Markus Persson, more commonly known in the gaming community as Notch is about to hit the big time, again. I say this loosely as the guy is already worth hundreds of millions of dollars in personal wealth, and his net worth is probably over a billion if you factor in his company equity and all that mumbo jumbo money jargon.
The reason he’s about to hit the big time again is because The Wall Street Journal decided to report on something the other day. Microsoft are rumoured to be ponying up around 2billion of their hard earned George Washingtons to buy Mojang, a tiny little indie company from Sweden.
Notch’s baby, Mojang is the sensational company that convinced the world that you’re never too old to play with blocks. It’s a simple structure and for the last two years they have made Notch alone at least $100million a year. That’s disgusting, but only because I didn’t think of it first.
Now Mojang isn’t solely Notch – there are co-founders of the company, but Notch is the main man behind the team. He owns the mojority (too subtle?) stake in the company, and that makes him the Dr. Dre of gaming. The company is small, around 40 employees or so, and they’ve been sensible enough to handoff work to third parties for the console versions of Minecraft (this is handled by 4J Studios in Dundee).
Now I have no idea what’ll happen if Microsoft are successful in their bid. It could mean support for current platforms out with the realms of Microsoft’s reach gets promptly dropped, which would be a firm kick in the bollocks for Sony who last week launched Minecraft on the PS4 a day before MS did on the Xbox One. God knows what it means for Android/Apple.
I still haven’t made my mind up as to whether this is good or bad for gaming. It’s a weird move by Microsoft, because no matter how talented the team in Mojang are, lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice. Minecraft is a runaway success, but what else do they have planned? We’re not going to get that prequel we’ve all been longing for, explaining why this little dude is mining. What’s his backstory? He can chop down trees with his bare hands, that’s not normal, but then neither are Creepers.
