That's precisely the kind of wildly overambitious project without obvious mass appeal that a large game publisher would never ever support.

Which also described Minecraft, of course. But I doubt anyone making decisions at Microsoft would take that gamble.

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.

So what IS Notch's second act going to be?

Have you been introduced to Space Engineers? ;)

Looks interesting!

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.