The rumors were true: Microsoft has bought Mojang, creators of Minecraft. The rumors were off a little bit — the speculation was that they’d pay $2 billion. It was actually $2.5 billion. But what’s half a billion dollars, anyway?
There’s some unreassuring reassurances, though.
There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC/Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android versions of Minecraft to stop. Of course, Microsoft can’t make decisions for other companies or predict the choices that they might make in the future.
One word: Bungie.
I remember Bungie as the great, innovative game company that was primarily a Mac shop, back in the days when my kids and I would play video games together. Marathon was great for it’s time, it was evolving into this newly announced game called Halo, with pre-announcements at Mac cons, and then it was bought by Microsoft, and everything dried up. They came out with Myth, which was cross-platform and really good, but then it was focusing on making XBox games. Bungie is now a full-on Microsoft-only company. Their next game, Destiny: consoles only.
If you want to know why Macs have a reputation as bad boxes for gaming, just look at Microsoft and their practice of strangling the market by buying up the best developers and killing cross-platform games as much as they can. Minecraft is a game where what computer you use is totally irrelevant and makes no difference in accessibility. I won’t be surprised if that changes soon.
Or maybe it’s because Apple has never been a big enough seller in desktops and laptops to garner much interest from game developers.
Your Apple worship is one of the few things about you that annoys me, PZ.
Not that I like Microsoft any better, btw. And it’s not really fair to use Destiny to support your argument since it supports Playstation as well as Xbox. It’s just not on computers, which is the case with a lot of games these days.
Dude, he just wants to be able to play future versions of Minecraft on a Mac. That’s hardly “Apple worship” – that’s not worship of any kind, just mentioning that he uses an Apple.
I’ve got more games for my Mac than I have time to play.
It’s always sad watching independent game studios get bought out by larger ones. It feels like we’re losing that much more creativity in the world of gaming.
Historically, Apple was a much harder platform to target, because Apple has frequently changed its APIs and its hardware. This is a lot less of an issue now with there being game engine companies dedicated to making their stuff work cross-platform.
There are few PC programs out there you can’t run on a Mac with emulation, such as VMWare and Parallels, or even dual boot your Mac with Windows.
You do have to fork over the $150 or so for Windows OS if you want to do it legally, of course.
What makes this surprising is that Mojang founder Notch Persson has been very critical of Microsoft and their business practices. He opined that he’d rather Minecraft not run on Windows 8 at all than endorse the platform and distribute his game through the restrictive Windows “store.”
Destiny is coming to PC in 2015, apparently.
Personally I think this is a great acquisition because Microsoft will never make its money back, no matter how hard they try. A sequel, made by Microsoft’s subsidiaries, will be devoid of life, nickle and dimed to death with DLC, will never reach the same broad appeal and market saturation as the original. Microsoft will take this golden egg and turn it into a brown turd in no time flat. Heads will spin they’ll screw this up so fast.
It could always be worse, too, even if I’m wrong. It could have been EA to buy up the company and IP, and the next Minecraft would be tablet/phone only and charge you money to speed up your timer bars to cut down a tree or forge a new weapon.
The main reason Apple isn’t normally viewed as viable for gaming is because they are closed systems, with high buy in cost, and core pc gaming demographic build their own gaming rigs. I just built myself a brand new pc for the first time in 4.5 years, and had I bought a similarly specced Apple laptop or desktop, I would have paid 2 to 2.5 times the cost, and be sending it off to Apple (plus paying fees) for them to upgrade/exchange parts I can easily change out myself here in two years when its time to upgrade things like ram and video cards. Its really that simple.
That’s not to say Microsoft’s business practices haven’t helped contribute to this trend of Microsoft being the go to for gaming pcs, they have, but Apple definitely bears some of the blame when it comes to why they aren’t seen as gaming pcs.
I wonder how current minecraft users will be affected by this buyout. I considered trying out MC now it seems like a bad idea.
I hope M$ doesn’t kill off the Linux version, either. It’s all written in Java, so there’s no reason to not support multiple platforms, unless M$ decides to rewrite the whole thing with C# and Silverlight.
Michael Deaton @8: I guarantee you, no mass-market game targets gamer rigs. There’s even fewer of them than there are Macs, and besides, no two have the same set of bugs!
The number of people who even do something as simple as upgrade their RAM or install a bigger hard drive is tiny; so tiny that Apple doesn’t feel like it’s necessary to even support doing that anymore.
I just seriously hope they don’t kill the modding community. That’s the only thing keeping me at all interested in Minecraft anymore. I wouldn’t play it if I couldn’t also cast spells or make sorting boxes less of a chore.
Maybe I’m being optimistic but I don’t think Microsoft is stupid enough to change Minecraft significantly. The entire charm of the game is in its simplicity and in the community. I’m crossing my fingers that this is one of those “here have shiny resources in exchange for letting us soak up the profits” kind of buyouts.
I can’t blame Notch, though.
I mean, a billion dollars. That’s serious fuck you money.
To be honest, I’m not sure how much I care about MS buying Minecraft. Mojang’s been remarkably slow about releasing updates; they brought in one of the biggest mod groups (bukkit) under their wing and effectively killed it; the years-ago-promised modding API has never materialized. Minecraft as it exists today would be extraordinarily difficult to take away–its security is easily bypassed–and, who knows, maybe MS can do something with it.
As a pedantic sidenote, Bungie went their own way from MS a while ago. Destiny will probably come out for the Mac eventually, they just made it a temporary console exclusive.
“Bungie is now a full-on Microsoft-only company. Their next game, Destiny: consoles only.”
Currently yes, but it should be noted that ‘consoles only’ includes non-microsoft consoles.
“Bungie is now a full-on Microsoft-only company.”
No. Bungie is not affiliated with Microsoft in any way anymore. They had a contract to do Halo and its first sequels, which has now ended. Destiny is out for the PS4 as well as the Xbox.
It’s just that console games have progressed to the point that there isn’t much need for PCs anymore.
Andrew T., #7
Maybe that’s the reason Notch said he’ll leave Mojang as soon as the deal is finalized. I think the other two founders are also leaving.
Wow, pipped at comment #1. But hey, while I’m here:
“The number of people who even do something as simple as upgrade their RAM or install a bigger hard drive is tiny; so tiny that Apple doesn’t feel like it’s necessary to even support doing that anymore.”
It occurs to me that part of the reason there are so few HDD upgrades in mac-land is that the process is enough of a pain in the arse that some of those that are curious about the process become discouraged; with a “we don’t need it that much”, the idea is simply dropped.
Last I installed a hard drive in a mac — or added memory sticks — it was super easy: shut down, unplug the power, open the machine, stick stuff into the proper slots, close it up and boot. The exact same difficulty level as doing it on any other machine. “We don’t need it that much” isn’t so much the sentiment I typically hear as “what, you can *do* that?!?”
I finally got over my social anxiety enough to join a minecraft server. I hope that I don’t regret it because of this. I’m worried about how this will affect the modding community (though I did join a vanilla Minecraft server, baby steps). Folks worried about platform, OS and other availability do have good points because limiting user options for profit is an instinct that can kill other things.
But I’m actually cautiously optimistic. What Microsoft did with Bungie was really well done in many ways and many (myself included) feel that Bungie was allowed to be themselves to enough of a degree that it ended up a positive, for a while. One game can’t be a standard forever and arguably Halo was a standard for business reasons for too long. But I’m not so sure that making a game like Minecraft a standard via corporate patronage is a bad thing IF it’s done right.
Where are these stores of which you speak? Next to the Apple Genius stores?
*cough* *cough*
ummm, that’s the thing I’m noting. Apple is guilty of the restrictive stores of Apple-only products, the only place to get anything compatible to Apple equips. M$ problem is exactly the opposite: the market is so open that installing PC compatible periphs in your PC can result in hours of tweeking to get it to even boot. So, my experience has been either choosing Totalitarianism or Libertarianism versions of the computer config space.
“Mac vs PC” arguments used to banished from the Usenet space as “religious wars”. So none of that here on the Free-Thought-Intertubez !!11!!
I have never played Minecraft, but in general, Microsoft buying a company is a bad thing. We shall see. In the meantime, I have decided that my next machine will be a high-powered Linux laptop. I want to have nothing to do with the “gaming community.”
My 10 year-old daughter’s an avid Minecraft player (and watcher of the Minecraft videos on YouTube). She uses a Mac (of course!) and if/when Microsoft screw things up, so that she can’t use a Mac any more, she (and the millions of kids like her) will just move on to the next environment. What’s staring Microsoft in the face is what happened to MySpace when Murdoch bought it (oblivion and billions wasted). They’ve never managed *not* to screw things up in the past – maybe this will be the first time, but I’m not holding my breath.
@22, twas brillig (stevem):
What? You clearly don’t own a Mac, and must not even have used one for at least a decade. (This seems to be pretty common with the “I’m not a fanboy, I just hate fanboys of ____ platform” fanboys. For all their criticism of Windows Vista and/or 8, Linux fanboys tend not to have actually used Windows since 98, or sometimes XP — which was released over a decade ago now, which makes it a silly basis for comparison.) I haven’t had to buy anything from an Apple store for a very long time unless I wanted to. My last hardware purchase was from Micro Center, where I bought a BlueTooth keyboard which — surprise! — works perfectly and cost under $20.
At least there are plenty of GPL Minecraft clones out there. If Microsoft is boneheaded enough to terminate Linux support, devs will pick up one of the clones and possibly turn it into a serious competitor.
Snoof@14:
Others agree. Considering it’s a game and not a real baby, I can’t really blame them. They can make more games…
PZ is/was a fan of Marathon. I’m impressed! Although I guess that shouldn’t be surprising— if you played video games and you had a Mac and it was the 90s, there weren’t a lot of choices available.
I usually steer clear of the comments around here, but I’m very informed on this topic, so I feel compelled to dispel a little of the speculation.
In foremost; as implied in the Mojang press release as well as in earlier articles speculating on the deal from last week — this isn’t the result of Microsoft eating a small studio. Marcus “Notch” Persson went to Microsoft and initiated the deal. It’s clear that Minecraft has grown far past his comfort level and his tolerance for celebrity, so he’s getting out. If you follow much of his material about his game development in the last few years, he’s been having a great deal of trouble handling the pressure of making a follow up to one of the biggest games ever designed — an issue that should be easy to understand.
Microsoft is not some sort of predator here, but they did win the jackpot. As Tycho of Penny-Arcade has said: Microsoft isn’t buying a game, they’re buying a generation. Minecraft is incredibly pervasive among children, and that has long term market value if used correctly.
Moving sideways a bit, there are a LOT of reasons why Apple has never been a gaming stronghold. In the infancy of the company, it was not an issue — games came out everywhere because no one had made any decisions yet. As gaming became bigger, it was all about install base. You sell to the largest group of customers. Apple had insisted until about 8 years ago that they need to control both the software and hardware components of their computers — where Microsoft much more cleverly let everyone else make hardware and only worried about the Operating System and core applications.
Additionally, when you saw independent developers, if they decided they were anti-corporate enough to shun Microsoft, they would go all the way to Unix based operating systems instead, rather than stopping comfortably at Mac OS; because the *nix systems were more open and more friendly to the tech savvy, where Apple was still a profit driven corporation and they were not as open. Additionally Apple spent a great deal of time crafting the image of Computers for Artists, which repelled most programmers.
This all snowballed. Hardware developed to produce better games came to PCs first, which lead to new drivers and better specifications for gaming. Apple was always playing catch up. It’s only been since they adopted standard hardware architecture that they playing field has leveled out, but their audience is still smaller and cross development still has associated costs, and Apple is doing essentially nothing to encourage the gaming market to come to their desktops. They’re not even motivated to retain the mobile gaming popularity that they have, which is slowly siphoning off to Android.
Lastly, I wanted to specifically comment on Brett McCoy @10:
“I hope M$ doesn’t kill off the Linux version, either. It’s all written in Java, so there’s no reason to not support multiple platforms, unless M$ decides to rewrite the whole thing with C# and Silverlight.”
I hope they do produce a version that’s not in Java. Anyone with programming experience will tell you that Java is a terrible platform. It’s only claim to fame is cross compatibility. Anyone who spends any time in Minecraft will recognize that even a beefy computer will often have difficulty running the game at high settings. This isn’t because the game is doing a lot of heavy lifting — it’s a two part problem starting with how Minecraft was developed (without an explicit architecture, but piece by piece with only a vague end goal), and because it’s written in Java which handles memory VERY poorly. The combination of the two means that Minecraft requires easily two or three times as much “power” (processing and memory) than is strictly necessary for what it does.
A complete rewrite of Minecraft from the ground up in a native programming language like C# would produce drastically better results. It would be slower to deploy across multiple platforms — specifically Windows, Mac Os, and Linux — but it wouldn’t be any slower than it is from Computers to Portables and Consoles which cannot run Java or cannot run Minecraft’s meaty core coding. (And if you follow the development news, lots of optimizations that have been created for Minecraft in the last four years come from implementing existing features in the Mobile version, where memory restrictions are too tight to play it fast and loose.)
If Microsoft is smart, they’ll continue developing Minecraft exactly as is for the next few years, and in parallel they’ll make Minecraft 2 which rebuilds everything from the ground, efficiently.
I know Microsoft has a terrible reputation, which is mostly perpetuated by ignorance. They got burned hard when they said the XBox One would have DRM controls that would block used games. Everyone assumes they came up with that idea; but they didn’t. That was something that Publishers (like EA) were pushing. Sony made fun of them for it and scored PR points, but Sony had a patent for the same technology, and they had it first. People have attacked Microsoft for bad policy, but very few people acknowledge them when they respond to the criticism and change. The XBox One doesn’t block used games. Windows 8 does not route all software through a Windows Store — but you’ll notice that Mac OS and iOS certainly do. (Though I believe only in the latter is it mandatory.) Microsoft also spends more R&D dollars than any other software company — that sort of thing is good for games like Minecraft.
I don’t know that Microsoft is “Good”, but it’s certainly not evil.
@1 (!!!!!) thelastholdout
First comment. pow!
So, does the Applesturmklagengruppe have bots everywhere?
However you folks manage it, that’s one über-efficient scarmble alert system you folks have there.
And I agreee… the following sort of statement is always a flag:
Large: “We stopped supporting that because company x did thing y.
We warned you about that, and explained that we had no control
or influence.”
Small: “We don’t remember you mentioning this. Are you sure?”
Large: “Yes. We did. Absolutely. The cause is clear, and the outcome was
unavoidable. As we said it would be.”
Small: “Do you have a reference to that statement?”
Large: “Of course… um… … …
(whisper to side) Hey! Who is company x? Uh-huh…
And what did this company x do? What? Well…
what can we say they did?
There is some stuff incorrect about Bungie in the post
Bungie was acquired by Microsoft in 2000, but in 2007 it spun off into Bungie LLC. An entity which Microsoft does not have any control over. However Microsoft does own the IP on the Halo franchise,
The halo games created after that were made by a Microsoft team not the original bungie team, and they were pretty poor quality.
Bungie LLC’s new game Destiny is cross platform and will be out on PC.
Also i am assuming there might be some bad blood between Microsoft and Bungie as Microsoft was not aloud to run commercials or advertise in anyway that showed actually game footage. all they could do is show the name of the game and when it came out.
A little off topic, but I have a question for parents of kids who play Minecraft. My 4 yo plays Minecraft and what he is learning is really astounding. (He plays on PC, NOT tablet) – he can use a keyboard fairly well and is learning to read and spell by searching his inventory. I even made an inventory list with images of specific items so he can spell the words on his own for the most part ( I might have one of the few 4 yo’s that can almost spell “obsidian” lol!). However, I would like to incorporate more structured learning – but every google search seems to bring up pricey teacher/classroom agendas…not what I am looking for. Does anyone have any ideas or resources on how to bring more education into the minecraft experience, specifically for pre-K kids?
More on topic, I do not think this buyout bodes well for Minecraft players. Especially for the modding community. If MS can squeeze a penny by stifling creativity, that’s what they are going to do. However, it would be pretty easy to set up emulators for this kind of thing – it would just be about getting all the interested persons into the right project/server.
Come to think of it, this could be worse.
@29, Eric Burl:
This is at least misleading.
Apple deliberately avoided supporting the games market for around a decade, starting in 1984 with the removal of Steve Jobs as CEO. Michael Spindler — the man who replaced Jobs — and his crowd of sycophants felt that the Mac, using a GUI where PCs of the time used DOS, was already too toy-like, and they would be more likely to break into the business market if they discouraged games.
This is another brilliant idea from the same bunch of people who thought that Apple shouldn’t have its own in-house application programming team (to encourage 3rd-party software), that it would make more sense to add a $500 charge onto the price of the original Mac and market it as a “premium brand”*, and that an Apple-branded programming environment for the Mac should cost $1000 or more (MPW) because nothing encourages people to write software like having to drop $1000 to do it. Not the sharpest bunch of knives in the drawer.
*This decision was more or less the first one made as Jobs was shown the door — given that the price of the original Mac was $2000 without the extra charge, it tells you how much Spindler liked to give his customer base the middle finger.
@33, The Vicar:
Sorry about misleading a bit, not intentional, and thanks for correcting it. Though I do maintain that part of the reason why Apple did not push to greater adoption is due to their restricted hardware model. A major part of Microsoft’s success has always been attributed to the decision to have MS-DOS included on IBM machines while retaining the option to have other manufacturers also distribute the OS; something that launched Microsoft’s position as the market leader in consumer operating systems. The more user friendly nature of DOS applications at the time (which was compounded by the introduction of Windows later on) over Unix, and the wide distribution of the OS through computer manufacturers with a positive reputation with businesses — IBM specifically — made PCs a default.
That market share was quickly adopted for games — something well witnessed by the volume of DOS games released commercially in the era that simply wasn’t seen elsewhere. If Apple’s anti-gaming stance was the only cause of their lack of games (especially after a fair prevalence of small production games earlier), we’d probably have seen a similar number of commercial releases for other platforms. While games on Unix systems weren’t unheard of, they were also usually tinkerings that took advantage of the network architecture (like the long legacy of Roguelikes), but I honestly can’t think of any commercially released *nix games until about ten years ago.
Still, the loss of Jobs and the introduction of Spindler did have a profound effect on how Apple was run and what their computers could do. It’s hard to speculate though on how things might have been different if Jobs had retained control over that period.
While I’ve broken most of my Microsoft ties over the years, preferring Apple and *nix for my work and development, there are a few things that still make it an attractive platform for developers. Install base is the most obvious, and that install base is equal parts monopoly (at least it used to be) and configurability.
But for all of Microsofts failings (and there were/are many), they did a lot of things right on the platform, the most basic of which was DirectX. It had it’s growing pains initially, but as it matured, it became a very powerful platform that made developing on those systems far easier than using the native or low-level stack. Yes, a skilled developer team can make OpenGL dance, but that means you’re investing more time there and less time into the game itself. OpenGL did also lag behind for quite some time, though that distance has closed, especially on mobile, but Microsoft has been continually pushing it as well.
One of the big issues with trying to get stuff on OSX for games is that you’re basically at the mercy of Apple for video driver and OpenGL stack support. For years, up until 10.7 (if I’m remembering right), OSX was effectively two generations behind any other platform for graphics, and there was absolutely no way to get it up to speed. Apple is also primarily a laptop company when you look at production, since even the iMac, while not portable, uses the same device integration stack.
And ultimately, the big reason why Apple never took off as a gaming platform, at least on desktop/OSX, is that Apple was never interested in it. They know games are the bread and butter of the mobile world, so there’s a huge focus, but we’ve never seen that snap back to the rest of the world.
I also want to say that today’s Microsoft isn’t the Microsoft most of us are used to. While their nonsense with the Xbox One is always disheartening, but as a developer, they’ve made a huge number of turns. They’ve been opening up a lot of their software stack, they’ve been supporting other operating systems in releases (their office stuff runs on Mac and iOS, and they’ve been putting more out there), and their cloud platform is a very broad tent. Time will tell how this one works out, it all depends on which Microsoft shows up to move it.
The minecraft story could make a fascinating documentary. Notch was just a programmer tinkering with a spare-time project until he decided that other people might like like it. It exploded in popularity, becoming one of the best-selling games ever, capturing the imaginations of millions of people, particularly kids, some of whom will hopefully have been inspired to learn programming, to deliver mind-blowing applications in the future. And yet it’s been obvious for some time that Notch struggled with the pressures that this brought to his life. Today, he wrote this post about leaviing Mojang, and linked to a Youtube video about public hate directed at another indie gaming personality.
The Internet makes it much easier for an indie developer to find a market. But, if your work takes off, this can carry a severe cost: people turn you into a symbol, a target of either creepy adulation when they like what you do, or staggering levels of hate when you do wrong in their eyes – and that can turn on a dime. I’m sure that huge wealth makes that easier to bear, but I still feel sorry for anyone who writes “if I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.” When you love creating stuff, but the lesson you’ve learned is that you don’t want people to love that stuff? That’s messed up.
Minecraft today is:
– a slow (now) steady trickle of new gamers (literally new generational waves) buying it and people buying it on other platforms.
– A large and vibrant player fanbase.
– A modding community.
– The huge (counted by millions of subscribers, hits, views, mentions, search rankings, and yes dollars enough to put a good many hundred people worldwide in gainful employment) Minecraft YouTube community, riding on top of the modders and mods, creating endless versions of Minecraft fun, laughing, swearing, feeling a little old in their mid-to-early-thirties, watched and adored by hardcore fans, teens, tweens, children, babes in swaddling cloth and their middle-aged-to-young adult gamer fans and mothers, who wished they’d done good on the YouTubes as well back in the day (2006-9).
The only way Microsoft can make money of of this is to either fuck every one of the above participants over royally for monetary gain, or totally rethink how they make money. Personally I think it’s more of a “PR move for good MS kudos and we’re totes indy not a big money-grabbing corporate tie-wearing company!” Support the Minecraft community and you have many loyal consumers for life. (I hope it’s this last one).
@dWhisper
Of course I’m biased as a developer in MS tech, but for me: the stability, performance and scalability of MSSQL (over any other DB engine I’ve met), followed by C# and .Net (I’m a web developer). Yes, they’ve done more things well.
But then there’s SharePoint. And I’ll just shut up now because even iTunes isn’t the tentacled Lovecraftian horror that is SharePoint (from its bug-ridden birth, to it’s still-same-bug-ridden present).
Eric Burl @29: have you heard of Dunning-Kruger?
* Apple *still* controls its hardware quite tightly. On the laptop where I type this, I can’t change the memory, video card, hard drive, or even the battery.
* Apple’s control of the hardware doesn’t make it bad for gaming per se. They always had good graphics performance, since they were targeting creative professionals. A lot of PCs had crap graphics performance, since they were targeting spreadsheet and word processor users.
* The *nix world is an even worse gaming platform than Apple, for a game player, which indicates that your putative anti-corporate warrior barely exists. RMS, ESR, who else? Wesnoth is pretty good, and freeciv nearly got me kicked out of grad school, but there’s not much going on here. Also, almost anything that runs on *nix runs on OSX also, given that OSX is a BSD derivative.
* Game programmers are not repelled by artists. We find them strange and vaguely dangerous creatures (and they find the same of us) but we have to work together or else no game gets made.
* I’m not aware that Apple has given up on mobile gaming. It’s a huge fraction of their revenue. Their market share has fallen, but their revenue keeps increasing — it’s just that the competition is finally catching up. Doing numbers recently on what platform we should target, the answer was clearly iOS, and whether we should even bother with Android was questionable (sort of like for desktop gaming, the answer is clearly Windows, and OSX is questionable).
* C# is exactly as native as Java, and not at all accidentally — C# is Microsoft’s attempt to head off a challenge by Sun (now part of Oracle). Both compile to byte-code that targets a virtual machine (JVM for Java, CLR for C#). Good runtimes for each include a JIT to convert the byte code to native code at runtime, since simulating a machine is slow. For most application code, the commercial runtimes for Java and C# are within a 2x factor from a lower-level language like C or C++ while the development time is much faster. The free runtime for C# is slow though, about a 10x slowdown (it *is* called Mono, which suggests sloth and fatigue). Converting to C# would be a huge lose for many minecraft players, and a win for none.
* A typical way to spot a novice from afar is when they start talking about how great it would be to do a complete rewrite. It takes an incredible amount of time to rewrite and fix all the bugs in your rewrite. It’s almost always much better to take problem spots one by one and improve them than to throw everything away and restart fresh.
* Microsoft has a well-deserved terrible reputation. They were terrible business partners given their anticompetitive tactics, which is what marks them out for the “evil” tag.
@39, numerobis:
Even worse, from what I’ve read they don’t have unit tests in the first place. Whoever gets tasked with rewriting even portions is going to have a nightmare job.
To some degree you’re right – a rewrite would be a demanding task, and it is not particularly clear that it would be worth the trouble. However, if it is truly coded in Java, there should be a change ASAP – not to a language in the .NET stack, but to one of the more lightweight languages running on the JVM (or even several, as they can work together)
How long ago was this, by now? And have you noticed how Apple, Google and Oracle behaves these days? If Microsoft behaved half as bad as they do, they would get slapped down – hard! Not to say that there are not still problems in Microsoft, but they are much less bad than people make them out to be.
Oh, that sounds just great.
It is a wonder that Minecraft hasn’t collapsed in a wormhole of bad code a long time ago.
Yeah. Minecraft: brilliant idea, decidedly less than brilliant execution. I’m not complaining, because I’ve got a ridiculous amount of pleasure out of my ten euros, but from what I hear about the code, I don’t envy anyone who has to work on it.
@39, numerobis
“Apple *still* controls its hardware quite tightly.”
Apple does not control its hardware in the same way it did 10 years ago, and I am not referring to the way you cannot easily swap ram — I’m talking about the architecture of the hardware. Apple used to use a completely different series of hardware, incompatible with PC hardware. Because of this, you couldn’t run Windows or Dos or similar applications on Apple machines, because they were incompatible. About a decade ago, primarily for cost reasons, they switched over to the PC standard of x86 architecture. Now they shop out most of their components to the bulk of other manufacturers, in the same way the Dell, Samsung, Nintendo, Sony and other companies do. Things like ATI graphics cards and Intel processors.
More importantly, the amount of RAM in a specific user’s computer is pretty irrelevant to a developer, but the technical specifications behind the family of processor they use across an operating system is not.
“Apple’s control of the hardware doesn’t make it bad for gaming per se”
It was the difference in these architectures that once led some credence to “needing” a Mac for design work, which has long since stopped being even remotely true or relevant. Some of those graphical benefits on Macs were great for design — like being able to display more colors more accurately, or run high quality video.
Those benefits also did not immediately translate to gaming in any meaningful sense, since at the time games were still testing the constrains of memory and processing speed for background operations not always related to displaying graphics. The issue is further compounded by the platform being fundamentally alien — we saw this problem reoccur with the Playstation 3 and Cell Architecture, which was theoretically much better than x86 processors (especially for gaming) but didn’t produce those results because it was a foreign architecture to what people were used to.
“Game programmers are not repelled by artists”
That’s not what I said. When you market a computer for artists, and one for programmers, which one do you expect that the programmer will use? Apple created an image that they had a tool with specific uses, which did not appeal to people who wanted to develop software.
“Also, almost anything that runs on *nix runs on OSX also, given that OSX is a BSD derivative.”
You’re confusing Apple then and Apple now. Again, Apple used to use different hardware, and they used to have an operating system that was designed to optimize the use of that hardware. When they switched, the old OS wouldn’t run on the new hardware, so they rewrote OS X using BSD as a starting point.
“I’m not aware that Apple has given up on mobile gaming. It’s a huge fraction of their revenue. Their market share has fallen, but their revenue keeps increasing ”
They have; or rather, they certainly don’t care. There’s been numerous developers that have gone bankrupt because they chose to publish on iOS, and the environment doesn’t encourage more than a few specific kinds of game that usually involve flash-in-the-pan sales. Once something loses popularity, it dies. It’s also especially difficult for people to navigate iOS content in iTunes, meaning you don’t see anything that you can’t explicitly name or find in one of the curated lists.
Gaming is also a much smaller fraction of their revenue than other media, and they have made no moves to maintain or court developers suggesting that they don’t see any need to encourage people to set up shop there except to access the iPhone community.
Beyond that, revenue is increasing because market saturation is increasing. There are more iPhone, iPad, and iPod owners now than there was 5 years ago. But the proportion of iProduct owners over similar Android devices is falling rapidly. Apple capitalized on being essentially the only game in town in high-end smart phones for about 7 years, but now they’re playing catch up with features introduced in Android and they’ve ceased innovating almost entirely. It’s pretty simple to project that the old Status Quo will return with Apple controlling a small but notable portion of the device and PC market, populated entirely by fans.
“C# is exactly as native as Java, and not at all accidentally”
That is true. However, Java does not have back end support in Windows like C# does. They’re both messy, high level languages, but C# as a product of Microsoft works better in the Windows environment than Java does. It’d be even better to go back to a C++ base, but that’s a distraction from the reality of my point — just about anything would run better than Java because Java is innately leaky. That doesn’t mean Java is bad, or C# is good — just that each has pros and cons here. Personally I’d like Minecraft to run faster on my computer, which Java isn’t helping.
“A typical way to spot a novice from afar is when they start talking about how great it would be to do a complete rewrite.”
Well, I’d rethink that perspective as I am a professional, not a novice, and clearly your personal history book is, uh, colored by your personal biases. Minecraft is the product of an iterative design process that is quite common now; but it often leads to building over old problems. The game doesn’t speciate objects meaningfully, which doesn’t make any sense. The code for occlusion has been written, rewritten and rerewritten because it’s been repeatedly incapable of addressing changes in the terrain generation. The fact that there still isn’t an official modding API isn’t because it’s especially hard — it’s because the relevant pieces are hard to cleanly access.
All of this spawns from the fact that Minecraft as it stands now was never envisioned this way. Most of the core code does not properly support current functions, and so there are problems. Problems get patched over, but they aren’t really fixed. At some point, the best solution is to strip everything down to the foundation and build a new house. This is exemplified by how many optimizations have been back-implemented from Minecraft PE.
“Microsoft has a well-deserved terrible reputation.”
I’m not going to argue over this, because it’s just mudslinging. I disagree, and I’d never work with Apple if I have a choice in the matter, as I find their business practices to be outright exploitative. Bottom line is that they’re both companies that exist to generate revenue.
I read that note by Notch, and …jeez. Yeah. Guy needs the world to cut him a break.
it’s -> its
@38, =8)-DX: I was a Windows developer by trade, starting way back in the days of VB6 and getting in on the ground floor of .NET. I spent several years as a C# developer and got heavily into the MVC framework (which is so vastly better than WebForms I smack anyone trying to reach for that older tech). That being said, I have to disagree on the MS SQL thing. It’s a better product than people give it credit for, but plenty of things beat it in both performance and scalability… it’s all about the use case.
I’m a web developer, and have given up on the Microsoft stack in favor of straight-up web stuff, like AngularJS or just HTML/JS at its most basic. I’ve found that things like MVC are good in specific cases (like WebAPI and wanting to build out some quick and dirty rest services), but the web layer is like adding a level of complexity to a basic problem. The basic problem with the MS stack is that it runs well on MS stuff, and you can scale it… but that added level of complexity and the lack of portability hurt it.
@44, Eric Burl
Going to have to totally disagree with this one for the most part. The reason why most publishers pick iOS over Android is that the return on investment for the platform is much higher. Users spend 19 cents on Android for every dollar spent on iOS. The deceptive thing about Android is the number of sales, while it’s a fairly small subset of users that purchase stuff (or use their device as a smart device).
As for Apple not focusing on games or game developers… I take it you haven’t been on the platform? Metal, Sprite Kit, SK + Swift… they’ve made huge advances in the last major versions to enable game development. Sprite Kit was basically standardizing at the core what had been a 3rd party addition (Cocos 2d) before, and then continually expanding on it. Metal in iOS 8 is going to provide low-level access to let developers do a whole lot more.
All this about Microsoft buying game companies.
Not one mention of the company Rareware.
In ten years, nobody will remember the name Mojang.
Now, to Minekraftect! Or Kinecraft or whatever.
(I guess technically this is more about Microsoft restricting platform availability for games but when talk goes to Microsoft buying game companies I will always remember one amazing game company that was lost)
(Also I guess Minecraft uses or can use Kinect for the XBox version? Dunno I sure never played it.)
@47, dWhisper
“The reason why most publishers pick iOS over Android is that the return on investment for the platform is much higher. Users spend 19 cents on Android for every dollar spent on iOS.”
I think that’s a failure to look at how money is spent in the mobile market. A certain amount of profit is derived from buying apps — and more so from buying content from freemium games — a substantial amount of money these days is being generated in ad-supported games. I don’t have the numbers to make it a concrete statement, but I know from just a few years ago that it is more or less impossible to get people to pay $5 for something on a phone that they would pay $15 for on a console. Also, it’s important to compare the data trends, because it’s been established that Apple was the market leader — the issue is that they’re losing their market share rapidly.
“I take it you haven’t been on the platform? […] they’ve made huge advances in the last major versions to enable game development.”
I haven’t done any iOS development in about four years, and I don’t expect to do any in the future, informed by my experience of working with their platform in the past. While it’s nice to know that they’re standardizing the architecture, it doesn’t change things like how Apple wants a cool 30% of all sales, full stop, and provides very limited services for that cost of being “put on the shelf”. (The New York Time famously fought with them on this, because Apple wanted a third of the worth of their subscription costs despite not being exclusive to Apple.)
And there’s further issues with how the iTunes Market deals with sorting, encouraging devs to produce ad supported knock-offs instead of new content — you can’t count on them to include any kind of promotion until after you’ve reached critical mass from some other source. And if you’ve gone viral, you probably don’t need Apple’s help to reach the rest of your audience. Their strategy for promoting gaming looks short sighted compared to every other digital distribution channel — and that hasn’t changed in the last few years as far as I can tell. Heck, I’ve found iTunes to be actively hostile to browse from the web, which is ridiculous.
#33
“…that it would make more sense to add a $500 charge onto the price of the original Mac and market it as a “premium brand””
Isn’t this still their current policy?
–
#37
“Personally I think it’s more of a “PR move for good MS kudos and we’re totes indy not a big money-grabbing corporate tie-wearing company!””
Isn’t $2,500,000,000 a bit too large to write off as a PR move? Not even Microsoft can take that sum lightly.
To put in my own thoughts, I made the mistake of installing iTunes on my old computer about 10 years ago. Even though I told the installation process to leave the file associations alone, it still associated all media files with iTunes. I tried out the program, didn’t like how it tried to dominate my experience, and uninstalled it. Then it kept pestering me to reinstall it. Apparently there was a little piece of the program left on my machine even though I issued the “uninstall” command. I guess “uninstall” doesn’t mean what you’d think it does. Later when I had to do a mandatory update of Quicktime, iTunes got restored as well even though it never had my permission to do so.
That’s why I’m not going to purchase anything from Apple again. They don’t respect the user and thinks they know what’s best even if you say otherwise. Maybe they’ve gotten better in the past 10 years, but the sin they committed against me is unforgivable.
uh, that’s standard MO for ALL publishers, not just microsoft, and not just in gaming, btw.
Adobe is another great example in software outside of gaming.
and the record companies established this as the most successful business strategy decades and decades ago.
… in fact, it’s standard BUSINESS procedure in the US, not just for publishers.
There’s an interesting Ars Technica article about the sale. Not only has Minecraft sold 65 million copies across all available platforms, it has yet to plateau after 4 years of sales.
Microsoft say they plan to “leverage cross-platform business opportunities, with Minecraft and its engaged players as the foundation”, which is totally devoid of any content, but obviously they have plans to monetize it. One “non-evil” approach could be to produce niche-specific content packs or versions, targeting education, rapid design & prototyping etc.
Notch received a metric craptonne of grief recently when Mojang started enforcing their EULA to block some of the worst attempts to monetize their game – such as servers aimed at kids with a bolted on pay-for-everything model a la mobile gaming – and it very clearly killed any feeling of connection to a community he’d held up until then. While I don’t think lightning will ever strike twice for him, he’s now free to do what he does best: dabble with small-scale game ideas
for fun.
Personally, I’m not that phased by the sale. The existing game isn’t going anywhere: I’ve stuck with a much older version of MC for a while now due to the large number of mods available for it, and have easily clocked 300-400 hours of play time, making it the best bang for bucks I’ve ever gotten from a game.
If anyone is a MC fan and haven’t already done so, I highly recommend checking out some of the fantastic modpacks out there, such as any of the FeedTheBeast packs, which add an almost endless amount of content to the game.
Duth Olec @ 48
I remember when they were Ultimate Play the Game. I personally thought their association with Nintendo killed their creative genius long before the Microsoft acquisition. (I know, I know, I liked their old stuff better than etc)
Minecraft brought in over $300 million for Mojang last year, and is still growing. They are on all the major console and mobile platforms, and have just recently come out of beta for Realms, their online monthly subscription service for those who want a play on a turnkey Minecraft server with their friends.
Something tells me that the last thing Microsoft wants to do is kill the goose. As for limitations of new versions of Minecraft, that’s not the Minecraft business model. There is no version 2 coming out, everyone simply downloads the updates as they appear, so it is very unlikely that Minecraft will disappear from any of the existing platforms, or be “end-of-lifed” (if that’s the right term).
Will they begin to prioritize development for the XBox? It’s possible, and I wouldn’t be surprised if XBox Live subscribers receive free or discounted access to the Realms service, making the XBox platform more attractive for Minecraft players. (The MS cloud-based infrastructure can certainly boost the capabilities of the Realms service, if they choose to do it.) We will probably also see tie-ins to other MS properties, like themed Minecraft skins, models, or mods based on some new game that’s coming out.
But I see no reason why MS would want to poison the well by starting to charge for DLC or adding micro-transactions to the game (which I’ve seen a lot of hysteria about).
I don’t play Minecraft very often these days, but I fully expect that if I fire it up in 18 month’s time, it will automatically download the latest update and off we go, just as it always has.
One thing: porting a game over to numerous platforms is a very difficult thing to do, and very time consuming. This goes for any and all patches along the way, and all the testing across all those platforms to confirm the latest build is stable. Games, unlike a lot of software, is extremely time dependent. Slight variations in hardware can change performance noticeably, more so than with “mere” office applications (where differences in performance still exist, but most users don’t really notice or care), so porting code to any new platform demands rigorous optimization to prevent an unplayable game experience. I give credit where it is due. Minecraft isn’t my thing, but I appreciate the effort that went into porting it across so many platforms.
Another thing: Minor point, but Bungie is not an MS company any more. They broke free and some other company makes Halo games now (part of the deal was Bungie would give up their rights to the Halo franchise). As a result, any blame for Destiny being on consoles lies with Bungie’s new masters. Frankly, consoles have more or less taken over the FPS genre. Companies see more profit there, so that’s where the games go. Remember what I said about porting games across multiple platforms, and add in one big factor: PC controls are pretty different generally. When designing an entire game interface to make it as optimal as possible, having to work in two different interfaces can be especially difficult. You need look no farther than Windows 8 to see this in action. So, they optimize the controls around a gamepad, because that’s just what’s going to get cut, and the PC players swear they won’t buy the “console nerfed” version of the game. The publishers hear this, and say “well, you will be missed” and just go ahead and release it to a player base that hasn’t threatened boycotts. Not saying it’s right, but that’s generally how things go. (There’s a reason for everything. Not GOOD reasons, often pretty terrible reasons, but reasons.)
Microsoft, for their part, is intent on changing their image. To their credit, Windows hasn’t been the joke people have made of it in years. Modern Windows versions are just as stable as any other OS out there, and MS has made combating security issues a major concern (most viruses are now spread through plugin vulnerabilities, not browser related issues, though MS made a HUGE misstep in making newer IE versions exclusive to new versions of Windows, as XP users are still stuck with an ever-aging IE8). The XBox situation is… pretty ugly though. The 360 started out as the best online experience, but after the old XBox design lead left, the new people focused entirely on wringing as much advertising dollar as possible from the thing. They were well on their way to doing even worse with the XBox One until Sony came along and said “hey, we win by default by just NOT doing those things”. Now MS has had some major reshuffling and new people are trying to correct some very bad missteps. They seem to be doing pretty well, though I still wouldn’t recommend the thing just yet (games would be nice, and something other than that FPS genre, which was never my thing).
MS has had a lot to answer for, but they get some bad flak sometimes, and frankly I’m rather sick of hearing people say “why don’t we switch our network to Macs?” and having to inform them that Apple has basically abandoned the enterprise side of things, leaving MS as basically the only choice (Linux is still an option, but most enterprise users are still more familiar with MS software, and retraining costs time and money, TIME IS MONEY! YOU CAN’T QUIT, You’re FIRED! Jowels and spittle!) What was I saying? Anyway, they’ve come a long way baby.
Buy a Wii U though. It’s got games I actually play on it. Like, this one where I have to defend witches in a witch trial and solve puzzles. I think it’s called SUPER ACTION LAWYER PUZZLE. It’s from Japan.
@39, numerobis:
And, er, how many PC laptops do you know of which have upgradeable video cards? That’s essentially never an upgradeable thing on a laptop. (Actually, though, on current Macs, you can add a better video card, even on a laptop — you just have to buy a Thunderbolt chassis first, which costs $200+. People by and large really haven’t been paying enough attention to what Thunderbolt can do; it’s a Big Thing.)
@44, Eric Burl:
Um, no.
1. OS X came out long before Apple moved away from PowerPC, and the old Mac OS ran just fine on all the PowerPC chips they ever used. (I remember seeing 10.3 on a clamshell iBook with a G3 processor.)
2. OS X was not a rewrite of the OS from scratch. OS X is just Nextstep/Openstep with an Apple-designed GUI on top of it, plus a series of incremental changes and new APIs added in after the fact. All the essential object classes still have “NS” at the beginning of their names as a reminder of that heritage.*
*And, incidentally, a lot of the OS X GUI is significantly inferior to the GUI of either the pre-OS X Mac OS and NextStep. Even now, 14 years after its introduction, Mac OS X handles process management much worse than Mac OS 9 did. The reason boils down to “the devs from NeXT who came with Steve Jobs threw a hissyfit over the idea that Apple was going to replace their GUI with the established Mac one, even though Macs had a much larger installed base by several orders of magnitude, so they held their knowledge of the technology hostage until the higher-ups agreed to make some things less Mac-like, and thus everyone had to put up with things like the Dock.” In the initial developer preview, OS X was going to look and act just like the Classic Mac OS… and even though it was terribly unstable, it was still a better OS than some of the official versions which came later, simply by having a better interface.
I very much doubt that. All the industry studies which come out show that Android users don’t spend as much as iOS users, don’t install as many apps as iOS users, and in general just aren’t as device-savvy as iOS users. This should not come as a surprise, since — if you pay attention to the sales numbers — an awful lot of the Android devices out there aren’t being sold to people who wanted a smart device, they just wanted a device and the Android manufacturers have lowered the price until you might as well get a smart one… with all the security risks that that implies. (That is, people who just wanted a mobile phone are getting smartphones and then not using the “smart” parts.) Furthermore, the market share for iOS strictly within phones and tablets is starting to swing back up slightly after Android beat it down for a while, so you’ll be waiting a while for Apple to be a niche player.
(To say nothing of the fact that Android has the same market fragmentation problems as Linux: targeting Android means either building for the lowest common denominator, or else building something that the majority of users can’t run because the cell phone companies aren’t bothering to update the OS for existing users, and most people don’t want to root their phones, potentially making the phone parts of the phone stop working, just so they can have the latest version of the OS.)
@50, Holms:
<eyeroll /> I’m always amazed when Windows users complain about the perceived price difference from Apple. In the last 6 years, my Windows-using friends have had to spend much more on upgrading Windows to stay up to date (at least, the few who didn’t buy completely new computers outright) than I have spent to keep my MacBook Pro going. (10.7: $30. 10.8: $20. 10.9: free. I’ve spent less money keeping my machine up to date than it cost me to get a single license of Windows XP to use in a VM, right before it was discontinued.)
The main reason for the perceived “expense” of Macs is that Apple doesn’t let you cut features or buy absolute bottom-of-the-line parts. You can buy a PC which will have the crummiest video possible, no networking support, no Bluetooth, and essentially no ports, with a plastic chassis and 3-generations-behind internal components, and sure, it’ll be cheap. But if you go and try to match the feature set of Mac hardware, you’ll have a very tough time finding a better deal — and you’ll end up tearing your hair out when the next version of Windows comes out and it turns out that half the drivers you need no longer work. Or you can put Linux on it and discover that half the drivers you need don’t exist at all.
@56, tacitus
Possibly — although I wouldn’t put it past them — but you also have to realize that Microsoft doesn’t always have a very good idea of what their own users want. Look at pretty much everything about the initial XBox One announcement (“our new console senses your pulse, tracks your movements, and listens to everything you say at all times, you can’t turn it off, you can’t use it to play used games, and it will stop working entirely if you don’t let it contact us periodically over the Internet! Why wait for a futuristic authoritarian Big Brother-style dystopia when you can buy the XBox One now?”) or just about anything to do with Windows 8 (“We heard tablets are big right now, so we decided your desktop computer should act like one… what do you mean you don’t have a touchscreen?”).
@57, Dark Jaguar:
Not to mention that the minute you switch to Linux, you either have to use Microsoft Office Online — which means your entire business halts if the Internet connection goes down — or you use the monumentally bad productivity software available for Linux, like OpenOffice (or LibreOffice for the people who were dropped on their heads as babies). Just as Gnome and KDE are GUIs built by people who think GUIs are a waste of time, OpenOffice is an office suite written by people who never actually use a word processor or a spreadsheet to do anything productive. And it shows.
daemon23 @ 15
Bukkit has been part of Mojang for a couple years and an attempt to kill it was initiated by its head developer. Mojang stepped in and said no , you can’t kill it, since you don’t actually own it. Dinnerbone, one of the original developers of bukkit and current head developer of Minecraft, then stepped in and has updated it for patch 1.8.
Also, the terrible slowness of Mojang has thankfully been solved as of the latest update which massively increases framerates. Instead of drawing everything, it now just draws what you can see in front of you.
every laptop I have bought from two different companies (Dell and ASUS) over the last 10 years has had upgradeable video cards.
It’s not hard to get if you just go for the customized versions that the companies sell. Extra costs are small, usually about 50 bucks for the option, and another 150-300 for the vid card, depending on what you want. You just have to be careful to specify you don’t want models that have custom video cards cut for them (I mean physically; some of these things actualy have cards that can only fit in the case if they are cut to shape by the OEM), and you’re good.
This will work best for everybody concerned if Microsoft takes a hands off approach. They have been reasonably good at doing this with Skype (Skype development on Linux for instance is not noticeably worse than it was before Microsoft aquired the product). Hopefully they realise that Minecraft is a product that they could never have came up with themselves.
Does have a history of fucking with companies they aquire or generally do business with and if some of their sociopathic middle managers decide that they should get involved it’s not going to be fun for anybody.
The Vicar – I am calling BS on some of the things you are saying. I have used KDE for the best part of the last decade and the KDE folks definately don’t think GUI’s are a waste of time. I use Linux because KDE gives me useful gui based stuff that I don’t get anywhere else including windows or Mac.
just to be clear.
total cost for my most expensive laptop vid card was over 500. equivalent on a desktop was only around 260.
so yeah, ain’t cheap.
Yep, and then they listened, and had to eat humble-pie as a result, reversing many of their initial decisions.
But the XBox One was a new system, and a lot of the missteps were made as a result of trying to gauge the future market for a product that was still months away from hitting the stores and getting it wrong.
They bought Minecraft as a going concern, and a hugely profitable one at that. They can see why Minecraft is popular, they don’t have to guess.
Clearly, after sinking $2.5 billion into it, MS will be far more concerned than Notch was about the long term profitability of the platform, but they don’t have to rush into anything, given that Minecraft has just been released on the new consoles. I could be wrong, but the odds of Microsoft veering wildly off the well worn path that Mojang has forged would seem to be very low. Nobody can predict what Minecraft will be like in five years time, but I’d been willing to bet that unless it is nearing the end of its natural life (which is certainly possible), the Minecraft scene will be pretty much as it is today–multiple platforms, with a lively modding scene.
@61, dannicoy:
Yeah. There’s that wonderful file browser — you can have your icons tilted at an angle or at different sizes in the same window, both of which are features the computing world was just screaming for. Combine it with the wobbly windows and cube transitions that were essentially the only completed features of Compiz, and your desktop becomes a cross between a Salvador Dali painting and what a Mac user sees if they drop acid while in the Finder. Everyone I know wants that, really badly.
Or there’s installable widgets which run in the OS (Mac users have this too, it’s called “Dashboard”). Or multiple workspaces (“Spaces” on the Mac). Or there’s the ability to script the OS (Mac users have had this since… oh, gosh, something like 1992, it’s called “AppleScript”… and Windows users, I’ve heard, have this little thing called “PowerShell” which is like an object-oriented, scriptable version of the command line). And all of it piped through good old-fashioned X11, the legendarily useless and opaque video stack, or Wayland, the Open-Source graphics stack which isn’t as fast as either Apple’s Quartz or Microsoft’s DirectX, but at least it means you lose the one theoretical advantage X11 supplied by decoupling the video stack! Hooray!
@62, Ichthyic:
If we’re going to talk about expensive, not-totally-practical, requires-custom-hardware solutions, then Thunderbolt is arguably better. Get a $200 external expansion chassis (yes, they exist) and stick a desktop graphics card in it — not only will it cost less than your solution, but when the computer itself finally gets replaced, you can keep the video card.
@63, tacitus:
Not only did they eventually sneak several of the really boneheaded ideas back in after pretending to back off — which is part of why the XBox One is not doing so well in the market — but… seriously? You think those misjudgements were trivial things that didn’t make a difference? The list of offputting “features” from the original announcement suggests that either they didn’t bother to ask the opinion of anyone who wasn’t an employee working on their main campus, or else they held their focus groups among not merely space aliens, but specifically non-humanoid aliens. (“At last! A video game console which detects my circulatory system! My secondary ovipositor quivers with anticipation! …Is this demonstration unit slime-proof?”)
actually I abandoned my solution once 10″ tablets started getting decent about 3 years ago.
Went with old-style tower for databse server, web machine, and games, and tablets for day to day tasks.
tablets basically can do everything I used to do on my old laptop work wise, at a fraction of the weight and expense.
leaving me to spend the extra cash on a much better primary server system I can hook all the tablets and other portables into.
quite happy with that now.
@64: Regardless, as I said, Minecraft is a completely different animal to the XBox One–different pedigree, different business model, very different stage of development (mature vs brand new), very different cost structures, and so on.
MS has had plenty of successes over the years as well as failures. The botched rollout of XBox One informs us very little of the fortune of Minecraft under MS’s control. We’ll have to wait and see, but I don’t think there is much to worry about.
Good grief. Do we really have to rehash the tired old Microsoft/Apple/Linux religious wars every damn time computers are mentioned?
Of the two (Microsoft and Apple). Apple is really the shittier company. No one does acquire and extinguish quite like Apple.
don’t forget android.
and.. I think it’s a law or something, isn’t it?
@The Vicar/Tacitus:
Microsoft did a lot of the worst stuff (the DRM, for example) at request of the game devs.
Hard to see how this is worth $2.5 billion… Minecraft’s popular, but it’s a one-time fee. Can’t be that much more to tap there. I imagine Mojang must make most of its money from licensing other products, t-shirts, toys, etc. That’s not really the sort of thing Microsoft is interested in, is it?
@U Frood:
It’s not just Minecraft, it’s all of Mojang.
Through just Minecraft, Microsoft has inherited a huge community of gamers, modders, and YouTubers. It’s not just a game, it’s a community.
Microsoft basically owns the Yogscast now.
You seem to have omitted the other things mentioned in #39 (memory, hard drive, battery) to focus on the card alone.
And the difference in hardware price more than makes up for this. For example, my current PC was put together three years ago and thus most slocely contemporary to the Mac Pro “Quad Core” 3.2 (Mid-2012/Nehalem), which came out a few months after my purchase. The processors are very similar, but after that it is a landslide loss for the Mac.
Mine has slightly more RAM (8gig to 6) and slightly faster (1333 to 1033MHz DDR3); twice the storage (2TB to 1TB); an SSD (120GB to no SSD); a graphics card better by an entire generation and a bit (Radeon 6950 to Radeon 5770)… It was at this point that I came across something puzzling. When I looked up the monitor specs for further comparison, I couldn’t find any. So I’m not entirely certain the Mac Pro comes with one. Is that correct? Likewise mouse, keyboard, headset / speakers and such.
If my sneaking suspicion is correct – that the US$2,499 release price tag does not come with those things – that that turns a comparison my purchase was already winning into an utter farce. Seriously, I dug out the receipts (kept for warranty purposes) and came to a price of AUD$1,932.69 (US$1739.42), which includes everything except mouse and keyboard, which were simply inherited from my previous (and broken) PC. Hell, it even includes 3rd party CPU cooling and Windows 7 Premium.
For US$760 less than the basic Mac Pro 2012 with none of that. Please tell me my suspicion is wrong! It won’t change the outcome of the comparison – the PC still beat it’s contemporary Mac Pro rival regardless, and for less money – but at least it won’t be so completely ludicrous.
Oh and as you note, the gap only widens at the low budget end of the spectrum.
And to append my earlier thoughts about iTunes, it recently forced everyone to download the latest U2 album. Further proof that it should be called iVirus instead and another point against Apple. Not only does it change your user preferences without your permission, it will give you crappy music without your permission. Surrender your free will to Apple!
last I checked, Mojang had serious Mojo… was pulling in about 300 mill/year
MS has snapped up a lot less lucrative assets than this before.
I think this is less about Minecraft than it is about Notch and the other Minecraft developers cashing out. Notch is a game developer, he was publicly never happy steering the behemoth that Minecraft became, and as much as said that if any future game he created started getting that popular he’d abandon it quickly.
If I could return to doing what I love, abandon responsibilities I didn’t want to someone I didn’t care about, and have a few hundred million dollars on top, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
really.
we’re just talking a bit of software here, but even then, it obviously affects millions of people.
what if selling out to MS meant that MS planned to scrap the entire thing and not let anyone use it any more?
still sell out?
what if it was something even more important to people than a game?
still sell out?
you might want to examine what your priorities are.
I wonder if Notch actually would agree with your take on it, even though in the end, it’s what he did.
Well, I don’t pretend to speak for Notch, I just pretend to speak for me.
I wouldn’t want to be someone’s video game messiah. For just the reason you mentioned:
“What if it was more important than a game?”
If I’m a guy who makes games, and doesn’t want to be Jim Jones, that’s scary territory to be in. I think Notch found a graceful way out.
Not that your hypothetical is even remotely plausible, but personally: yes. The term ‘selling out’ has garnered negative connotations, but it remains entirely reasonable in this and many other scenarios; gaining a few hundred mil and freeing me from a restrictive job? Hell yes, that’s an amazing deal and there is nothing obliging me to stay in that position since, as you note, it’s just software that people happen to like.
But it isn’t; that would be a different scenario altogether.