A popular indie game is not so surprising. What's surprising is the sheer magnitude of the profits: $359,000 in daily profits -- a $131 million profit run rate. Pure profit. It's conceivable that Notch will become a cash billionaire over the next few years if the growth continues. That's just insane.
Especially when you consider that Notch split his $3M cash dividend across his staff - I don't know if it was staggered across the roles, but on average it would be roughly $125k a piece.
Minecraft is one of the few modern examples of Gave Design triumphing over Graphics. That alone is enough to make me cheer wildly for every positive news I hear about Minecraft.
I want to thank Notch and the team for making/extending this game, and the players for making it popular. It brings me hope that this counterculture can grow stronger in the years to come.
While the graphics are unremarkable. The aesthetic is largely consistent and pleasing. It's a good example of lending the design to the technical limitations (i.e a cube world) rather than trying to disguise it.
The result is a slightly cartoony throwback, interestingly they did experiment with smooth models and at one stage even a round sun/moon, but each time realised it wasn't a good fit. (See removed models here - http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Mobs)
What's also remarkable is that Minecraft isn't entirely a new play concept - I always thought of it as infinitely scaling sandbox of Legos that allowed you to 'live' in the world you create. My first play of Minecraft triggered nostalgia of playing with a big box of random Lego bricks.
Notch knows how to execute and how to do it quickly. Watch any of his coding live streams and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. I hope his new space MMO blows that genre out of the water as well.
I have been interested in the rise of minecraft, so about 3 months ago I started scrapping some stats from the website and forums every day. I grabbed total users, total paid users, forum post count and forum member count.
I haven't been doing it for very long, so there is nothing of great interest in the data, other than the crazy amount of money that Notch must be making.
If you ever want to do cool analysis let me know, I can provide you about a years worth of forum history, can't help with the minecraft.net side though, but there must be someone with the data out there!
28,850,178 registered users, of which 5,884,899 (20.40%) have bought the game.
In the last 24 hours, 125,974 people registered, and 13,337 people bought the game.
However, it's been over 10,000 a day (every day) for at least a year. Honestly, I stopped personally tracking his sales once gross revenue was somewhere around $50M USD.
It should do well to ensure Mojang can survive some tremendously long dry spells and projects that are either failures or only modest successes.
Good question. I just assumed 3 full calendar years. I'm pretty sure that the 'birthdate' is when Notch went public with the project and people started being able to play it, but I don't know if that's the same date that people could pay for it.
It had multiple price points so it's hard to estimate profit. People who bought the game early (like me) paid significantly less than the current $26 price.
There are a few historical graphs showing the sales (the wiki keeps track of the various price points too), however I'm yet to find a graph for the whole 3 year period.
Heh, that screenshot is from my website. The utility I built that used to track the sales (during the period of that screenshot) was turned off once minecraft.net became unreliable (used to crash and I didn't have things in place to avoid data corruption). I wish I had kept it going, would have been great to have it still.
Just for curiosity sake. What's HN's opinion on Minecraft keeping a regular level of sales into the long term. Noting that it's an ongoing development title (and that's a large part of the continuing appeal.)
My observations on /r/minecraft and the minecraft forum reveal that while there is a solid base, the vocal majority of posters seem to be green.
Whilst I'm sure the growth rate will slow, I think there is potential for it to hit a consistent long term growth trend.
Minecraft is basically a modern version of Lego - and Lego has for the most part been consistently popular and sells well. There is a constant batch of new customers (ie kids) who will always enjoy the freedom of exercising their imagination and building their own worlds.
Congrats! I've been tempted to get the iOS version, maybe this milestone will compel me to do so.
The only indie-game-story I respect as highly is Dwarf Fortress. It's hard to imagine how that dense gameplay could ever make a sales breakthrough but what incredible game design it is
The game engine was going to be used by Notch as a '3D Dwarf Fortress' but ended up turning into Minecraft. I wish I could have seen it as Dwarf Fortress.
As someone that only really learned about minecraft fairly recently, that old tech demo video of minecraft from 3 years ago was rather interesting. Is anyone aware of perhaps a series of videos that document its progression?
I'd recommend just reading Notch's blog[1], he started it within a few days of starting the project, and he kept a very good log of changes and reasons, there. There are the occasional fan video or something just for silliness as it is his personal blog, but most of it is related to Minecraft and its development.
