Minecraft

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Everyone could see it coming when Minecraft's popularity started rising. There are 2 sides to it: of course a developer doesn't have much influence to code a game on his own when he has no publicity; when there's a lot of publicity though, everything gets commercial. And we really could see this coming as soon as those Swedes announced plans of their own office, company, etcetera.

It all starts out with a small hobby developer, perhaps made redundant at their job, who starts experimenting with little stuff, like this Notch guy of ours. Of course no-one can expect a GTA game to come from this, I suppose that's a job of 50-60 experienced modelers. What's next is the small, 100-player community, which starts growing rapidly. During that phase the developer does a lot of writing: about piracy issues, licenses and the project itself. When the 100-player community grows to around 730k games bought (and this is €7.2635mil in pure revenue), it gets all fucked up and a desperate scream for money. I don't know where the money is going or if Notch thinks he's going to need more insurance than 7 millions. The current phase is strictly a step-away from the promises when the community was still smaller, look at this for example...
We will also change the license to remove the line that promises all future versions of the game for free. Please note that this change only affects people who buy the game after December 20, so if you got the game for during alpha, you will still get all future updates for free, despite this change. A promise is a promise.
Buying the game during beta will include all updates up until release, of course, and bug patches will be free.
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This is either a scream for money or someone's plan to live a good life until death.

Though wait, there's another great addition coming to the whole thing...
Soon, you will be able to buy gift codes for Minecraft, perfectly timed for the holidays! Even better, if you buy those before December 20, accounts created from these codes will count as alpha accounts, and will receive all future updates for free.
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I don't know about you guys, but I think there's still a lot of things to do in Minecraft and Notch clearly misunderstands what people expect from him. People don't expect his one-man-business to become a huge game developing company or a Minecraft beta as soon as possible. Most people actually want the main core to be more optimized and things to work like they did before, this would mean one-two guys developing small time and seriously enjoying themselves while at it... Now that would make a good indie game.

Plus I perhaps mentioned optimization, yeah I did. I don't know how the system works but Java sounds overwhelming in the beginning. Sure, Minecraft world (nether?) is very large and there's a lot of streaming and synchronization to do, but the server is very intensive on the server and connections as well. I mean the memory/cpu usage is not outrageous, but the game at the current state does sound unpolished when we look at the cpu spikes and huge lags together with the "unsynchronization message" that most server consoles get every 10 seconds.

This is just my few cents but I don't think this is heading in the right direction.
 
GPow69 said:
Can't blame the guy for wanting money, everyone here would do the same thing in that situation :P
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Except for the fact he already has earned €7000000, but I suppose that ain't much anyways. Nah, it isn't about that, even I would want more money if I already had that amount and the moneyhunger really doesn't matter. I doubt Notch even does it for the money, what I was trying to say that it is going in a wrong direction and becoming too streamlined... it is supposed to be an indie game!
 
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