Honestly I don’t think this is true. It is apparently from “a source close to Microsoft”, but doesn’t say who it is. They could have made it up. Rumours are easy to start. For example, if I went on IRC whilst all the staff were off and said we were being bought by Curse, a lot of people would believe me. I could say I’ve spoken to several of the lead developers, that’s true, but it doesn’t make the rumour any more true.
Considering Microsoft is 3rd on Notch’s hate list (after EA and Facebook), I highly doubt he’d agree to selling to microsoft.
Minecraft is Mojang’s ONLY successful game. Scrolls has sold well for a game, but not very well considering it’s a Mojang game. They don’t want it ruined, if I were Notch and had to sell something, it would be scrolls, not Minecraft.
I believe other wise, mainly because Mojang is creating a new project ‘Scrolls’ and Notch could drop Minecraft, put the $2B toward scrolls if he wanted, and move on with his life. Throw away with the old, go on with the new.
But at the end of the day scrolls has been a huge failure. They’re not going to sell Minecraft for a very obscure game that very few people have heard of and even fewer play.
It is, but it’s shameful to sell Minecraft after all the terrible things they did to it recently. They (somewhat) killed their own game and then sell it. Nah, I don’t think that’s happening, they will probably put the game on its feet before even thinking of selling it.
Notch said on hitbox.tv “I been trying to get away from minecraft lately”, or something like that. This was while he was working on his dart/webgl based Doom renderer. In that context, I understood that maybe he was trying to take some time off or something, but looking at other stuff he wrote I think it makes sense that he may want to sell. He’s not directly involved in the development of the game anymore, and after the huge amount of stupid hate he received because of the *(not)*new EULA maybe Minecraft isn’t fun for him anymore.
As an aspiring game developer, I’m trying to see this from a different perspective: maybe he’s not selling because he wants the big bucks, maybe he’s selling because he just wants some peace and being able to code for fun again.
The same thing has already happened with Phil Fish. It doesn’t matter how justified you think your hatred is, that doesn’t excuse anyone to be a cyberbully and it doesn’t solve anything.
All that violence just drives away the developers that don’t have huge PR teams but who do care about the games they make.
Mojang decided to enforce the EULA to stop server owners abusing their players by making the game fun only to those who pay. You may disagree with their reasoning, but what matters is their intentions. Do you think that EA would’ve done the same thing? They would’ve done whatever was more profitable for them, and they wouldn’t care about how much hate they receive on twitter because they know that everybody is gonna buy their next game anyway.
So I hope this is is indeed a hoax, otherwise I expect Mojang to follow the same path as Rare.
Microsoft is likely talking to or has talked to Mojang. Whether an actual sale will happen will remain to be seen. It is certainly getting a lot of media attention.
As far as I knew, Microsoft’s not rumoured to be buying MineCraft. They’re rumoured to be buying Mojang AB, which includes Scrolls, Cobalt, and MineCraft. So Notch wouldn’t be able to use the money for Scrolls.
It’s fine. People make mistakes. It’s no big deal. Here’s the source to verify my claim. I realised that I never actually produced one and that’s like Rule No. 1 of the Intrawebz. =P
