This is interesting given that Mojang doesn't actually own the Minecraft IP, they license it from Notch who owns it (I believe) exclusively, that's how he's able to pull in hundreds of millions per year while Mojang makes a much smaller amount. Notch previously said he's had an offer in the $2bn region and turned it down[1] so this seems /weird/, that said anything is possible!
Is it fair to say that once you achieve "FU money", numbers start to lose their value? I can't imagine being able to say "no" to something like that. Although likely for something like Minecraft, it'd be stock options/cash mix.
I don't have any "FU money", but it seems very likely to me that once you have that sort of money, there are only a couple of reasons to run it up any further:
1) You have "Big Plans" that need funding (eg. Elon Musk)
2) Running up the numbers as a life gamification to "beat" your peers, or just because you can't stop chasing yourself, like one of those freak beast weightlifters that looks like a space monster but is addicted to "the gainz" (eg. Larry Elison, et al)
There are only so many houses and planes and boats and experiences you can buy, practically speaking, and at a certain point all your grandkids' grandkids are easily taken care of (should you decide to reproduce, and assuming society stands and the dollar keeps its value, of course).
Interestingly I'm pretty sure Bill Gates started in bucket #2 but moved to #1 at some point later in life, but I think most people stick in one or the other.
> once you have that sort of money, there are only a couple of reasons to run it up any further:
Your reply seems to indicate you didn't read what he said, but instead read your own meaning into it. Your #3 doesn't make sense as a reason to "run it up any further".
In that case you shouldn't sell. The buyer might promise you everything, but once the deal is done, he will make his own calls, implement his own vision.
Microsoft can sell Mojang to EA the very next day if they want to.
Except for Steve Jobs and a few very rare exceptions, nobody really has a second act. Once you get the FU money, you might as well ride the first act for all it's worth cause that's all you're going to get...
He briefly though about investing into Psychonauts 2, but dropped out when he realized how much money was involved ($18m). [1] With a couple of hundred million dollars on his bank account he could get interesting and novel AAA games that would never get funding from traditional publishers made.
He even mentions this in [1]: "Perhaps in some distant future when I’m no longer trying to make games, I could get into angel investing."
For US citizens/residents with billions, taxes are pretty much a constant 25%, since
1. almost everything is capital gains (which comes to 23.6%). Note that this was 15% under GWBush, so it was even better back then.
2. You can avoid state taxes by relocating to WA/TX (If I recall correctly, this was Bezos' motivation for starting Amazon in Washington). A lot of billionaires live in 0% state capital gains tax states, except the ones that need to live in CA/NY for the tech/financial sector respectively. If you live in one of those, then think of the total taxes as more like 33% total (federal + state)
Ingvar Kamprad is too, doesn't prevent him from not paying any taxes. It's not very hard to find exploits in the tax system. Even in the worst case, the corporate tax is 22%.
It's worth noting that annual income above five million is almost definitely coming from investment of both labor and capital (ie, working to manage/direct a business you own, and seeing gains from the value of that business -- or working to manage your stocks and seeing gains from their value) rather than just from labor. This comes with very different risks, including the ability to lose your capital, which is why it's taxed in a very different way.
It's also worth noting that the tax rate for the very rich is still 15%. As far as I can tell, certain very rich people "not paying taxes" is a myth.
Finally, it's worth noting that Notch is not American.
The UK has a variety of schemes of tax planning[1], tax avoidance[2], and tax evasion[3]. Using such schemes usually requires someone to be wealthy enough to afford accountants and access to the scheme.
Rich people do have ways of reducing their tax burden, sometimes to surprisingly low amounts.
[1] planning is normal reduction of tax burden and is unlikely to be challenged by tax authorities.
[2] avoidance is legal, but sometimes exploits loopholes in tax laws in weird ways and you might risk the Inland Revenue changing the regulations - sometimes retroactively.
Many of the recent tax avoidance schemes that celebrities have tried to use in the UK were outright fraudulent - for example, one involved them falsely claiming that they were used car dealers and reporting fictious losses which were large enough to offset their income for the year. Another involved reporting that they'd invested money in UK film production when they hadn't.
> This comes with very different risks, including the ability to lose your capital, which is why it's taxed in a very different way.
Exactly, there are good reasons for this. The problem is that it would be grossly unfair to tax a small business owner or small investor at say income tax levels because their risks are so much higher. On the other hand a big investor will millions or billions ends up paying the same tax rate as that small business owner or investor, but is able to spread their risk across many investments reducing the overall risk. Yes it would be unfair to tax them at a higher rate for doing fundamentally the same thing - how would we justify one tax rate for one investor in a company, but another rate for this other investor?
"Yes it would be unfair to tax them at a higher rate for doing fundamentally the same thing - how would we justify one tax rate for one investor in a company, but another rate for this other investor?"
Because taxation has gone way beyond what it was initially meant to do. That's why it's a hard problem; we're trying to make value and fairness judgements and using that as a basis for applying tax.
To me, personally, people can't claim fairness if they're treating people differently based on their arbitrary value judgements. Until we start treating "fairness" as a universal, with no subjective component.
What do you imagine fairness to mean without subjective components? I'd say that value is a subjective concept and I cant think of a definition of fairness that is not based on value.
Mitt Romney also gave a huge amount of his annual compensation to charity, which reduced his tax rate substantially.
The big reason why the rich guys can lower their tax rates is because they can use investment losses to offset taxes. It's not a loophole, just a tax deduction you can optimize.
I'm not sure why he got downvoted so muh. Just read all the threads about Amazon, Starbucks, Google, Vodafone, etc etc who manage to make fucking loads of money while also operating at minimal profit this avoiding / evading large amounts of tax.
Wow, you are so brave for bringing forward such a revolutionary and controversial statement. I hope you will bless us with your intelligence at every opportunity you get.
I bet Bill Gates has a hard time finding enough qualified people to wisely manage the money he is giving away.
For example, if he has someone in charge of spending money on medical research, don't you think there is a point (a few billion) where they just don't know what else to spend money on? I mean, there are only so many medical researchers in the whole world.
Of course you can always just throw money away/at people, but it won't do any good. "Give a man a fish" vs. "teach a man to fish."
No, this isn't really true. The NIH's budget is 30 billion a year, and that funding is already incredibly competitive. Private universities, other government sources such as NSF, NASA, and DoE, and private institutions then in addition spend an amount that dwarfs that number. On top of all of that, the last 6 years have seen cuts, layoffs, and an enormous amount of work go unfunded in the life sciences.
Only about 16% of proposed NIH grants alone are funded each year- we can immediately see from that data that funding all NIH grants in just one year would probably take well over $100 billion.
The life scientists of the U.S. could find a use for Bill Gate's entire fortune in a few years. Not that dropping $80 billion on across the board medical research wouldn't be incredibly, enormously beneficial, but the infrastructure and manpower in the medical sciences are there to be able to absorb it and put it to use.
Have you talked to anyone who's been funded by the Gates Foundation? I have. It's rigorous, and very data-intensive. Whatever imaginary cache of research out there that might exist probably couldn't be qualified-up for a GF funding process.
I've done grant funding as well. People say they want money, but the minute you give them a deadline, they're gone, and they can't collect even the merest evidence required for due diligence.
If they magically funded all of the grants then there wouldn't be enough scientists to do all the work; there's nothing to say that you can't put in more than one proposal at a time.
Edit: well, of course everyone's salaries would go up since there would be so much more demand and no extra supply, but I doubt they could go up that much all at once; most of the money would still go unspent.
> Of course you can always just throw money away/at people, but it won't do any good. "Give a man a fish" vs. "teach a man to fish."
Yes, throwing fish at the poorest is the right thing to do. Malnourished children grow with diminished intellectual capacity. Then it is too late to teach them to fish.
Look at the recent US drought - were people wrong to have had children ten years ago? How were they to know that some areas of the US were going to be in severe multi-year drought?
Why is it different if you change "the US" to some other part of the world?
Have a read of "Too Poor To Farm" which explains some of the problems very poor people face, and explains some of the reasons why very poor people have children.
The best way to do that is to educate young girls so they grow up into women who don't want to just pump out kids. It happened in the West, it can work elsewhere.
> I bet Bill Gates has a hard time finding enough qualified people to wisely manage the money he is giving away.
That's hardly surprising. Managing money is investing, and wise investment requires a lot of skills, market information, and connections. There's only so many good investors out there.
I don't think managing a charity successfully and making savvy investment decisions are similar. Investing outside of angel investing/accelerators is fairly close to a zero sum game, and there are many more excellent opportunities from a societal investment perspective in charities than in investing.
Not investing as a whole is a zero sum game but specifically increased levels of investing sophistication and savvy.
Diminishing returns does apply to some problems, but there are enough researchers in most areas to justify investing hundreds of millions or billions, and for that matter you can fund research grants for students to expand the number of people in that field.
The thing is money is the best drug known to man. One you get big numbers you never want it to stop. You just keep fighting for bigger and bigger numbers.
Maybe Notch's perspective is that Minecraft as an IP is worth more than that. He can probably ride it out for the next couple decades with sequels or other monetization techniques.
Why take the big payment today when you can have the bigger payment on-going? Especially if you want to continue to make it your life's work. Look at some gaming stars from the past. John Romero didn't "make us his bitch" with his post iD offerings. Carmack's career seemed pretty down until his recent excitement with Oculus and even that happened while he was playing with space companies on the side. Even with all his brains and cred, he's now just a Facebook employee and his boss is a 20-something php coder.
A lot of gaming luminaries are often one-trick ponies. Its difficult to get lightning to strike twice. Smart money is keeping a tight hold of the IP that made you successful. Notch has seen what happens when you lose your IP and maybe he doesn't like it.
It's probably very smart of Notch to retain what he can regarding the Minecraft IP. What a lot of people seem to miss is that Minecraft isn't only about the "official" game.
It's a platform for development. More importantly, it's a platform that lets many people create things in 3D without having to bother with OpenGL/etc.
If you think I'm talking about pixel art or other static things, or if you think I'm talking about mods, I suggest watching these, which are all stock minecraft only.
The larger ideas that Minecraft is effectively a prototype for is basically the VR environments we've wished for over the last several decades. We achieved a lot of the 3D graphics capability (and are ok with sound, the few cases where the developer bothers), but interactivity is just as important for immersion. Not being able to interact with things that are not part of the "intended" experience can rip you right out of your suspension of disbelief.
This interactivity is what Minecraft gets right, and we've barely scratched the surface.
Minecraft : interactive 3D voxel games :: NCSA Mosaic : hypertext documents
It seems to me that the one-trick pony nature of the gaming business is more reason to take a big payout upfront. $2bn is fuck you money for the rest of your life. Who knows if the Minecraft IP will even be worth anything a few years from now?
Yes, but Minecraft is not a lego - you do not need to buy newer sets. You buy it once and you own infinity of it. The only reason to buy another Minecraft is when new incompatible hardware becomes the norm.
> Yes, but Minecraft is not a lego - you do not need to buy newer sets.
Minecraft the game does not generate a continuous income after the initial sales, but recently they started an official multiplayer server hosting service (called "Minecraft realms"). You can buy a private server for $10 per month.
Given that Minecraft is played by a lot of kids whose parents whose parents or themselves do not know how to set up a server, I think this is a very viable monetization strategy, albeit launched a bit late.
Of course, there have been 3rd party commercial hosting services for Minecraft for a long time, but again, it's not something kids and their parents go after.
Hell, I know how to set up a server but I am considering hiring a Minecraft realm for the winter months, just because it is less hassle than setting up a server and the price is reasonable.
And who knows if Minecraft will grow in complexity and interconnection to the point where instead of having websites, every company has a Minecraft world? Who knows if Minecraft won't become the online world from Snow Crash?
In my own personal case though, the second I had anything worth $2 million I would sell out and retire. I just want to be able to feed myself and shelter myself and I'll gladly do independent research the rest of my life.
MineCraft has sold over 50 million copies at $7 (pocket edition) to $27 (PC edition) each, plus merchandise. Even after expenses, I'm pretty sure Notch's personal cut is in the nine-figure range. Easily enough to be independent for the rest of his life.
(I'm with you on "sell out at $2 million" in general, though. For the area I want to live in, which I coincidentally already live in, that'll last a lifetime.)
41 year old you might regret 31 year old you taking you out of the game. A lot of the type-A people who dominate the coding and business worlds might not be happy with just one big paycheck while they watch their peers continue on.
I can't imagine Bill Gates selling MS in '86. He wanted to build an empire.
My familiarity with notch is only superficial: we met in person 3 times, once before MC got big, once when it was starting to get big, and once after it was already big. Before that we used to hang out in the same game dev irc/forum circles and chatted on occasion there.
I won't pretend that makes me really know him as a person but I can say I've never got the impression he cares much about empire and/or massive ego building. I would venture a guess that by now he accepted the fact that MC was his one massive strike and that he likely won't have another one & would be content to live his life of luxury with that.
It is important to remember that PV calculations are pretty easy to do, and help bring the FU money back to reality.
For instance if Minecraft sells 10,000 copies a day (as someone else said) that is $100m a year. Assuming other platforms add up to the same that is $200m a year. At an 8% interest rate that is worth $2.5 billion assuming it continues forever. It is worth $1.3 billion if it only happens for 10 years.
Hey, I said that with the 10,000 (PC) copies. (With the 10,000 number that hasn’t changed for years I mostly wanted to make clear that, while not exactly growing, Mojang doesn’t seem to shrink, either.)
$322M revenue, $128M profit. However, I’m not sure whether that profit number is the correct one to assess the value of the company and IP.
If I understand this potential acquisition correctly, Notch seems to want to sell everything (company and IP). I think the company is currently set up so that Mojang pays Notch licensing fees for the Minecraft IP. That could potentially be a large part of their revenue. If Microsoft acquires company and IP they obviously don’t have to pay those licensing fees anymore.
Mojang is only a 40 person company, labour has to be their by far biggest cost, and I really don’t think a 40 person software company (that doesn’t really do any marketing, by the way) costs nearly $200M to run per year.
Anyhow, the easy rule of thumb for converting between income streams and present value is simply "multiply by 20". In rough numbers, it $1/year is worth $20.
How do you come up with the factor of 20? On a smaller scape, if you try to buy a website or an online-business (say, on Flippa), oftentimes the sales price is around 2-3x yearly income. For my own business, I'd love to see a factor of 20, but I can't see how anyone would offer that much money.
Consider the difference between income and profit. For the present value calculation, you would need to use the profit, not the revenue. (After all, once you take the payout, you don't have any expenses.)
Eh, can you name one? There are several "Minecraft could have done this as well" games, I guess, but nothing really stands out as anything like a spiritual successor, or whatever. There's Terraria, but that's not quite the same either is it.
my mom bought me a stuffed animal from Walmart, and I know more people who play it on the xbox in real life... and I know at least 150 pc gamers personally through heading up VTC's gaming club. I'm pretty sure the business angle here is marketing leverage to sell more xboxes.
My kid loves it, but I'm the one who has to deal with the mods and the shitty YouTube videos and ad-filled garbage forums made by a community that's somehow never heard of GitHub.
Hopefully Microsoft can reign in all of that crap and make the game less of a nightmare to maintain.
This is why I have my nephew maintain his own minecraft-server. Costs me 10 euros p/month. Kids' ten years old, knows how to debug crappy java plugins better than most java programmers. Everytime he calls me to ask about a problem I think: "Okay mverwijs, don't hold back." He now edits yaml files, rsyncs plugins, makes backups.
He's smart, but not a genious. He's doesn't even speak or understand english. Most kids can learn to do their own minecraft-management.
Kids love minecraft. They love to have their own server. I shamelessly abuse that love to install some *nixcraft on them.
Thank you for making me realize I'm not the only crotchety old bastard who bitches and moans about this! My kids are old enough to play Minecraft but too young to understand how to install mods.
Speaking of that, I've looked into the mod making scene and it's rather disgusting. Mojang really dropped the ball by not having an official way to write mods/plugins. Instead we get a horrible client side mod environment (Minecraft Forge), and a half decent server side (Bukkit), but they're not compatible with each other. Bravo Mojang!
Bukkit's dead now anyway. The entire development team decided to call it quits due to legal uncertainty and general exhaustion, then Mojang announced that they weren't allowed to do that because Bukkit was actually owned by Mojang and had a special deal which meant there were no legal issues, contradicting what they'd told people who asked privately. Then one of the main developers got pissed about the fact that he'd been secretly working for Mojang for free and used the DMCA to kill the whole thing off - something he could do because his code, and all of Bukkit, was licensed under the GPL and using it for modding Minecraft was a GPL violation(!). This didn't stop Mojang from arguing that he had no legal right to do so, though. They're really keen on the whole free labour thing.
Craftbukkit was never licensable under the LGPL. From the projects inception, it contained proprietary, closed-source Mojang code used without a license. It's LGPL license was invalid from the start.
From the get go we were plagued with issues and obstacles we needed to overcome, one of which we were sadly unable to tackle despite our best efforts: the legal barrier of licensing and permission. When starting the Bukkit project and even getting involved with hMod before that, we all knew that our work - no matter how well-intentioned - fell into a dangerous legal grey area. - EvilSeph[1]
This calls into question the legal standing of all derivative works of Craftbukkit.
The contributors still have copyright over the things they wrote, but they also weren't writing them in a vacuum. They were creating derivatives of Craftbukkit under the assumption it was valid LGPL.
The LGPL wasn't violated because it came out that Mojang controls the Bukkit project. It was voided before these contributions came into question. It's not clear what license, if any, the contributions by Wesley, et. al. fall under.
I am very interested in the legal issues of this whole situation and am constantly looking for the best resources I can find. If you're curious, I suggest reading some posts by /u/VideoGameAttorney on reddit[2]
This is not how it works. When you write code, you are the owner unless you sell/disclaim all rights. You can contribute your code under a license, a license DOES NOT TRANSFER RIGHTS. Just because something else went wrong with the licensing of other code in the same project does not mean you lose your rights to the code.
Now, in the bukkit project there's two sources of code:
1. Mojang owned closed-source
2. Contributions made by commiters under the LGPL
Then it was distributed in it's entirely under the LPGL. Source #1 clearly is incompatible with this, and this is an issue. However, this has NOTHING to do with the fact that all contributions were licensed by their rights owners, THE CONTRIBUTORS, under the LPGL.
Just because you contribution was distributed with something that's incompatible with the license it was distributed under does not mean you lose the rights to your code.
IANAL These are just some of my opinions gathered from information surrounding the Bukkit drama. I have spent a good deal of time this week researching what I could, but I can very well be wrong.
I'm not arguing that anyone, including Wesley, should have lost valid interests in the code they developed. Please consider the following scenarios:
1) Contributor was clear to license his contributions free end clear under the LGPL. They contributed them to a project that was a priori in violation of said license. If they were unaware of the conflicted project status and were led to believe it was valid LGPL, they should have sought correcting actions as a soon as they were made aware.
1.a) If they knew that contributing their code would directly create a violation of the LGPL, they shouldn't have contributed. If they knew and did it anyway, they are party to violating the license.
2) Contributor code is encumbered and isn't free to be licensed under the LGPL. Depending on circumstances, just because you type the keys doesn't mean you're completely clear of another entities interest in the work. In this case not only is the project encumbered but so is the contribution. It's unknown what the validity of any license would be in this case.
A case could be made that the trigger to this recent mess, Wesley's DMCA notice, is scenario #1. That the contributors were just recently made aware that the project they contributed to was violating the LGPL. They would be right to seek redress for the violation of the license. This is the process working like it's supposed to.
It could also be that we're seeing cases of #1.a (or if skeptical #2). Certain contributors weren't just submitting patches to an email list. They were also the ones accepting pull requests to the main repo. It would stand to reason that they would be aware of the status of the main project. It's a legal nightmare.
In _any_ of the three scenarios, the status of the project as a whole is still infringing. It's so encumbered that it can't be distributed and individual rights owners who are being violated should seek remedy. This doesn't take the rights away from anyone. If they have found their rights to be violated, they should speak to an attorney.
Addedum to 1.a "You can't violate your own license." The contributor could have dual-licensed the code under the LGPL, but then contributed it to the project under some other, unspecified license. That would be ok depending on the terms of the other license, but it's not documented and impossible to verify. Also, we have contributors stating that their LGPL licensed code being violated, which discounts this possibility.
Everyone left that matters is on #sponge @ irc.esper.net recruiting and planning Bukkit's successor called Sponge, it aims to be something like Bukkit+Forge.
It was so much worse before Forge. With Forge, it's still incredibly arcane, but it's not batshit crazy like it was before. Of course, now you need to have the Forge version of a mod, and you have to have the right version Minecraft too.
I'm getting mad just thinking about it. I need to stop now.
This also highlights why client side mods (Forge based or not) are the vast minority of 'Modded Minecraft'.
Configuring a Bukkit server would still have taken some work, but it also only required that to be expended on the server side.
Players would be able to connect with a purely vanilla client and benefit from the enhanced interactions and gameplay mechanics that could be handled on the server side only. This attracts thousands more people than fiddling with launchers, or worse, .jar files.
Thank you Freshyill and JWN! I nearly ripped my hair out trying to keep the Minecraft, Forge, and the JVM in sync version-wise for the Pixelmon mod. I tried upgrading just one of them and the Pixelmon mod silently failed.
Of course the forums are a Wild Wild West of inconsistent solutions that make me feel like Druidic incantations would be just as effective.
Minecraft dev culture in 2014 in general feels exactly like microcomputer dev culture in 1985, speaking as a guy who was there. Version control, whats that? Why would I want to open my source code, free software whats that? We don't need standards or APIs we can just hack it into working, one piece at a time. What do you mean a development methodology or strategy, we just start coding? If you find a bug, its your fault, if you don't like seeing bugs then stop finding them. What is all this scalability and O(n) talk I don't understand why that could matter. We don't do documentation (although in minecraft world in 2014 rather than make a one page doc in five minutes, we get unprofessionally produced 45 minute youtube videos as "docs".) What do you mean by a "silo", why would a silo be bad, I just wanna admin my own webforum and only use my forum.
Its a really retro game, and I'm not talking about block graphics. Culturally and technologically its like something out of shareware game programming on a C64 in the 80s.
The crazy thing, is in 2014 there's a lot of people making a lot of money telling us that doesn't work, but just like 80s software development, it really DOES work. Maybe not well, maybe lots of heads pounding on desks in frustration, but it works surprisingly well.
If you're in the modern dev community it does feel like visiting a museum or an Amish community, very deja vous.
I very much agree. Last Christmas I gave my kids one mod install each. Earlier in the year I helped them once which set a bad precedent :). I cut them off telling them to wait until Christmas. Since then they've discovered some minecraft launchers which automate some of this process, but it's still pretty ugly.
Mojang really needs to fix this: standard mod interface (which doesn't require jar surgery), sane distribution, etc.
See my previous comments on this exact problem[1].
I'm actually working on a server app thing to make this easy. The idea is pre-configured sets of mods which will work together, installable with a single click. I have various techniques to constrain the resources used by mods so they don't kill other servers on the same machine, too.
The mod part isn't ready yet, but on-demand Minecraft server provisioning is working well.
People on HN probably aren't the real market since most here can wade through the horrors of incompatible mod versions etc, but my contact details are in my profile if anyone is interesting in testing it.
Honest note here - no idea what will pan out, but if it does ping me about getting some github traction. I don't play minecraft, but happy to help organize some forum or such.
Proper version control strategies have been employed by larger projects and more established mod authors for quite a while now. See Pahimar, Forestry, MinecraftForge, Sponge, Bukkit (now DMCA'd) on Github.
Minecraft is probably attracting tens of new people to Java and game modding every day. Backgrounds vary all over the place. Not everyone knows the best practices well enough to just go out and start on them.
This leads to the scenarios described around here about poor mod management in 2014. The 'state of the art' definitely has changed, but it's not a structured community so the outside view still looks similar to 3 years ago.
Why dont you just use something like Tekkit, FeedTheBeast, or ATLauncher? They bundle mods together and its a click and play ordeal. They are essentially just autoconfigs for Forge.
I find the most odd thing about minecraft is how much 3rd party adds to the game, but is in no way supported by mojang. Even when Things such as pistons and horses began as mods, and were implemented into the standard game years later.
Its been years since mojang announced they'd make a mod api, and it still doesn't exist.
Why would you trust your account data with a 3rd party launcher? Mojang explicitly advises you not to enter your login + password into non-official launchers.
I had the same feeling, to be honest I just gave up caring about my Minecraft account. Mojang butchered their account system, Then butchered their own launcher. They went from a simple log in and play to this seemingly complex mash-up of features that barely anybody even needs thrust straight at you in an ugly way. 3rd Party launchers actually do this better, where you select what you want, and customisation is easily found, but optional.
Launcher aside, mods are easily able to have shady code in them anyway. I remember a server which required you to use a custom modded client which, upon decompiling, i found contained a nice FTP module inside its mandatory anticheat, allowing anyone with permission on the server to issue your client commands to retrieve anything from your minecraft directory.
For people under a certain age, minecraft is the Internet. If handled correctly, it will be Facebook, email, Skype and damn near everything else to an entire generation of users.
Notch didn't really see it. He created the metaverse.
I think about this often actually. It really could be what second life and lots of other platforms really wanted to be. I think if and when the modding api that they have been promising ever comes out it really could be the metaverse, or at least OASIS.
I don't get it. Mojang already made "all the money" from selling minecraft and are largely maintaining it now. I haven't heard if they even have any new games on the way? The space one was cancelled. What exactly is MS possibly getting that could be worth $2B?
I can only assume that MS are going to insist on a sequel with all of the 'NextGen' trappings we've come to expect from them. Minecraft2: MasterChief Edition. With Kinect! And day1 DLC! And product placement... (Use the new MTN DEW powerup to double your building speed! Feed your animals DORITOS to improve their stats!)
Good for Markus and the Mojang guys though... they built a multi-billion-dollar empire out of nothing. It's real indie-games success story. An inspiration to the rest of us! Congrats!
There's two obvious monetization strategies that I can think of.
The first one they're already doing: that's a commercial server hosting service (Minecraft Realms).
The other one is bringing mods to the console versions as paid DLC. Mods are popular on PC (but miserable to install and maintain) but I don't know if there are any modding options for the console versions. At least the Android Pocket Edition doesn't seem to have any modding options.
Well, there's a third strategy but I don't think they'll go that way. Pay real money for getting some in-game goods or consumables. I don't think this would work very well, because it seems like people really like grinding for hours in search of the elusive diamond blocks. I certainly do :)
I was just thinking that a kinect interface could be really interesting... Not that I'd use it personally, but it could be fun for kids to interact with.
Not sure what it's written in, or how difficult of a port to Unity would be (another possibility).
Stop this MS h8 shit m8 if anything, MS will bring some stability to that company. Right now it's just a bunch of children making shittonnes of money for an indie games accident. They didn't work for it, they got lucky. Notch just prefers to be a little bitch on Twitter over everything while spending his 10mil a year on holidays.
Anyone who can bring accountability to Mojang will be a good thing.
The ability to make a popular game franchise exclusive to their gaming hardware. Just take some money you would have spent on advertising and dump it into buying some franchises for exclusivity.
Also since Mojang is a European company MS can no doubt use some of it's $90+ billion stockpile of money outside America without getting hit for taxes.
But minecraft already released on ps4. Unlesss MS buys and takes back the minecraft of ps4, there is no exclusivity. This move will make MS face a shit-storm. The gamers are not taking well to tomb raider (timed) exclusivity. It is accepted that you can have exclusive gaming franchise. But you should not most certainly take a multi-platform and try to make it exclusive.
It’s not growing, but it’s also not exactly shrinking (I remember obsessively checking those stats years ago and they always hovered around 10k), and hasn’t for years. Minecraft might be a different beast than other video games, truly more like Lego than video games actually. There are always new young people you can sell the game to and with constant maintenance for free that might just work out.
That’s even ignoring other platforms and merchandise – or however much Minecraft Realms (their server hosting service) makes or how much potential that has.
The believe that they already made all the money seems completely wrong to me.
When you release something that, on day one, already has 'dated' graphics, you don't have to worry about keeping up with the latest graphics cards or poly-counts or anything of the sort. Its just about the game. Like Legos there are countless others, The Game of Life (Milton Bradley, not Conway) has been around since the 1800's. The beauty of this is that you've never completely saturated since kids are coming of age every day and growing into the game.
>> ...truly more like Lego than video games actually...
Which is really funny considering what Lego did in the video game space - they made video games where many things were made of Lego, but there was no "building" involved at all.
That’s only the PC version, not including console versions, their online service (they rent servers), merchandise and Mojang’s other games (which aren’t very successful at all).
I think the large difference between revenue and profit is mostly down to licensing fees that Mojang has to pay to Notch. At any rate, it seems unlikely to me that a 40 person company could cost nearly $200M to run per year, especially since I really struggle to come up with any significant costs besides just labour (and even if every employee costs half a million per year that’s still only $20M). But I obviously don’t actually know this for sure.
Nextgen Minecraft could be a XboxOne exclusive maybe as a launch title with whatever VR/AR device MS is supposedly working on. So, I could buy the Oculus that works only on a super-powered gaming PC that costs more than I make in a month, or the Sony Morpheus product which I'm sure will be great, but Sony won't have Minecraft, they'll have Playstation Home II. MS will have Minecraft. Which one will kids buy? I'm guessing the system with Minecraft. This all could be as soon as next xmas or even 2Q 2015.
Even if we ignore the VR/AR stuff, Minecraft with Kinect would be loads of fun. The Kinect's killer app may not be been dancing games. It could be world-building games. Imagine lifting your hand to move a brick and flicking your wrist to toss it.
...and thats on top of revenue MS would make on more traditional Minecraft monetizations. Look at how Disney is re-invigorating the Star Wars IP. Suddenly new movies and games are coming out. We're finally getting a third Battlefront and upcoming movies that seem under the aegis of more... competent creators than the recent prequels (Sorry George!). People are more excited than ever about an IP, that frankly, has been treading water for the last 20 years. MS could do something like that to Minecraft, which always seemed more than a bit under-commercialized.
Minecraft is not ideal for VR in the near future because it's a game where you run around which causes simulator sickness for a significant percentage of the population.
VR is better suited for other types of games, especially those were you are inside a cockpit and your avatar is sitting just like you are in real life.
Its not just the moving, it's the extreme range of head motion. I've been trying out Minecrift with my DK2 and you get sick of looking up and down at extreme angles very quickly.
Maybe Minecraft + Morpheus has MS running scared. If they owned the IP they could stop that and make it a Kinect/VR/AR exclusive. I doubt the current license would allow Sony to port Minecraft to their Morpheus platform without permission.
They could probably do this pretty successfully following the tf2 model, where they bring in community contributions, but also pay the community contributors royalties.
They don't need a new game or sequels. 1.8 just came out, it was months in development. All they need to do is come out with releases, some small, some large, add new stuff where it makes sense and as computers and game systems pick up the power to handle the additional computations. This could go on for decades.
They can make is windows-only, make a WindowsPhone port, etc. Try to lure even more people into their platform, and let the other die (which is pretty microsofty).
Absolutely not. Microsoft ports OneNote to OS X, iOS and Android. Same for Office that is available on OS X. On the other hand, Google, for instance does everything it can to make smallish platforms like Windows Phone die.
I can quite clearly tell you omited Linux from that list, for example.
Also OneNote is one of those things where MS benefits from cross-platformism. Games are not.
As an avid minecrafter since the early days I can't help but see this as a good thing. The mod community is what has made mc what it is, but it gets no support from the developers.
Minecraft has been so wildly profitable but the company is set up in a way which Mojang the developers get a tiny portion of the profits to re-invest in development.
Notch essentially diverts all the money into his own pocket while leaving a very small staff to work on what is prob the most profitable video game franchise in history. Just from a very basic business standpoint this seems to make very little sense to me.
If someone could get control of minecraft that was willing to invest in it's development amazing things could be accomplished. Imagine big budget lego minecraft expansions, minecraft re-written in C with a good rendering engine. So many things could happen!
The flat game is a voxel engine that does mostly what MC does. It is written in C++ and is a billion years more optimized than the desktop Java Minecraft client. It is also open source.
It has an actual modding API, and has a bunch of mods like mobs and home decorations, etc, but nothing on the scale of the Minecraft mod scene (which is kind of insanely stupid, since you have to decompile the Java binaries of MC to mod it at all).
I do think the Minecraft mod scene is at its own dead end. Mojang iterates slowly on the game if at all, and its proprietary nature prevents true collaboration. It is a real shame all the effort is being poured into Minecraft at this point.
If someone could get control of minecraft that was willing to invest in it's development amazing things could be accomplished. Imagine big budget lego minecraft expansions
You don't understand. The whole point of Minecraft is user created stuff. In a Lego-like world, for profit expansions are not needed.
The mod community is what has made mc what it is, but it gets no support from the developers.
Minecraft is more open now, than it will ever be at Microsoft.
minecraft re-written in C with a good rendering engine
How do you think they got it running on PS4. It was completely ported to C++.
Minecraft has been so wildly profitable but the company is set up in a way which Mojang the developers get a tiny portion of the profits to re-invest in development.
Notch essentially diverts all the money into his own pocket while leaving a very small staff to work on what is prob the most profitable video game franchise in history. Just from a very basic business standpoint this seems to make very little sense to me.
That is simply not true. Do you have any data to back that up?
what is prob the most profitable video game franchise in history.
Nitpick, but Minecraft doesn't make it on the top 10.
This article indicates that of $316M revenue, 130M was paid to Notch, $57M was spent on other costs and expenses, leaving $129M profit for Mojang. That doesn't seem tiny.
readerrrr: I appreciate you taking the time to consider the possibility that someone else doesn't know what they're talking about.
Won't you return the favor?
The whole point of Minecraft is user created stuff.
And that's why it never should have been closed-source. It is foolish of users to build their worlds in a closed universe, where a 3rd party could wipe them out on a whim with a forced update.
But we should forgive those users for building on unstable ground: they are children, after all.
Yes, Minecraft has captured the imaginations of a generation of children.
Captured is the operative word.
Minecraft is more open now, than it will ever be at Microsoft.
I need not (and won't) point out that this doesn't mean [...]
That is simply not true. Do you have any data to back that up?
Other than what I have seen written on it I don't have any hard numbers, but what would mojang be doing with all the money if they had it? I don't think mojang is stockpiling cash.
Nitpick, but Minecraft doesn't make it on the top 10.
It's currently making over 100ml a year, not sure there are many other franchises that can pull that off. I mean total money of course it is smaller because it is only a few years old.
For comparison, GTA V grossed almost 2 billion after 7 months (October to May). That's just one game not the entire franchise. The game should have another large bump in sales when it hits next gen consoles and PC this fall.
It makes a lot of sense to me. The barrier to expanding Mojang isn't money, but trust. It's very difficult to turn money into trustworthy, talented people who share your artistic vision. Throwing more money at it doesn't help - it attracts the sharks as much or more than the people you're looking for. People you trust can help, but it's hard to go from trust-to-implement-vision to trust-to-vet-people-for-trustworthiness.
Well if Microsoft gets the rights to it we all know what will likely happen: It will be made exclusive for the XBox. Maybe not immediately but eventually.
Notch has a history of bashing Microsoft and MS's efforts to lock down Windows and Microsoft has a pretty bad track record when it comes to acquisitions. They seem to kinda squash anything interesting out of them to try to force that acquisition into helping the MS/Xbox brand.
If anyone buys Mojang I really hope it's either Valve or a company much like it. They seem much more analogous in outlook, business model and process.
You don't think there is a material difference between Microsoft changing Windows to a closed platform and Apple creating a closed platform from scratch?
In the case of the latter it is well known and can be planned around. In the case of the former you have fully invested and then suddenly the game changes.
It won't happen though. The minute that Apple closed off the Mac, with the Mac App Store being the only software source, the minute that idea might have a little credence.
The Mac App Store is not (yet) the only software source, though that restriction is available as an opt-in setting in System Preferences.
Applications from outside the App Store run just fine, as long as they're signed with a developer certificate. The certificate presumably costs $99/year, but you don't need Apple to approve your application.
Furthermore, you don't technically need the certificate. The deafest are protective but the system will happily launch unsigned apps if you right click them.
WSJ does have a very good track record on rumors (disclaimer: MS employee but with no knowledge at all on whether this is true or not, and no opinion about it).
Wow, good for Mojang and notch. I kind of fear that this is just going to be another Rare though. All the talent will move on after the handcuffs are off and the popular franchises will just languish.
edit: Also I hope this wouldn't kill any momentum to get Minecraft on the Occulus Rift. Something tells me MS wouldn't be so happy to have a first class game experience on a competitor's hardware/platform.
In the early days of personal computers, killer apps were a luck-driven factor in the success of platforms. VisiCalc in the case of the Apple II, and Wordperfect in the case of DOS.
Observing how killer apps are crucial, the makers of risky, new platforms have since attempted to load the dice in their favor. This is particularly the case with game consoles.
Just look at how Nintendo and Sony line up games for their consoles, these literally make or break it for them.
It wasn't an acquisition, but Office was the preordained killer app in the early Mac days. Apple pulled MS in with unparalleled access to their new machine in order to get Word/Excel out in time.
Later, as we all know, Windows became the main platform for Office apps, and Office on the Mac was seriously neglected. So what was one of the first things Steve Jobs did upon returning to Apple? He persuaded his old friend Bill Gates to promise to get an updated version of Office on the Mac. This turned what seemed to be sand into concrete.
I'm forgetting what the original killer apps were for the iPhone, but I'd guess that, like MS with Office, Apple focused on their own music, photo, and chat apps.
> At the same time, Mr. Nadella has said Microsoft views videogames as a way to expand the company's footholds in PCs and mobile phones.
Really? The company that owns Windows feels that it doesn't have enough foothold on PCs? Really? If Nadella is talking about PC gaming, then I get it. I find it difficult to believe that they are serious about it. Remember that Games for Windows thing that Microsoft epically failed to act on?
They don't need to buy game studios, they could do fabulously by releasing old Xbox exclusives on PC. If they released that Halo Collection on PC, I'd buy it right away.
Ugh. Horrible if true, and not because it's Microsoft. Any large corporation that would potentially drop that much money for such a property clearly has plans to suck every last dime out of it.
While immediate changes would likely not be visible, I'm sure that over the long term it would mean the end of the ongoing Minecraft development, less developer-community interaction, and the start of Minecraft 2 development ... exclusive to Xbox 1 (with Windows 8 launch TBA). And DLCs out the ying-yang.
If true, I can't blame the Mojang team for cashing in on an incredible opportunity. But as a consumer, I really hope this rumor turns out to be false.
Mmmm... this would be quite surprising, actually. Notch always seemed to be very fond of his independence, and he sure has enough money to back his position.
Notch has been enjoying the independence so much that he's also not very involved with Mojang anymore. He hasn't worked on Minecraft in quite a while and last 'big' expectation, 0x10c didn't develop very far.
Notch seems very content to just participate in things like Ludum Dare, make games and enjoy life.
Notch could make a dozen failed games the next 2 decades and it wouldn't tarnish his reputation; he should try and see and tell Microsoft and EA to take a hike.
If Microsoft is trying to build its own Steam competitor (which given Valve's current strategy to make Linux an alternative gaming platform to Windows, makes sense), then Minecraft is the perfect acquisition to start it up, for a number of reasons.
Minecraft is the best selling video game of all time, with over 15 million copies sold for the PC (54 million copies across all platforms), and it has over 100 million accounts registered. It is possibly the only successful indie game that has never integrated with Steam, and that has a very young userbase (based on my experience) which, given their ages, probably isn't part of Steam's userbase. All of these aspects make it a great strategic acquisition if Microsoft wants to make a new and successful game marketplace and platform for Windows.
But it's the kind of thing that a crazy multi-billionaire with time on his hands might just try to pull off.
Really, really wish 0x10c would get a second chance after this, from either side of the transaction. If Minecraft is the baseline measure against which future efforts are compared to determine "success", Notch is likely to face a string of "failures". Might as well make one of these failures that comes up short something you love.
It looks like they want the ships to be programmable in C#, and I'm wondering if that's going to work out for them. It doesn't seem like the right kind of language to embed within a game.
I'm not saying they have to go all bare metal like Notch was going to do with computers in 0x10c -- though I was kind of looking forward to bootstrapping a Forth environment on my spaceship -- but I would have expected a language designed for embedding such as Lua.
I'm surprised by this news because I feel like most game developers would usually pick ~100 million in income for a few years and total creative freedom over a much larger number and having to do the bidding of a corporate giant.
What makes the most sense to me is that Notch is completely tired of Minecraft, never wants to touch it again, and he wants to hand it off to someone completely. Even though he hasn't been directly working on the project for a long time now, he must still get dragged in enough that it's an issue for him.
Given everything I've read from Notch in the last year or two, I would be highly unsurprised if he wasn't pushing this as a way to dump his hands of anything to do with business and/or notoriety (as much as he ever will be able to). His recent sentiments have expressed a lot of regret that he is no longer able to spend his time doing simple game programming & experimentation with a decent level of obscurity -- and I can't blame him for it. This is wild speculation, of course.
He was experimenting/coding on a public stream for the last two weeks while talking to chat. Also he always announces his Ludum Dare entries, when he could make them using a pseudonym. Doesn't seem like he has problems with free time or fame.
I'm in many ways sad I stopped working regularly on Bukkit.
My involvement started to wane a couple of months before the 4 founders got acquired by Mojang, mostly because I got a Real Job.
I was there just as it was starting, and helped (what seemed like) a lot with the early dev work and community management. Mostly it was just fun hanging out with the team (primarily EvilSeph and Tahg, but of course Dinnerbone, Grum, and all the other core devs as well) solving problems, but that started to happen less and less.
I have heard snippets of what has been going on, but haven't yet really read up on it. I do know that Warren (EvilSeph) was always at the core of the project, he kept the community more or less under control and helped co-ordinate everything. It was always clear that if he ever stopped pulling the various threads together the project as a whole would stop working.
Sure, devs would be able to keep adding features and upgrading to latest versions, but the project was always more than just the plugin API and server implementation. It's incredibly annoying to manage the expectations of thousands of minecraft server admins (who seem to mostly be 12 years old, though there were definitely a lot of older admins) and no-one but Warren ever seemed up to the task.
I should probably go do a bit of reading to find out exactly what has been going on.
Better, if you still have contacts, I encourage you to reach out to some of those devs involved. Otherwise, read wisely.
It seems that Bukkit had just been going on too long under it's quasi-relationship with Mojang. Semi-blessed but not supported (and still technically illegal). Energy drained to a point where the developers realized that as fun as Bukkit was they might like to work on other things after so many years.
This point has been almost entirely lost on the reddit lynch mob. They've only been focusing on the secondary event, the DMCA take down and it's effects. This was also significant, but I don't think people appreciate that even if Bukkit were still up and, like you said, "devs [...] keep adding features [...] upgrading", the very heart of the project was already walking away.
I really wish Bukkit would have been able to find a better footing to build atop of than relying on distributing Mojang's code sans license, putting them in a legal bind. If they would have had that technological footing early on, I think Mojang would have actually been more legitimately supporting of more of their efforts. Instead, they only turned their eye to the violations, and skirted the issue leaving it ambiguous.
Eventually the ambiguity without change got to the core team and they decided to close up shop.
I've started going through the 'goodbye' posts from various team members that mbaxter assembled[1]. I feel a profound sense of loss reading through and remembering the many interactions over the years. When I read lukegb's[2] account in particular I almost broke down.
Luke is someone I still have the contact details of (in fact I could probably find most of the guys on irc or through various social network profiles) and I reached out directly to thank him. He was one of the few still involved today who was with us at the start. I was incredibly humbled, and grateful (there are tears in my eyes as I write this), when he listed me along side the 4 who were acquired by Mojang -
"Thanks to @Dinnerbone, @Grum, @Tahg, @Cogito, @EvilSeph for kicking off such an amazing project that’s been a big part of my life"
Minecraft is almost no part of my life today, but I can say for sure I wouldn't be where I am without these people and the Bukkit project. It's sad to see it in turmoil like this, but as you say the world is a bigger place, and no open source project is worth pouring your time into when legal ambiguities abound, the community is so volatile, and the rewards are so fleeting.
I was (am?) a moderator for Technic/Tekkit, and at the time the modding community seemed to me like it was a cesspit of adfly links and people eager to claim copyright over everything they touched. If the community is still similar then I agree, seeing the reactions to this news will be interesting to say the least.
I still don't grasp why everyone is trying to make a profit and claim copyright of their modification on someone elses work. (That doesn't have a licence to allow modification)
Because at the end of the day your code is your code, and you do have copyright on it, and in a number of cases are or should be legally allowed to profit off of it.
Especially when you bought it under a license [1] that allows you to do so
If Microsoft dropped $2B on this property, the last thing they're going to do is continue to pay a development team to work on a game that has already been completed in their eyes.
A re-write, on the other hand? Guaranteed. And it will be the first of many sequels, Halo-style.
As a former minecraft player, I am salivating at this.
Believe it or not, Notch did a great job creating the game and doing a few updates, and then became totally incompetent (or maybe just disinterested) after that. Development has been at a standstill for years, despite many bugs and vast potential for improvement.
I would love to see somebody do something great with this game and Mojang does not seem to have "the right stuff."
Might be more accurate to say that it was at a standstill for years.
Yes, they release bug fixes and minor features often now... but the game is almost identical to what it was years ago.
The only really big thing I know they've done lately is make the game properly multi-threaded, and while that is a big and worthy accomplishment, that should have come years ago.
My 5 years old learned the meaning of the word "bugged" playing MineCraft. Everything that isn't perfect, from his night milk to the TV is "bugged". Ah! He doesn't speak English.
> The deal would be valued at more than $2 billion...
> Mojang has sold over 50 million copies of "Minecraft" since it was initially released in 2009...
$40 per a customer? It seems a bit excessive to me, unless MS counts on extracting more money from the same customers...
Thanks for the link. I realized my initial comment might look like I was insinuating he wouldn't/isn't good to his employee, while I was simply wondering how the situation would turn out for them. I guess probably quite well in this situation.
Makes a ton of sense. This is peak Minecraft. Right time to cash out before it depreciates. I expect Microsoft to do some things. One: monopolize. Two: monetize. Within three to four months most Minecraft fans will be extremely pissed at Microsoft. They will be practically forced to either move on to some of the successors to Minecraft like Tug or Blockscape, or adopt an open source Minecraft clone that is designed from the outset for plugins.
Overall this is great for everyone. I wish Microsoft would burn in hell though.
People keep bring up movies and books, so... honestly curious - about what? A Minecraft movie makes about as much sense as a movie about Battleship, and we saw how well that did...
You could say the same about LEGO, and the LEGO movie did great. In many ways Minecraft is just video game LEGO. Battleship is a board game some people like or at least know but that's about it.
Minecraft on the other hand has a giant fan base that loves it and will buy anything related to it. Just look at all the merchandise that's started coming out over the last few years and now is everywhere. It's basically Angry Birds 2.0, just 10 times bigger, and Angry Birds it's still making tons of cash.
Minecraft is huge right now, there's a lot of money to be made by someone who knows how to properly milk it for all it's worth and has no problem with doing so.
Im not sure of how wide a net Minecraft has globally, but based on every kid you know (U.S.) who spends hours on it, it has to be worth more then 2 billion. Especially, when compared to the WhatsApp acquisition.
I hit that paywall every single time. Can we have a rule against posting links with paywalls? WSJ and other websites can either disable it for HN or we don't link to these websites at all.
I hit that paywall every single time. Can we have a rule against posting links with paywalls? WSJ and other websites can either disable it for HN or we don't link to these websites at all.
Perhaps it'd be better to change the link to a second-hand source in these cases, instead of the usual approach of the mods switching the link out to be the original source. I'll take blogspam over a paywall, and the WSJ link will still be available in the blog for those that really want more details.
I suspect that many here actually subscribe to WSJ, the NY Times, the Economist, and other common paywalled newspapers and magazines that get submitted here.
I don't see why they should be forbidden from discussing that material here just because some of us might have trouble seeing it. Enough people apparently CAN read them for them to get lots of comments, lots of up votes, and get a lot of people "liking" them on Feedly (this story seems to be the most liked non-Apple submission today on the main RSS feed).
Also, in most of these discussions of paywalled stories, other sources pick up on the news fairly quickly. There are dozens within the last hour reporting on this particular one. None have as much detail as the WSJ article, but many give enough information to allow one to reasonably follow the discussion here and participate meaningfully.
Isn't it well established that slightly different content is okay?
Minecraft started as a small company and has always had a fairly vocal development team so a lot of people likely have heard a lot of programming material about them.
Ahh yes, votes of disapproval...
Sorry, just venting my frustration at
[[insert corporation with soulless corporate board here]]
gobbling up another
[[insert small company with real passion for the craft here]]
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the exit frees those with passion to really let loose and experiment. I hope so.
All these comments saying it's a good thing™ that Microsoft will buy it make me a bit sick. Have you forgotten so easily? <hate>It's MICROSOFT. Here are some other users' comments that sum it up:
- Sorry, you can't build any more wood blocks today! Would you like to buy an extra 10 wood blocks for 99 Mojang bucks?
- You Died! (Respawn for $2.99?)
Next thing you know they release sequel as an exclusive for their shitbox</hate>
It's incredible luck that such an innovative (not Apple innovative, but really innovative) project is maintained by a company like Mojang. And it needs to stay that way. Being avid player, I really don't want Minecraft to become DRM-infested crap Windows became (still, Windows is a very good day-to-day OS, kudos to them). Not to mention their last attempt at gaming: GFWL (yeah, we all remember that one).
That's more EA's MO, to be honest. I don't see Microsoft going heavy with microtransactions. Microsoft is more about bone-headed, tone-deaf "synergies". They'll undermine the franchise trying to use it to promote other projects no one cares about (e.g. Kinect, for a start), and you can forget about PC being the primary platform for it going forward (or it will only be available on Windows Store). But, they won't charge you to place blocks.
I mean, Mojang stands out as one of the few independent studios (as opposed to indie) that * gasp* charges real money for software. Not F2P, not P2W, not whatever else. Microsoft would love to go back to those days.
I believe product tying is the phrase you're looking for.
No more mojang/mc accounts all auth will be thru live.microsoft.com.
No more java, next version will be dotnet only.
No more ingame chat but skype will be integrated.
Pocket edition works great on my android phone, that'll be the first thing to be "fixed", although the 0.5% of the population with windows phones will now be able to run minecraft.
I've only run it on my linux desktop, although I'm told it runs on Windows I don't have 64 bit windows set up so it runs out of memory. Whatever it'll never run again on linux and possibly macs.
As you imply the UI will have keyboard/mouse removed and you'll only be able to use kinect.
[1] https://twitter.com/notch/status/448900844541726720