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Mojang Sold Out
As I predicted based on the complete radio silence from Mojang since the rumours began last week, Notch sold his company.
I'm guessing the three people leaving are the three people that are making hella bank on the deal.
I'm just going to do a play-by-play of Mojang's post as well as add in my predictions for the future.
"Change is scary, and this is a big change for all of us. It’s going to be good though. Everything is going to be OK. <3"
I have no idea how they can just say "Everything's going to be OK!" when they've lost complete control over what their company is going to be doing from now on. Microsoft is now the one calling the shots. What they say will go, regardless of any complaints. Kinda hoping the guy making the post is one of the ones that get canned with the first round of layoffs in the future just so he can see how wrong he was. :P tl;dr: This is nothing but PR speech for the public. You can ignore it.
"Over the past few years he’s made attempts to work on smaller projects, but the pressure of owning Minecraft became too much for him to handle. The only option was to sell Mojang. He’ll continue to do cool stuff though. Don’t worry about that."
Or, OR! The other option was for him to retire while still owning Mojang and leaving all the company decisions for Minecraft up to others. Hell, he was already like that anyway. If he did this to get away from the "hate" he'd get over doing unpopular things regarding Minecraft, he hasn't seen anything yet. I'm sure there will still be a small fringe that will be interested in watching his projects. After all, even 0.1% of Minecraft players is still 100,000 or so people.
I'm not sure what cool stuff he's been working on however. Recreating the original Doom from schematic documents doesn't really count as cool to me. More like "waste of time". But he's rich enough to waste all the time in the world so it's fine.
"Of course, Microsoft can’t make decisions for other companies or predict the choices that they might make in the future."
True! However. Mojang is no longer some "other company". They are now a division of Microsoft and not only can they predict Mojang's choices, they can damned well dictate them. Why they added this statement is beyond me unless they typoed the company name and intended to say "Mojang can't make decisions for other companies..." which would be entirely correct and relevant to what's being discussed. It would mean regardless of what Mojang is saying now, they have no control over what actually does happen going forward.
"Will we still be able to make videos, mods, awesome builds, and all the cool stuff we’ve created over the past few years?"
The entire answer to this question looks to be PR smoke to me. They outright say they don't know specific plans for Minecraft (Anymore anyway.) but it's hardly good PR to say anything less than their "we want the community to continue to grow" etc.
However Bukkit is already dead. And with that goes thousands of plugins unless they get ported to another api. (Hint: Most won't!) And even if they do, MS can easily start cracking down on unofficial apis to their minecraft server from this point on. And due to my predictions below, I fully expect them to.
"we predict that the vast majority (if not all) Mojangstas will continue to work at Mojang for the time being."
This counters one of the inside-remarks made by an AC that seemed to be "in the know" about the deal on slashdot last week. Yes, that guy could have been faking it all but it didn't seem that way. According to him/her it was expected that most of the staff would eventually be cut.
"For the time being." pretty much makes the entire statement/prediction worthless. It basically means "We haven't received our pink slips from Microsoft yet, so we'll assume we can keep all these peoplep for now."
And that's certainly possible. Microsoft has to finish their embrace stage before they extend it with Minecraft 2, then extinguish the original + community.
So in the end, the rumours were correct.
My predictions:
1. An official api will be written for the server finally. It will be mostly incompatible with bukkit and others already available. You will need to be an official developer to get access to the api to make plugins, and they will probably be sold as the new DLC option.
2. A crackdown on all non-official apis/mods will begin. Why let users have something for free when you could charge them for it amirite?
3. Resource and skin packs will become DLC on the PC. At first as an option. Later they will probably encrypt the files to make it impossible to legally create your own with image editors, etc.
4. Realms servers will be the only ones that will have mods for the new api. (Best way for them to keep control over it after all, plus the cash for the servers themselves!)
5. When a Minecraft 2 shows up, it will not be Java. There might be a Mac version made available, but I doubt it'll run on anything but Windows 8 or higher, and I doubt they'll try too hard to get a Linux version out.
6. I expect Minecraft 2 to sell for anywhere from 49.99 to 59.99 for the base game. It will likely be incompatible with Minecraft maps. A map converter might be sold separately however as DLC, which of course will have a free DLC coupon for with new purchases of the game.
7. When Microsoft wants the original Minecraft to end, they will simply shut down the validation servers that let players log in. This will prevent anyone from logging in to a server running in online mode. Pirated servers will be shut down, and any running in offline mode will become a hackers playground and thus die off that way.
8. While out of order, I -do- expect most of Mojang's staff to be cut, and eventually they'll just be a trademark. It happens way too often in the video game industry to not see this coming.
But no problem, Minecraft 2 will probably go on sale for a few weeks when the logins are shut down. ;)
Yes, these are only predictions. They may not happen, but I'm fully expecting them to one way or another. (For example, keeping "bukkit" in name, but rewriting the infringing open-source portions with incompatible replacements would still satisfy my above prediction about an official api.)
Well, for the time being I'll continue playing on the few private non-realms servers I play on and fiddle around with working on Koby's server to get it working for other people to play on. But I can see myself becoming more productive in my own game projects again within a year or two.
I'm guessing the three people leaving are the three people that are making hella bank on the deal.
I'm just going to do a play-by-play of Mojang's post as well as add in my predictions for the future.
"Change is scary, and this is a big change for all of us. It’s going to be good though. Everything is going to be OK. <3"
I have no idea how they can just say "Everything's going to be OK!" when they've lost complete control over what their company is going to be doing from now on. Microsoft is now the one calling the shots. What they say will go, regardless of any complaints. Kinda hoping the guy making the post is one of the ones that get canned with the first round of layoffs in the future just so he can see how wrong he was. :P tl;dr: This is nothing but PR speech for the public. You can ignore it.
"Over the past few years he’s made attempts to work on smaller projects, but the pressure of owning Minecraft became too much for him to handle. The only option was to sell Mojang. He’ll continue to do cool stuff though. Don’t worry about that."
Or, OR! The other option was for him to retire while still owning Mojang and leaving all the company decisions for Minecraft up to others. Hell, he was already like that anyway. If he did this to get away from the "hate" he'd get over doing unpopular things regarding Minecraft, he hasn't seen anything yet. I'm sure there will still be a small fringe that will be interested in watching his projects. After all, even 0.1% of Minecraft players is still 100,000 or so people.
I'm not sure what cool stuff he's been working on however. Recreating the original Doom from schematic documents doesn't really count as cool to me. More like "waste of time". But he's rich enough to waste all the time in the world so it's fine.
"Of course, Microsoft can’t make decisions for other companies or predict the choices that they might make in the future."
True! However. Mojang is no longer some "other company". They are now a division of Microsoft and not only can they predict Mojang's choices, they can damned well dictate them. Why they added this statement is beyond me unless they typoed the company name and intended to say "Mojang can't make decisions for other companies..." which would be entirely correct and relevant to what's being discussed. It would mean regardless of what Mojang is saying now, they have no control over what actually does happen going forward.
"Will we still be able to make videos, mods, awesome builds, and all the cool stuff we’ve created over the past few years?"
The entire answer to this question looks to be PR smoke to me. They outright say they don't know specific plans for Minecraft (Anymore anyway.) but it's hardly good PR to say anything less than their "we want the community to continue to grow" etc.
However Bukkit is already dead. And with that goes thousands of plugins unless they get ported to another api. (Hint: Most won't!) And even if they do, MS can easily start cracking down on unofficial apis to their minecraft server from this point on. And due to my predictions below, I fully expect them to.
"we predict that the vast majority (if not all) Mojangstas will continue to work at Mojang for the time being."
This counters one of the inside-remarks made by an AC that seemed to be "in the know" about the deal on slashdot last week. Yes, that guy could have been faking it all but it didn't seem that way. According to him/her it was expected that most of the staff would eventually be cut.
"For the time being." pretty much makes the entire statement/prediction worthless. It basically means "We haven't received our pink slips from Microsoft yet, so we'll assume we can keep all these peoplep for now."
And that's certainly possible. Microsoft has to finish their embrace stage before they extend it with Minecraft 2, then extinguish the original + community.
So in the end, the rumours were correct.
My predictions:
1. An official api will be written for the server finally. It will be mostly incompatible with bukkit and others already available. You will need to be an official developer to get access to the api to make plugins, and they will probably be sold as the new DLC option.
2. A crackdown on all non-official apis/mods will begin. Why let users have something for free when you could charge them for it amirite?
3. Resource and skin packs will become DLC on the PC. At first as an option. Later they will probably encrypt the files to make it impossible to legally create your own with image editors, etc.
4. Realms servers will be the only ones that will have mods for the new api. (Best way for them to keep control over it after all, plus the cash for the servers themselves!)
5. When a Minecraft 2 shows up, it will not be Java. There might be a Mac version made available, but I doubt it'll run on anything but Windows 8 or higher, and I doubt they'll try too hard to get a Linux version out.
6. I expect Minecraft 2 to sell for anywhere from 49.99 to 59.99 for the base game. It will likely be incompatible with Minecraft maps. A map converter might be sold separately however as DLC, which of course will have a free DLC coupon for with new purchases of the game.
7. When Microsoft wants the original Minecraft to end, they will simply shut down the validation servers that let players log in. This will prevent anyone from logging in to a server running in online mode. Pirated servers will be shut down, and any running in offline mode will become a hackers playground and thus die off that way.
8. While out of order, I -do- expect most of Mojang's staff to be cut, and eventually they'll just be a trademark. It happens way too often in the video game industry to not see this coming.
But no problem, Minecraft 2 will probably go on sale for a few weeks when the logins are shut down. ;)
Yes, these are only predictions. They may not happen, but I'm fully expecting them to one way or another. (For example, keeping "bukkit" in name, but rewriting the infringing open-source portions with incompatible replacements would still satisfy my above prediction about an official api.)
Well, for the time being I'll continue playing on the few private non-realms servers I play on and fiddle around with working on Koby's server to get it working for other people to play on. But I can see myself becoming more productive in my own game projects again within a year or two.