
The Story of Microsoft's Minecraft Buyout - jsnell
http://www.wired.com/2015/06/minecraft-book-excerpt/
======
sageabilly
After reading this story I'm struck by a bit of a parallel between Notch and
Tarn Adams, the guy who writes Dwarf Fotress. Both are to be extremely
passionate about the simple but massively playable games that they make, but
Dwarf Fortress has a niche following and Minecraft has _EXPLODED_ in
popularity. I can see Notch riding the leviathan for a while but at some point
that's got to be extremely tiring and every day's growth would take him
further and further from the "I just want to sit in the basement and make fun
games" that got him in the industry in the first place.

Regardless of intent, at some point if someone comes along and says "hey we'll
give you $2B to walk away from this and go back to making fun games in the
basement and never having to worry about money ever again" it will be a more
attractive offer than trying to deal with the headache that comes with running
a large company (which would be compounded by never desiring to have a large
company in the first place).

~~~
baldfat
> Both are to be extremely passionate about the simple but massively playable
> games.

Have you ever even looked at Dwarf Fortress? It is the most complex non-trival
game I have ever layed my eyes on. It takes over 100 hours just to understand
the ascii art.

Quoting: "Dwarf Fortress is one of the most complex computer games in the
history of computer games. How complex? In the game's discussion forum, one
player asserts that after 120 failed games, he can finally "get into the swing
of things."

[[http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/02/dwarf-fortress-ten-
hou...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/02/dwarf-fortress-ten-hours-with-
the-most-inscrutable-video-game-of-all-time/)]

~~~
GuiA
That's a bit of a dramatic exaggeration for theatrical effect. The ASCII art
definitely does not take 100 hours to understand.

If you use a beginner's guide, you can get the basics in a couple hours -
after that, you start having fun but of course it takes a very long time to
learn and understand all of the subtleties of the game (but that's true of any
good strategy game).

O'reilly has published a book about the game, I highly recommend it. You can
start really grokking the game within an afternoon.

~~~
outworlder
The basics, yes. But you are gauging the wrong complexity here.

Dwarf Fortress has no concept of 'hit points', for instance. A character
(monster, undead or whatever) can die for several reasons. For instance, they
hemorrhage to death, or a vital organ is hit. The can be crippled for life.
All 32 teeth in a dwarf are modeled, and they can all be individually
damaged/lost.

It has complex social interactions. One reddit thread was asking why one of
his engravers was engraving pictures of rats over and over in a room. He got
asked to check if said dwarf had a grudge against whoever owned that room.
Sure enough, he did - the owner was a noble that happened to be afraid of
rats.

There's a legal system, dwarfs can commit homicide and you need to try to
track down the perpretator and bring to justice, assuming there are no
witnesses.

Heck, even the world generation is way more advanced than anything I've ever
seen.

~~~
GuiA
Hah, I think you are gauging the wrong complexity :)

Sure, all these things lead to an incredibly deep universe, but you're meant
to discover them as you're playing the game. In a way, the metagame (posting
on reddit, reading wikis, etc) is just as important as the actual game (which
is also true for Minecraft, when it comes to sharing your creations, learning
red stone, etc). But knowing these things is certainly not required to start
playing the game or to get in the "swing of things".

------
johnyzee
It's interesting to me how entitled the employees come across as. Minecraft
was making millions, but they were only getting a regular salary. (Aside from
luxury trips to Monaco with their families, and an extremely laid back and
pleasant work environment.)

I remember that Notch was doing Minecraft development all alone for the
longest time, even after it had become hugely popular, and users had been
begging him to hire people to speed up development. So these employees join as
regular employees, getting a regular salary, taking none of the risks of the
founders, yet they are pissed off because they don't own shares of the
company.

I suspect this is very common in successful startups, and in a way I
understand it: They see the founders, guys their age, rolling in the dough, on
the back of their work. I've felt the same way as an employee, when stuff I
come up with and implement ends up making the company a lot of money and the
most I get, if I'm lucky, is a pat on the back.

But, as a founder? Where the fuck do you get off expecting to take a piece of
my company, that I have literally sacrificed blood, sweat and tears for, taken
time away from my life and my family, risked huge amounts of money,
relationships and years of my life, without any guarantee that I would ever
succeed. And you take an interview, walk in the door from nine to five and do
your job, which you get fairly compensated for, and would not be paid anymore
for anywhere else, you can, and probably will, leave whenever you feel like it
with no stress or loss. Yet because the company succeeds, somehow you are
entitled to own parts of it for simply being there and doing your job?

~~~
AaronFriel
You forget that the employees are also taking a risk. A Fortune 500 is stable,
and steady work can be found in many city hubs.

Startups are sometimes spread quite afar, Mojang was in Stockholm, and are not
always likely to survive. While Notch was "rolling in the dough" there was no
guarantee that it would continue indefinitely.

That risk is why employees, especially early employees, feel like they should
get some equity. It's a trade-off: they are accepting a percentage chance that
they are joining a company that could fail, but there's also a chance it could
be wildly successful. The difference between equity and wage represents an
assessment of risk and riskiness. And, of course, offering lower wages and
higher equity shares creates positive incentives for employees to go above-
and-beyond and ensure that the company is not just a mild success, but a
multi-billion-dollar-buyout success. This is opposed to the perverse incentive
that wage-only compensation creates, where a buyout potentially means losing
your job. After all, if you weren't valuable enough to deserve equity, you may
not be the talent the new company was seeking to acqui-hire.

In this case, it is almost certainly the case that any Mojang employee would
have better off foregoing all wages in exchange for a small amount of
ownership.

With hindsight biases, I suspect every Mojang employee would say they'd be
willing to give up some wages for some equity. But before the acquisition, it
was nowhere near clear that the company was worth $2.5 billion, so I wonder
how many employees might still be willing to take that offer.

So, like I said, trade-offs. I think the tone at the end of your post
represents how a lot of founders might look at it, and I realize it's
hypothetical. But stepping back from the situation, there are complicated
incentives involved in wage and equity compensation, and balancing those as a
founder or an employee can be difficult.

~~~
moron4hire
>> You forget that the employees are also taking a risk.

I don't know how it is in most countries, but in the United States, an
employee gets unemployment when they get laid off. A founder gets nothing when
the company goes under.

Also, I know of a lot of companies that consider self-employment the same
thing as unemployment. I've made more money as a freelancer in the last 3
years than I ever made working for anyone, and I've produced more code in that
time to boot, so I think it's been a pretty good measure of my productivity.
But as far as your run-of-the-mill cunsoltoware company is concerned (and
let's face it, the long-tail of such companies is the majority of places where
your average software developer can expect to get hired), I might as well have
been on a 3 year vacation.

So IDK, seems like there are a lot more implicit risks to being a founder
other than just "everything could go belly up and I have no retirement".

~~~
cpwright
> I don't know how it is in most countries, but in the United States, an
> employee gets unemployment when they get laid off. A founder gets nothing
> when the company goes under.

The $350 I got a week when I was unemployed three years ago doesn't affect
much of anything compared to a developer's salary. I am fortunate in that I
received 2 weeks severance and was able to get a new job within about a month;
but not everyone is going to find a job within a time frame that having a
drastically reduced income is trivial.

~~~
pavlov
In Sweden (which is where the employees in question were), most workers are
entitled to unemployment benefits of 80% of their full salary for 200 days,
after which it's reduced to 70% for the next 100 days [1].

So a Swedish programmer will definitely be making much more than $350/week for
almost a year while unemployed. Like someone else said, Mojang's employees did
not take any real risks.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_Sweden](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_Sweden)

~~~
vinkelhake
It's _up to_ 80% of the full salary. While your typical Swedish programmer
would get more than $350/week, they're not going to get 80% of their salary
since they cap out well before that.

~~~
pavlov
Oh, you're right. I missed the part about the 680 SEK / day cap.

Is that per calendar day or workday? I guess calendar day. That means the
average programmer would get about 50% of salary on unemployment. (Just taking
a wild guess that a programmer in Sweden makes 40k SEK / month.)

------
phn
The other side of the story is that notch contacted Microsoft about the sale
in the first place, and he was pretty transparent about the reason why, after
it was done: [http://notch.net/2014/09/im-leaving-
mojang/](http://notch.net/2014/09/im-leaving-mojang/)

~~~
adventured
Notch didn't contact Microsoft, they contacted him.

“Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life?” he
asked. “Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.”

"Mojang CEO Carl Manneh was sitting at home with his family when he first saw
the tweet. Within 30 seconds of his reading it, his phone rang. A Microsoft
executive who coordinated with Mojang wanted to know if Persson was serious.
“I’m not sure–let me talk to him,” said Manneh.

"While Persson originally wrote the message as a half-joke, the realization
that he could disassociate from Mojang took hold. The man who once publicly
pledged that he would not sell out to evil corporations now had his head
turned.

"In the week that followed, Manneh’s phone rang constantly with interest from
Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard and others. Talks with
Activision petered out. Persson, cryptically, won’t discuss what happened with
EA but says that Mojang ruled out potential buyers “who did game play in a way
we didn’t like.” Microsoft, however, apparently passed muster."

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/03/03/minecraft-
mar...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/03/03/minecraft-markus-
persson-life-after-microsoft-sale/)

~~~
phn
Oh, right, I could've sworn it was the other way around, sorry for the
confusion.

Either way, it was pretty clear he wanted out, with what I think are valid
reasons. The article makes it look like a "take a money and run", leaving a
dissatisfied bunch of employees behind.

First, the employees seemed dissatisfied before (why that is relevant to the
sale, I am not sure), and it seems to me the deal was pretty good for them.

Second, and this is just my impression, is that Minecraft, from the
community's PoV was already completely outside the hands of Mojang's founders,
so they didn't exactly abandon the product.

------
MrZongle2
Several items from the article jumped out at me, such as:

 _" Everyone at Mojang was made the same offer: whoever stayed on board for at
least six months after the sale would be rewarded with two million Swedish
crowns, approximately three hundred thousand dollars, after taxes."_

While it pales in comparison to the payday Mojang's founders received, I'd be
happy to get that much. Especially if:

 _" The three founders were yet to make anyone else a shareholder in the
company, not even those who had been with Mojang from the start. This meant
that the massive profits generated by Minecraft still went straight into their
pockets, even though Markus himself hadn’t done any actual work on Minecraft
for over two years now. ... Many no longer regarded Markus, Carl, and Jakob as
their equals, as part of the team, but simply as management. Mojang had long
since ceased to be anything but a workplace."_

Sounds like if you were a working stiff at Mojang, your options were simply
"find a new job" or "enjoy a $300,000 bonus after 6 months of continued
employment". Compared to what had been happening, this sounds like an
_improvement_.

I can't blame Mojang's founders for selling the company; hell, I'd do the same
when offered that much money. Markus (Notch) can spend the rest of his life
quietly making games mostly to amuse himself. That sounds like a dream. But
when I read something like this:

 _" When Microsoft sent a delegation for its first official visit to Mojang in
Stockholm, Markus wasn’t around. Few if any of his employees knew for sure,
but it was rumored that he’d just returned from a few days in Vegas with
Jakob. Either way, he was either too tired or too uninterested to show up in
person. The task of representing Mojang to its new owners fell on Carl."_

and:

 _" The day before, Markus had put in his last day at work. Several others
were in the office as he stood up to leave. He hesitated, not sure how to say
goodbye. So he decided not to."_

...I can't help but think, "geez, what an ass." You've got your big payday,
but you can't even be bothered to see the thing through or say goodbye to some
of the people who helped _make_ your big payday happen?

This is only one side of the story, of course, and as rilita notes elsewhere
in this thread this is largely a promotion for a book. After reading this and
having watched Minecraft's lack of progress over the last year (compared to
its previous 2), I think that perhaps the acquisition by Microsoft may be the
best thing that happened to the game.

~~~
vidarh
> perhaps the acquisition by Microsoft may be the best thing that happened to
> the game.

I can't believe I'm saying this - as a previously long time avowed Microsoft
hater (I used to be an Amiga user - it's in my blood...) - but I agree. My 6
year old son plays a lot of Minecraft, both the PC version, mobile version and
Xbox version, and it's just amazing how stagnant the official versions are
compared to the thousands of mods my son watches reviews of.

It also boggles my mind how little has been done to enable extra paid content,
given how incredibly excited he is about texture packs and skins and mods. For
the PC version there's a thriving eco-system that Mojang was not part of. For
the other versions there's a very limited set of extra content for the Xbox
version (which we now have all of...) unless you want to go through the hassle
of storing maps on an external storage device and modding it on a PC.

Who knows yet if Microsoft will do much more with it, but they can hardly do
less.

~~~
MrZongle2
_" it's just amazing how stagnant the official versions are compared to the
thousands of mods my son watches reviews of."_

Preach it, fellow parent and Amiga user! :D

It's like Mojang hit upon success and didn't know what to do next. From an
outsider's point of view, by late 2013 the company didn't seem to really have
_any_ vision or direction besides arranging the next Minecon. That year saw
the release of versions 1.6 and 1.7, which both contributed greatly to the
game's content and replayability.

Then 2014 rolled around, and it took pretty much the entire year for Mojang to
release one version that added a couple of blocks, flags, and _still_ didn't
contain the long-requested and (supposedly) long-worked-upon Plugin API for
modders.

Makes you wonder where Minecraft would be today if they had kept their initial
energy and focus.

~~~
mjevans
The Forge and FML 'mods' are effectively the defacto modding API at this
point. Sure, something official might be released, or maybe MS will do what
Mojang should have done and somehow integrate this project in to the core;
however at this point the modding community has momentum.

------
adventured
"Everyone else had to do with a normal salary, plus whatever perks or bonuses
Markus decided to throw their way when he felt generous."

To say that Markus had been generous with employees, would be an
understatement.

[https://twitter.com/notch/status/175174949277941760](https://twitter.com/notch/status/175174949277941760)

~~~
paulornothing
It certainly seems like for some reason (I assume the success of the game)
that employees think they are entitled to more than a reasonable salary. I've
worked plenty of jobs where I've received a decent salary and no perks. The
one company I worked for was doing really well, I received a good salary and
we received perks. No trips anywhere but catered lunches or desert bars or
other things about every other month or so. Things like that show that you are
appreciated, not sure where the entitlement comes from.

~~~
adventured
It sounds like nothing more than run-of-the-mill envy and fear of change.

Someone else is getting rich. I don't think people anywhere - Sweden or
otherwise - are immune to it. I believe it's an extraordinarily common human
attribute. I think the culture at Mojang amplified, perhaps even was
responsible for, the sense the employees had that it was their baby.

I inherited a business with a dozen employees when my parents died at a young
age. The tenure of the employees was long, averaging ten or so years. The
employees believed the business belonged to them (they had never been promised
ownership, they didn't own it in any regard), that their jobs were perpetual,
and that their roles were to never change. For the next year, they were fond
of quoting that "well, I was told that my job was x y z by the previous
owners." I've never met more entitled people in my life, and this was at a
small business that didn't make tons of money. That extreme atmosphere of
entitlement, in that case, came from how the former ownership had, basically,
allowed the inmates to run the asylum and never have to deal with change. It
became, as the years went by, an increasingly entrenched mindset that it was
their business, and they were all very afraid of change at their ages (average
age of 45).

~~~
honestcoyote
If your employees were basically running the shop with little-to-no control
from your parents, then it's only natural they would feel a sense of
ownership. It's a very human reaction.

And when someone much younger takes over and wants to implement changes,
that's going to be scary to employees aged 40+, who depend on the job for
their mortgages, kid's college, and retirement. And who are going to have a
hard time getting a new job of equal pay, thanks to age discrimination in many
industries, if your changes lead to them being let go.

I'm sure the situation was incredibly frustrating for you. I've been where you
are, in the sense of working with middle-aged people terrified of change.
Quite maddening. But now that I'm middle-aged myself and fighting similar
tendencies, I can have a lot of empathy for them. I hope you can have at least
a little.

------
frik
Yesterday, LEGO launched Minecraft's competitor LEGO Worlds:
[http://videogames.lego.com/en-us/lego-
worlds/about/screensho...](http://videogames.lego.com/en-us/lego-
worlds/about/screenshots)

~~~
somedangedname
What a terrible launch page. Video not front and centre, video trailer doesn't
load and the 'more info' button displays copyright information. Because that's
what grabs kid's attention these days - a wordy rights statement asserting
WB's ownership of '...the Brick and the Knob configurations'.

------
andyidsinga
this really shocked me. He must have been filled with all sorts of mixed
emotions to not even say goodbye to the team. (or he did, and for whatever
reason that's not public ..).

    
    
      >> The day before, Markus had put in his last day 
      at work. Several others were in the office as he stood 
      up to leave. He hesitated, not sure how to say goodbye.
      So he decided not to. He made his way past the desks
      outside where his employees sat working, past the shelves 
      stacked with awards and prizes. He took a left out the 
      door, went down a small stairwell, and stepped out of the 
      building.

------
z3t4
I guess Notch wanted to try the rockstar life, something he couldn't do
representing Mojang. I hope he gets tired of it and comes back to the gaming
scene, or at least starts blogging again. He has a really great analytic mind
when it comes to games.

He actually quit his day job to start making games on how own. (He already
made games for a living). And decided to make Minecraft because he knew it was
easy money he could use to keep afloat.

Jens already had his own successful game studio when joining Mojang. It was a
pretty good hire ... I guess he's not that good at negotiating, considered he
didn't get any ownership. But I guess he's happy enough to be the lead on the
greatest games of all time, besides Tetris. :P

------
DrTung
Always thought he'd opensource Minecraft and then sell it to Unicef (or
Unesco) for 1 dollar. But alas it was not to be :-(

------
triplesec
I wish it had put "book excerpt" in the HN header because I was looking for
the rest of the article when I got to the bottom. Not satisfying.

------
boroboro
It's always an opportunity to sell to someone how is desperate and has deep
pockets, especially when you're currently looking for an exit. Minecraft,
Wunderlist, ...

------
pcunite
Any story about Minecraft needs to mention Zachary Barth.

------
rilita
Interesting, but this is just a huge advertisement for a book. Also; it says
nothing about what Microsoft is doing with Minecraft in the last year. There
is no new news here in this blurb as far as I can tell. Move along.

~~~
VLM
"Also; it says nothing about what Microsoft is doing with Minecraft in the
last year."

That is accurate. Nothing so far. At least in public.

When the news of the purchase went out there was a lot of theory about how
they will get rid of all console ports but the msphone/xbox ports, get rid of
the osx and linux port, somehow find a way to make it un-runnable on anything
but windows 8 which I'm sure with effort is technically possible, or monetize
the heck out of it like buy diamonds for real world cash or whatever.

I'm not sure if they're wisely waiting for things to quiet and calm, or if
they're actually making no progress.

The modding community is busy enough. I don't think its possible for one human
to keep up with absolutely everything in the FTB DW20 pack, for example. It
would just take more wall clock time to gain expertise than there is wall
clock time between new releases and new mods.

~~~
rilita
There was a lot of hoopla from the community right when it happened. The head
of forge quite, leaving the guy under him to make the next forge version. The
one guy in bukkit sunk the whole project due to it also.

I would like to know what if anything Microsoft has done to help Forge to keep
the community strong. My guess: nothing as you say. If they have done
something that would be news.

There is speculation that nearly all Minecraft mods right now are illegal due
to reverse engineering of the obfuscated core.

