

WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion - prs
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323807004578282142065371984.html

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nicpottier
I love Minecraft, it is genius, original and tons of fun, but you need at
least two points to draw a line, one hit does not a trend make.

The game world is littered with 'one hit wonders' but it is very hard to
repeat that success, doubly so on the scale of Minecraft.

For those that say Mojang is somehow unique, that Notch is the messiah of indy
gaming, all I can say is survivor bias. The game industry is chock full of
brilliant, passionate peeps who build really original games that just fail to
spark the imagination of a large audience for one reason or another.

Hope the best for Mojang and co, love their work on Minecraft and hope they
can follow it up with something just as unique, but this article is making
some big leaps.

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justinhj
I've been working on video games for 20 years and from my perspective
Minecraft is not a one hit wonder, it's the coming of age of a genre. It
reminds me of when I first saw Doom running. It was graphically beautiful for
the day and a real technical accomplishment. Although it was by no means the
first FPS, it was a huge hit and drove a lot of other companies to go into the
genre. That industry has peaked today with Call of Duty being a $1b franchise.

With Minecraft, Notch took some really good games and put them together in a
way that had much more Universal appeal. I wouldn't be surprised if the genre
expands and matures and takes 15 years to play out. I think it's likely Mojang
will lead that process.

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jiggy2011
Surely this depends on if they can continue to produce smash hits like
minecraft.

While I love the idea of 0x10c I don't know if it will replicate the success.

It's something I find it hard to explain to people who don't understand things
like programming and emulators. It could just be too hard to have the sort of
mass appeal that minecraft did.

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dwerthen
Surely the same thing could have been said about Minecraft, having little to
no mass appeal, before it became a huge hit, no?

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ben0x539
Lightning never strikes the same place twice, etc

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wcoenen
I never got that analogy. Lightning will strike the same place over and over
again[1], because that place has the least resistance for charge to flow
between the clouds and the ground.

[1] <http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00354.htm>

~~~
zeroexzeroone
After lightning strikes it probably doesnt :)

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mbesto
_It takes 3,000 employees for Zynga Inc., ZNGA -0.38% the largest social-
network game company in the world, to generate at least $150 million in annual
operating profit.

From an office in Stockholm, a largely unknown company brought in more than
half that sum. Its employee count: 29._

Ugh, this type of statement does a massive desservice to the programming
service provider industry.

~~~
buerkle
And it ignores the thousands of people writing mods for minecraft.

~~~
cookiecaper
With something close to absolutely no support from Mojang, even though they've
appropriated some of the community's features.

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tterrace
I just finished talking with a colleague whose six year old loves minecraft
and I remember talking with a twelve year old who was similarly obsessed - to
the point of knowing the patch numbers and all the details. The community
which grew organically around this game is incredible, and that kind of peer-
to-peer promotion is priceless.

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Shivetya
and if you don't want to play it there are many people who stream their
playing of this game.

I have used twitch.tv for perusing games I am interested in as well as
screening games for my niece and nephew, usually I send a link to my sister
and ask if the game is acceptable and would her kids enjoy that.

~~~
tterrace
That was another thing he mentioned - his kid watches all the minecraft
youtube videos too. I'm sure if you get bored of doing your own thing you can
take a look at what other people are making and come away with a whole new
perspective on how to play the game.

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bstar77
For the people who criticize Minecraft as an underwhelming gaming experience,
you need to look at the game from a different perspective...

For a young child, this game has a tremendous lure... it's very simple to
visually take in. All of the objects you build with bricks are abstract
representations of real life things. For a child, visualizing a castle in
minecraft is much easier to process than showing them one in a Lord of the
Rings movie.

The other thing is that there's really no rules. You can pretty much do
whatever you want... build stuff, explore, play the actual campaign, fight bad
guys, etc. This is the exact opposite of the 'cinematic' experience most other
games try to create. Kids will bec creating their own storyline in their
minds.

Minecraft is the ultimate game of imagination and kids will eat it up like
candy. This is why it's made so much money and has become a cultural
phenomenon.

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mmahemoff
Is it really a child's game? I got the impression it had pretty broad appeal
especially as it's programmable.

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bstar77
It definitely has tremendous broad appeal, but I think the characteristics I
mentioned above is what puts it into this category of it's own. Notch has done
an amazing design job of baking in advanced gameplay without affecting any of
the accessibility.

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Hawkee
I'm surprised to see an article that requires a paid subscription on the front
page of HN.

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nicholassmith
Minecraft isn't WoW (that's a good thing). WoW is pretty much aggressively
targeted to make large amounts of money, which is why they're valued so high.
Mojang seem to want to make things that are cool and fun, more than they want
to set up large subscription bases, add on packs and so on. Could Mojang
become a billion dollar company? Sure, maybe. Anything can happen. Is it a
good comparison between them and Blizzard? I'd say no, they seem to have
distinctly different goals.

You know what's cool, being a company that is happy making things rather than
being a billion dollar company and dealing with the headaches of stock price
related soothsaying.

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corkeh
For those having trouble getting past the paywall:
[http://wsjwap.mo2do.net/s/4150/388?articleId=SB1000142412788...](http://wsjwap.mo2do.net/s/4150/388?articleId=SB10001424127887323807004578282142065371984&fullStory=fullStory)

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topherjaynes
This link works:
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732380700457828...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323807004578282142065371984.html)

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6ren
not for me :(

EDIT: Googling the title got one that works (for me).

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webwanderings
> Sales occur digitally rather than through brick-and-mortar stores ...

This isn't true. I bought the Minecraft (activation card) for my son through
Walmart.

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geuis
Please don't submit articles behind pay walls.

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martinced
I think one real lesson here is that super-shiny high end graphics are not
what counts. The gameplay is by far the most important ingredient in any
game's success.

More than ten years ago back when I playing Counter-Strike (CS still being
immensively succesful btw) I was using a "low poly" mod: this would replace
the models of the players with models made of fewer polygons (the head became
a cube, etc.) because it would give me a faster framerate.

And the shitty graphics didn't matter: the important thing was the gameplay.

If you can have both great gameplay, great graphics and great perfs, go for
it.

But if you have to choose and want to get succesful: cut down the graphics
budget. That's not what's going to make your game succesful.

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slmt
It just goes to show that social proof is extremely powerful. 1. Create a
really crap game that's not really a game. 2\. Create a site with a bullshit
stats page showing how many geeks are supposedly buying it and how fast. 3\.
Spam about it on geeky sites. 4\. Watch all the geeks throw money at you as
they try to prove that they are geeky enough by buying a sandbox game that
they "totally get." Mojang, I salute you.

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criley
Wow, you could not have misread Mojang any worse. You must be intentionally
obtuse here -- I refuse to believe that you're this ignorant.

You feel like some washed up older guy pissed off that his idea didn't make
it, content to sit and pooh-pooh anything else that comes by. "My idea was so
great, but no, stupid little blocks is what idiots around the world want" is
the vibe I get from you.

"Crappy game" "bullshit stats" "spam it"

You're jealous and content to sit there and throw your sour grapes at anyone
who dares actually like Minecraft.

Honestly, you're an insult to the spirit of this site and the people who come
here. To shit all over a start up that is wildly successful for no other
reason than you dislike it -- Shame on you.

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Harkins
He can be wrong without being a personal failure driven by spite. Your comment
is not so nice.

