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.
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).
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.
It's unbalanced. There's really no good reason why management should be getting orders of magnitude more profits than the employees just for being there first.
I think the cooperative model[1] should really be the natural order of things. Too bad it's not very common, especially in software.
In this case, "management" (ie, Markus and one or two others) has done 95% of the work of making and selling a hugely successful product. Everyone else was brought on later for support and maintenance.
People are talking about startups, but this is nothing remotely like a typical startup scenario.
