
How Minecraft Was Born - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/11/minecraft-book/
======
lukaszdk
After watching Minecraft: The Story of Mojang [1] I was left with the
impression that no one at Mojang really knows how to run a business, but since
the cash from Minecraft just keeps coming in, everybody at Mojang is just
having a great time.

In this sense they a very much a like a startup learning to become a company,
but without the financial pressure.

It will be interesting to see if Minecraft will be a one-hit wonder for Mojang
or if they will be able to grow into a company with sustainable profits from
multiple IPs.

[1]
[http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft](http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft)

~~~
VLM
WRT multiple IPs, I am interested to see how they interact with the mods
ecosystem over time. Not so much can they make a twitter app or a 2-d
platformer or something equally unrelated. I don't want a blocky minecraft
looking pacman clone, at all.

I'd pay more for the RailCraft mod than I paid for minecraft itself, in terms
of enjoyment per $. Of course the RC mod is free ... Also I use buildcraft mod
although the gold pipes suck for steam distribution, and I'd pay for
buildcraft, although thats free. Thermal expansion has better steam
distribution...

The great mothership recently released a new minecraft version, which amounted
to a couple new flowers and some biomes for people who don't mine, and nothing
at all for anyone who does anything below the surface. Its called Minecraft,
gentlemen, not fuzzy bunny craft so lose the giant mushroom biome please, and
beg borrow or steal the buildcraft, railcraft, forestry, applied energetics,
universal electricity, and a couple other mods so people who mine in MINEcraft
actually have something fun to do rather than admiring double height grass
blocks and mesa biomes.

The other thing which is hilarious from a guy who's been into computers since
1981 is the mods ecosystem is from a software engineering / systems
administration standpoint just a tiny bit more advanced than the msdos era,
actually pretty close to my historical digging into MVS/360\. So its 2013 and
apt and dpkg and friends have existed since the very early 90s, but in 2013
the way you handle version dependence and bug tracking and distribution is you
manually visit adware download spam sites and click 50 times to download a
tiny mod, and then track version compatibility manually by visiting 50
decentralized web forums. Oh and don't get me started on people who think a 15
minute youtube video with awful video and music counts as the only form of
"documentation" required. Dudes, its 2013 almost 2014 not the era of msdos
3.11 and warez BBS systems? It really does suck after using Linux since the
early 90s and downshifting back to 1985, even though I run minecraft on linux
(both client and server).

Mojang should implement a minecraft mod store with a payment system thats
trustworthy/reliable and very fast with excellent versioning compatibility.
I'd pay $40 for railcraft and mojang can keep $10 of it and everyone else will
be happy as long as I get $40 of actual service, like its very fast and
completely transparent and highly reliable and effective and perhaps dare I
ask, effectively and centrally documented and centrally bug tracked?

~~~
asiekierka
Okay, you're kidding, right?

Minecraft 1.7 did not include any major changes. They just rewrote about 50%
of the source code.

Nah, not a lot.

And they're doing it EXACTLY so they can make a mod store.

Now, the only reason you cannot pay for Railcraft is because Mojang included a
clause stating that you cannot sell modifications or derivative works based on
Minecraft's source code. They ARE working on a mod store and API... since
2011. I believe it will be coming in the next year or so, Mojang claims
January but I stopped believing them long ago.

About modifications, I started work on a way to improve mod distribution from
servers to clients: AsieLauncher. It automatically generates a launcher, a
list of modifications and a list of changes between modpacks. It supports
delta updating, all MC versions from 1.2.3 to 1.7.2, optional mods and a lot
of other things.

The plan was to add support for automatic mod updating and dependency
tracking, but the problem is mod authors aren't often willing to participate,
due to stubbornness or just plain assholery or laziness. That's why such
projects rarely take off.

~~~
mutagen
Mod authors indirectly monetize their mods by hosting them on the deceptive
and ad laden file hosting sites that have some tiny return on traffic.

~~~
asiekierka
Yes. I prefer donations, and AsieLauncher got more money for donations than it
ever would from adf.ly for the next 2 years.

------
Torn
Notch described what later became Minecraft in a 2009 youtube, calling it an
'Infiniminer clone' he was working on

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k)

~~~
GuiA
I've been involved in the indie game dev community for a while now, and I was
an active member on the TIGSource forums when Markus first presented Minecraft
there[0] (he still posted, at the time!)

I remember from day one thinking it would be pretty cool if he could make
infiminer with gameplay (at the time, he was talking of a capture the flag
mode, and a "defend the castle you built from zombies" mode).

Then he started charging $10 for preorders, which I thought was insane- who
would pay money for a prototype that he'd probably abandon within 6 months
anyway? (most indie game debs abandon their project- finishing a game puts you
in the 0.0001%)

But it actually worked, which surprised me. I finally preordered myself,
because everyone was doing it to support him- I think I was order ~11 000 or
so. I thought it was insane that he managed to get 10k+ preorders for his
small project, and a little something clicked in my head then. Of course, now
of over 12 million people have bought the game :) [1]

[0]
[http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0](http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0)

[1] [https://minecraft.net/stats](https://minecraft.net/stats)

~~~
itsybitsycoder
Preorders were $5, at least by the time I bought (in alpha), which IMO is a
much more justifiable price for an impulse buy that might not work out. It was
raised to $10 after it hit "beta" (which was after it was already popular and
had made at least a million, IIRC).

~~~
GuiA
Ha, thanks for correcting this- faulty memory :)

Even $5 was surprising, as most people on TIGS just post their demos and games
for free- back then, most people made games with the only intention of making
something cool. It's only recently that everyone builds a game with money in
mind, and Minecraft was amongst the games to start that trend (remember, this
was before Kickstarter et al.)

------
jdmitch
I wonder if minecraft's financial success (after the initial stage where
Persson couldn't have done it another way as the article argues) was because
of the pricing model that bucked trends in the gaming world, signalling "this
game is different", or if it was despite the difference?

~~~
giulianob
I was pretty surprised when Minecraft was charging money for a fairly simple
and uncompleted game. I was surprised because I had not seen that done very
often. Now it's definitely more popular with things like Kickstarter but I
think the fact he was asking for money early on helped a lot. If he had not
asked for money, he may not have been able to develop the game to the level he
did.

~~~
OvidNaso
Steam is now overloaded with "early access" game sales.

------
thomasfl
98% of all great startups are copycats, not original innovations. Markus
copied the look and feel from infiniminer, but minecraft was far better
executed.

~~~
k__
No, he didn't just copy it, he looked what the players liked and what they
didn't like, extracted the good stuff and made a game out of this.

This is how everything remotely successful works.

This is also why things later fail!

The companies want more customers and add stuff to their products to appeal.
But what they end with is a product, that doesn't reflect the good things
extracted anymore, because they got bloated.

------
andygeers
I'm still not sure I'm entirely clear what about this story is "amazingly
unlikely"?

------
coldcode
Passion > Business. Passion that makes a business is even better.

------
era86
Thanks for sharing. This is inspiring. Hope to grab a copy of the book!

------
dsego
TL;DR he ripped off Infiniminer.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Inspiration is not the same thing as blatantly ripping off other games and
passing them off as unique creations. Comandeer Keen started out as a project
to copy Super Mario Bros. 3, for example. But is Comandeer Keen just a "rip
off" of SMB 3? Hardly. And Minecraft is far from a rip off of infiniminer. If
anything, today infiniminer is much more well known due to minecraft's
success. Infiniminer is about as similar to minecraft as pong is to breakout.

~~~
Grue3
What is "amazingly unlikely" about that though? Revolutionary games that
create their own genres (Rogue, Adventure, Dune 2) are amazingly unlikely.
Minecraft is just evolution of the games that already existed.

~~~
bliss
Not sure of the others, but Dune 2 certainly didn't spontaneously big bang in
a vacuum either, it was built on earlier iterations of similar games most
notable being Herzog Zwei,whose english translation curiously enough is just 2
letters forward on a single letter, it translates as "Duke 2"

that said, played the shit out of dune 2, what a game!

------
notdrunkatall
Every time I read a story about some unassuming person getting rich off of
doing what they love, I always ask myself: how can I do this?

Step 1: find something I love.

Does lying in bed surfing the internet count?

No?

Damn.

~~~
junto
Based on your comment and your username, you must be in bed, drunk and surfing
the internet! :-)

Here's an idea for a simple app that prevents you from phoning / texting your
ex when you're drunk in bed. You have to (previous to being drunk) mark all of
your contacts that you aren't supposed to contact when drunk and give reasons.
Use the acceleromter to test if the user is able to stand up straight. If not
then block certain outgoing calls / texts.

Then place ads in bars that say, "Don't drunk text your ex tonight. Download
the app... DTP (Drunk Text Protector)". Hint: You can charge a little extra
for the app because the user is probably part drunk anyway. ;-)

So, as the user, you get drunk and get home and text your ex 'Anna' and the
app says:

    
    
      Your message to Anna was blocked. You previously told me that she 
      was "some crazy bitch who slept with your best friend".
    
      If you really want to text Anna, then you can use one of your "go on
      be a dumb ass" credits to bypass this drunk text lock.
    
      You currently have [0] credits. Click here to purchase some now.
    

If you really want to text Anna then you can, but you have to buy a "I'm an
idiot" credit pack as an in-app purchase, which gives you a number of credits
to text / phone people you shouldn't.

Profit!

~~~
kd0amg
_Use the acceleromter to test if the user is able to stand up straight._

Riding on the bus/train can cause a lot of wobbling around. How well can an
accelerometer-based system distinguish this from drunkenness?

~~~
jdbernard
It doesn't. That is a bonus feature for all the other people on the bus.

------
dumbfounder
Does anyone find it funny that Bezos is making money off this inaccurate book
about himself, that he probably hates, by selling it in his store? And that
his wife's bad review of the book probably drove more sales? (the rank is
currently 83, earlier today in a Google cached version of the page the rank is
86)

Not that he should/would pull the book or anything. Just kind of funny.

~~~
WA
Wrong thread, you must have mixed up tabs :)

