Selling Minecraft - How do you react if someone offers you $2.5Billons...

You're right but what makes him a hippo-crate (bestpunevershaddup) is the way he went on and on about indie studios and big scary megacorporations, even cancelling Oculus Support when Facebook bought Oculus VR and then just did the exact opposite of everything he apparently stood for.

He's allowed to do whatever he wants, I agree. I completely understand his reasons, and I understand the pressure on him.

However, that doesn't excuse the fact that he has historically and repeatedly spoken out against both MS and corporate sellouts (see: @Geers post about Oculus). The fact that that is now convenient for him is hypocritical - regardless of how good it is in general.

I dunno if you can call a company worth 2.5B $ an "indie" company anymore actually.
I mean what defines indie actually? Microsoft itself making a game is totally independent as well.

My first thought was: What does Microsoft value at 2,5 billion? They obviously have some plan to earn it back, what are they schemeing?

I gotcha. I missed what exactly was hypocritical. And I can see from that stance that yah, it looks a little weird. Though I think the Oculus thing was somewhat unique. I'd be inclined to think his frustration was more major community backed kickstarter campaign suddenly becoming a mega corporate take over thing.

But that's just guessing. However, I do see your points. I hadn't realized he had railed quite so hard on those topics.

A while ago he released a small online game called "life" that actually was quite depressing. It's been quite obvious for a while now that he couldn't stand the pressure from the behemoth Minecraft. So him selling his company is nothing shocking. I think it's mostly people being shocked that it's Microsoft. On the other hand, how many companies can put down 2.5 billion for a gaming studio?

Well that was easy.

Your quoting skills are bad and you should feel bad.

Yeah but if the independent company has many many millions of dollars it might as well be the same as a publisher. Where is the difference really? Both try to make money from selling a game.

was looking for this here.

I was going to post it myself if I didn't find it.

Good news are scarce these days.

here's me upon finding out.

Iwas reading funny 9gag content and then suddenly bam!

evrybody's got heir braking point and a certain limit to the stress they can take. Everybody.
Now ........is it possible he was at his last straw to the point he couldn't make a call to google before accepting the offer?
google's buying everything nowadays I'm sure they wouldn't have felt terribly bothered to take minecraft off his hands.

or heck facebook. Facebook even tried to buy ubuntu.

He's the developer we deserve, but not the one we need.

rather the opposite, no?

Minecraft is rubbish anyway, like facebook, its only value lies in its ubiquity. And notch is far from indie's hero.

2.5 billion dollars, that's like, a space shuttle mission plus change, you could literally launch STS-Notch and fill the cargo hold with the worlds finest food and booze and have a 2 week party in space, then come home, and still be I'll-never-spend-all-this wealthy for the rest of your life. Who wouldn't sell out something that you basically hate for that?

I dunno it was 2:00am.

What?

obviously, noone's saying the opposite.

It's just you can take 2.5 billion from microsoft, or from facebook or google, maybe even from steam (I do believe they're quite well-off nowadays).

There's a lotta merch. out there, books and such. Nevermind the incoming revenue from Minecraft (which is still selling) as well as the benefit of having access to a talented games development team.

"Talented games development tean" is maybe a little strong.
Their only game is Minecraft, and the update and content is not growing strongly.
A few friends are very disappointed by the lack of "real" update...

My bad, they accidentally threw some writing together and it turned out to be a functional game engine

Frankly, the source of Minecraft is also far from clean, it's a mess.

Absolutely, and a lot of that is predicated on the original design concepts and sloppy programming work, most of which came from notch. He himself admitted that, I think, and his programming has developed since then.

However, to presume that they're not talented is somewhat insulting with little basis behind it.

Minecraft itself is a rubbish game, but it's nonetheless important because it's got a huge, huge player base, to the point where most people you could talk to, even children and many non-gamers, are familiar with it. It's a common reference point.