Some rumours and reports had surfaced at the end of last week that Microsoft had been looking to acquire Mojang, the developers behind the hugely successful sandbox creative game, Minecraft, which has recently been released on Xbox One and Playstation 4, with the Playstation Vita version coming soon as well. The game has been the most successful digital game on Xbox Live when it was released on the Xbox 360, with over 12 Million downloads, as well as being hugely successful on it’s main platform, the PC, and on mobile devices as well.
Today, it was revealed that these rumours were indeed true. Microsoft have indeed acquired Mojang, but instead of for $2 Billion as first reported, for $2.5 Billion. While that doesn’t seem like a huge jump, because this is in the billions, it’s a massive difference. Both Microsoft and Mojang themselves have discussed the beginnings of what this will mean, which you can read here and watch below.
A lot of worries have come from this acquisition as Microsoft of course will now have a game they own on Sony platforms. Though by the sounds of Xbox Head Phil Spencer, this isn’t going to change, as they feel that they want to continue improving and supporting the game across all platforms. Good news, of course, but it remains to see what changes this will bring to Minecraft in general, though it’s suspected that there will be unique features for the game on Windows Phone and Tablet platforms. The push on it’s own platforms may be the forefront of Microsoft’s ideals, but at the moment it seems that they will not be removing the game from their competitors platform, especially with the massive increase in revenue that gives them.
There is some unfortunate news with this, however. With these early reports, it was said that Notch, the creator and one of the founders of the developer Mojang, is leaving the company, along with other co-founders Carl and Jakob. It was said in the post at Mojang’s site, linked above, that Notch had been having trouble with the pressure of Minecraft while trying to work on other projects, and he doesn’t want the responsibility of owning a company with a huge global significance. Understandable for someone who just made a game that he thought would be cool that blew up so much that it’s one of the most recognisable and successful games on the planet. Notch recently posted on his blog, discussing the sale and his reasons behind everything that has been transpiring recently. You can read the entire post here, if the site hasn’t continued to be overloaded with traffic.
There’s not much known about the current future of Minecraft, but from what Phil Spencer has been saying, it seems that they’re just looking to improve on it in as many ways as they can, while keeping it available to everyone. Either way, although some of the big faces at Mojang are gone, those who have been working on Minecraft for a very long time at this point are still there, and the developer has a very interesting future ahead of it.
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