatar is sitting just like you are in real life.
Its not just the moving, it's the extreme range of head motion. I've been trying out Minecrift with my DK2 and you get sick of looking up and down at extreme angles very quickly.
Maybe Minecraft + Morpheus has MS running scared. If they owned the IP they could stop that and make it a Kinect/VR/AR exclusive. I doubt the current license would allow Sony to port Minecraft to their Morpheus platform without permission.
They could probably do this pretty successfully following the tf2 model, where they bring in community contributions, but also pay the community contributors royalties.
They don't need a new game or sequels. 1.8 just came out, it was months in development. All they need to do is come out with releases, some small, some large, add new stuff where it makes sense and as computers and game systems pick up the power to handle the additional computations. This could go on for decades.
They can make is windows-only, make a WindowsPhone port, etc. Try to lure even more people into their platform, and let the other die (which is pretty microsofty).
Absolutely not. Microsoft ports OneNote to OS X, iOS and Android. Same for Office that is available on OS X. On the other hand, Google, for instance does everything it can to make smallish platforms like Windows Phone die.
I can quite clearly tell you omited Linux from that list, for example.
Also OneNote is one of those things where MS benefits from cross-platformism. Games are not.
