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Minecraft could be gaming's biggest ever success story. Developed (initially) by one man from a clone of another game, into a massive entertainment product that's sold millions of copies on multiple platforms, Minecraft also spawned conventions and merchandise and changed pre-ordering and early access forever. And now Microsoft wants in on that action, apparently, as it's considering a $2 billion acquisition of the game's developer, Mojang Studios.
This hasn't been confirmed by either studio or Mojang's founder, Markus “Notch” Persson, but the Wall Street Journal is citing a “person with knowledge on the matter,” who claims that the deal could be struck as soon as this week, which means we may not even get much of a confirmation before it's a done deal.
If this turns out to be true, it would just be one more chapter in Notch's book of how to print money, as his company has already made well over a hundred million pounds from Minecraft sales, with revenue in 2013 alone topping £200 million. This is of course why any deal with Microsoft would need to be as lofty as the $2 billion figure sounds, though whether Microsoft would be able to wring out a return on its investment is unclear.
It could be part of a Microsoft push to support the PC again, but it hasn't shown much of a proclivity for that in recent years.
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KitGuru Says: Here's hoping it doesn't somehow make Minecraft an Xbox One exclusive.
Image source: Sebbz
Oh ffs MOJANG DO NOT ACCEPT THE OFFER! While Microsoft ‘might’ have good intentions, they most likely are going to limit the PC version of the game, while giving “special” updates to the Xbox version, so they can sell more XBones.
a lot of people were moaning about a similar acquisition with the same amount of money (and I think we all know what I’m talking about here) but they were soon shut up when development started evolving rapidly and the price of the product is staying at an insanely low price. I’m just going to sit back and give this one a chance. See what Mojang can do with the $2bil (hopefully make a second good game)
Aw, hell no!!! I won’t let Microsoft destroy my favorite game of all time! Guess I’ll have to pick up my toy pickaxe and smash some big Microsoft faces (again) 😛
I agree Totally, freeking microsoft
Calm down, that’s highly unlikely to happen. If you know anything about Notch.He’s very picky and selective about how he does business.
Maybe with that kind of investment there will finally be some progression with the game. Development of Minecraft has been stagnant for a long time with the only real innovations coming from community modders, not Mojang.
Notch isn’t part of mojang anymore Jeb took over and notch took early retirement with all the mullah he earned
Notch has personally worked with microsoft before and he enjoyed said
experiences, and this could only be a good thing – mojang is a
relatively small studio, ms could be looking into beefing it up to get
some heavy development going, there is no situation where this could be a
bad thing. Also, this speculation about “oh microsoft would restrict pc
version and give xbone more features” is just stupid, microsoft have
never been the party to restrict – I don’t see how people are getting
nintendo mixed with microsoft here? This would only be a good thing.
Lets go through a list here that may help people understand:
#1
Microsoft are giants for a reason, they generally do things well and
all of this hate stems from microsoft entering the console market and
it’s just false propaganda. They listen to their customers and have
solid teams.
#2 Mojang, again, is a very small studio
and the people behind the project aren’t exactly as “experienced” as
would be good. The throughput of work is slow for mediocre results and
every update they release breaks something else and after fixing 15 bugs
they create 30 more. It’s pretty difficult for plugin developers and
mod developers to keep changing and updating their code hugely every
time
#3 Microsoft have a console market but that’s not
to say they have no other market, they have no reason to damage their
own sales if they acquire mojang. Restricting the PC version would mean
less sales, removing other console versions, again, less sales. This is
very highly unlikely that they’d even think about restricting minecraft
and making it xbox/pc only as they’d only be narrowing their market
more.