Why Microsoft has spent $2.5 billion on Minecraft, and what it means for fans
The morning of 15 September, was not like any other. Well, it might’ve been for most people — showers, shaves, repeated self-affirmations to stave off the demons inside — but not for Markus Persson. For that day the Swedish programmer, known to the world as ‘Notch’, was planning to tell the world that he’d had enough.
He’d had enough of being a celebrity. He’d had enough of getting abusive emails from people he didn’t even know. And he’d had enough of the pressure of being presented as a ‘symbol’, and of being responsible for something huge that he didn’t understand, didn’t want to work on and kept being pestered about. Enough was enough. He was going to announce that he was selling the company he’d built from scratch.
A few months earlier, Notch had expressed his frustration on Twitter. “Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life?” he wrote. “Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.” He was responding to community furore over Mojang’s decision to begin enforcing parts of the end-user license agreement (EULA) that every Minecraft player agrees to before they play.
The EULA controversy
In that agreement, Mojang expressly forbids people from charging others for non-cosmetic items on multiplayer servers. For some time, a blind eye had been turned to servers where people could ‘pay to win’— exchanging real money for virtual diamond swords. But when emails started rolling in from parents asking Mojang to refund money their children had given to anonymous server owners, the company knew it had to put its foot down and make a change. The response to this crackdown was immediate and vitriolic. Server owners wrote open letters condemning the move. A Twitter hashtag, #saveMinecraft, was seen by over 500,000 users. The community quickly became split between supporting the creators of the game they loved, and the people that ran the servers they played on. Wars raged across Minecraft forums and discussion boards.
It was a grim time in the Mojang offices. One of the biggest surprises for a company that had always been adored by its fans was the extent to which its staff, and particularly Notch, were flooded with abusive messages. Despite multiple attempts to reach out to the community, listen to their concerns and clarify misconceptions, the hate kept pouring in from Minecraft players. This, for Notch, was final confirmation of something he’d suspected for a long time — Minecraft simply didn’t belong to him any more.
So, tired of dealing with it, he tweeted an offer to sell his share of the company. Most saw it as an expression of exasperation, not to be taken seriously. But behind the scenes, he also reached out to Microsoft. The software giant had made advances towards Mojang in the past, and Notch had long had a positive working relationship with the company. He asked his contacts there if the company might still be interested in acquiring Mojang.
The offer
Microsoft was definitely interested. It had cash, a new CEO , a profitable gaming wing, and plenty of customers that either loved Minecraft themselves or saw the joy it brought to their kids.
The company’s offer to Notch and the other Mojang shareholders was $2.5 billion dollars—an incomprehensibly vast figure to many Minecraft players. It was a relatively small amount, however, compared to other companies Microsoft had recently acquired — about a third, for example, of what it paid for Nokia in April.
In many ways, the price was an absolute steal. For the $2.5 billion, Microsoft would get the third bestselling videogame of all time, a meticulously assembled group of about 40 staff totally dedicated to making the best games possible, and one of the most active and passionate communities in the games industry. The statistics that Microsoft rolled out to justify the decision are almost as eye-boggling as the price. It’s the most popular online game on Xbox, with more than two billion hours played on Xbox 360 alone in the past two years. It’s one of the highest grossing mobile games of all time, sitting permanently at the top of the iOS and Android paid apps charts. And its fans are loyal—almost 90 per cent of people that have bought Minecraft have played it at least once over the last year. The acquisition, Microsoft said, would pay for itself in less than five years.
For weeks, discussions between the two parties were kept top secret, with staff of both companies unaware of what was happening. But a week before the announcement was to be made public, the word began to spread inside both companies. Almost immediately, the news leaked to the Wall Street Journal, attributed to a ‘person with knowledge of the matter’. The rumor was soon all over the mainstream and gaming press.
The initial response was disbelief. Notch had long been seen as a figurehead for the indie games movement, as well as its most successful export to the wider world. The idea that he might sell out to the big guys was treated with immediate skepticism. People pointed to his fondness for open platforms, to his history of taking anti-establishment positions on issues such as virtual reality—he ended development of Minecraft on the Oculus Rift after the acquisition of Oculus VR by Facebook—and to past comments that he’d already turned down offers of a similar size.
The fact the buyer was named as Microsoft also detracted from the credibility of the rumor. Notch had attacked Microsoft’s decisions in the gaming industry in the past and refused to certify a version of the game for Windows 8, saying the company was “ruining the PC as an open platform”. Meanwhile, a version of the game for PlayStation 4—the biggest rival to Xbox One—had launched just a week previously.
But those looking closely would have spotted some clues suggesting that the deal was real. Notch’s past attacks on Microsoft were matched with as much praise, and had never actually affected the two companies’ good business relationship. Meanwhile, the Mojang founder had stated very publicly that he was not only willing to sell, but desperate to be rid of his unwanted fame in the wake of the EULA fiasco.
The one thing there was nearunanimous agreement on is that if the rumors were true, it would not be a good thing for players. PC Gamer’s Evan Lahti called Microsoft “PC gaming’s most obstructive opponent”, pointing to its fondness for exclusivity deals, horrific digital rights-management software, and for destroying all of its past games studio acquisitions in a variety of cruel and unusual ways. And he was far from alone, with numerous players, journalists and commentators all jumping on the bandwagon of negativity.
Judgement day
But the rumors were true. After Notch arrived at work on that September morn, he gave the nod for Mojang staffer (and former PC Gamer web editor) Owen Hill to press ‘publish’ on a blog post confirming the sale. “Yes, the deal is real,” Hill wrote. “Mojang is being bought by Microsoft.”
He described how much of the reaction to the rumor had mirrored that of the company’s staff in Sweden when they were told the news. “Change is scary, and this is a big change for all of us,” he said. But Hill sought to reassure fans: “It’s going to be good though. Everything is going to be OK. The future of Minecraft and you—the community—are extremely important to everyone involved.”
He outlined the reasons for the sale—that Notch didn’t want the responsibility of owning such a massive company, that the pressure had become too much to handle, and that there were only a handful of companies in the world that could grow Minecraft on the scale that it deserves. Of those companies, Hill said, Mojang had been impressed by how dedicated Microsoft had been to the development of Xbox versions of the game.
Most notably, he admitted where there were also unanswered questions. He said there was no reason for development of versions of Minecraft for non-Microsoft platforms to stop, but pointed out that, for example, Microsoft wouldn’t be able to force Sony to keep working on the PS4 version. He also added that Mojang didn’t know Microsoft’s specific plans for Minecraft’s future, but promised that everyone involved wanted the community to grow. He said that “stopping players making cool stuff” wasn’t in anyone’s interests. Finally, he mentioned that Mojang’s founders—Notch, along with CEO Carl Manneh and Scrolls creator Jakob Porser—would be leaving the company. “We don’t know what they’re planning,” he said. “It won’t be Minecraft-related, but it will probably be cool.”
Microsoft, in its rather-morecorporate announcement, also went to great lengths to reassure fans that nothing would be changing in the short term. “We are going to maintain Minecraft and its community in all the ways people love today, with a commitment to nurture and grow it long into the future,” promised Phil Spencer, head of the Xbox division at Microsoft. The company called the Minecraft franchise “iconic”, and said that fans would benefit from Microsoft’s investments in mobile and cloud technologies—particularly when it comes to “richer and faster worlds, more powerful development tools and more opportunities to connect across the Minecraft community.”
Later that afternoon, Notch shared his side of the story. In a highly personal blog post, he wrote that during the EULA shambles he had realized that he didn’t have the connection to his fans he thought he had. “I was confused. I didn’t understand,” he said. “I make games because it’s fun, and because I love games and I love to program, but I don’t make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don’t try to change the world.”
“As soon as this deal is finalized,” he said, “I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately. I’m aware this goes against a lot of what I’ve said in public. I have no good response to that. I’m also aware a lot of you were using me as a symbol of some perceived struggle. I’m not. I’m a person, and I’m right there struggling with you.”
He concluded the post by thanking the community for turning Minecraft into what it has become. “It’s not about the money,” he said. “It’s about my sanity.”
What happens now?
In the days following the announcement, the business community was quick to loudly applaud Microsoft’s acquisition — pointing out how much money the company could make from the deal. Ben Thompson, a technology strategist, wrote on his blog that it “isn’t just a great financial decision; it’s a good strategic one as well that fits very nicely with Microsoft’s new vision”. Reuters’ Bill Rigby added that it could help pull people into using Windows Phone, and said that the price was “small change” for Microsoft. Only Shira Ovide and Evelyn Rusli, writing in the Wall Street Journal, noted fan fears over the deal, writing that “without Mojang’s original backers, it could prove difficult for Microsoft to sustain the videogame and nurture its community”.
Among that community, however, the reassurance strategy seemed to work. The reaction to the confirmation of the rumor was more muted than the rumor itself, with most vowing to reserve judgement. More than anything, players responded to the announcement with an outpouring of memories of their favorite times in Minecraft, and their most beloved creations. Anger, by this point, had already cooled into sentimentality.
Both companies have said that fans shouldn’t expect any major shortterm changes to the game. Most of the Mojang staff—Notch and his co-founders aside—will be staying with the company for the time being, and continue to work at its offices in Stockholm. As such, it should be business as usual—the normal cycle of regular development builds and less-regular patches should continue unaffected.
Longer-term, it’s harder to predict what might happen. Microsoft will likely find the resources to finally put together a Windows Phone version, given how popular Minecraft Pocket Edition has been on other mobile platforms. The Xbox 360 and Xbox One editions of the game will no doubt also benefit from a bit of extra attention—and the community as a whole stands to benefit from them being brought up to the standard of the PC version.
The desktop edition will likely retain its status as the place where new features arrive first. Microsoft’s considerable resources could even help the pace of development increase, and if the company is smart then those resources will be funnelled into the long-promised official mod support. Rolling that out as soon as possible is by far the best chance Microsoft has of keeping Minecraft relevant for years into the future. It’s also probable that Minecraft Realms, Mojang’s official multiplayer servers, will be shifted from their current home on Amazon’s web services to Microsoft’s Azure platform.
Pocket Edition players on iOS and Android shouldn’t expect to be cut off from updates. Neither Apple nor Google have played a large part in the development of Pocket Edition to date on their respective platforms, and Microsoft’s new CEO—Satya Nadella—is rather friendlier to cross-platform software than his predecessor. He released versions of Microsoft Office for iOS and Android with great fanfare just days into his new job—something his predecessors had always resisted.
Server owners will probably be fine. Despite the fact that Microsoft’s lawyers are likely to be far hungrier than Mojang’s, the battle over the EULA has quietened and it’s rather unlikely that Microsoft will want to reawaken that monster among an alreadysuspicious community. For now, the rules will probably stay as they are — where you can charge for access to your server, or for cosmetic items, but not for anything that affects the game itself.
What’s mine is yours
One thing is for sure: Minecraft’s community will remain as vibrant as ever. Its players will continue to create incredible builds and exciting mods. The vast creativity of its players has long been a hallmark of Minecraft, and has kept the game growing like crazy as other names rose and fell.
Notch knows this, and ultimately that’s probably why he finally feels comfortable handing over the reins of his creation to someone else. He knows that whatever Microsoft does, Minecraft can’t be killed. “In one sense, it belongs to Microsoft now,” he wrote in his blog post. “In a much bigger sense, it’s belonged to all of you for a long time, and that will never change.”