[rcamera]

I have been trying to understand why Microsoft would buy Minecraft. Even though Minecraft is really important, and wildly successful, but the price tag for a game studio with one successful game is rather odd, considering it is unlikely Minecraft will sell millions of copies more (it is already the most sold game ever made). This is a long shot, but it may explain it:

If Microsoft is trying to build its own Steam competitor (which given Valve's current strategy to make Linux an alternative gaming platform to Windows, makes sense), then Minecraft is the perfect acquisition to start it up, for a number of reasons. It is the best selling video game of all time, with over 15 million copies sold for the PC (54 million copies across all platforms), and it has over 100 million accounts registered. It is possibly the only successful indie game that has never integrated with Steam, and that has a very young userbase (based on my experience) which, given their ages, probably isn't part of Steam's userbase. All of these aspects make it a great strategic acquisition if Microsoft wants to make a new and successful game marketplace and platform for Windows.

Anyone else has any other idea why the 2.5 billion price tag?

[ryandvm]

Look at what Microsoft was able to do with Bungie. They took Bungie, who was effectively a one-hit shop, and milked the Halo IP for the better part of 10 years. Hell, they were centimeters from spinning it into a Hollywood blockbuster.

This is the exact same play and frankly, they're pretty good at it. They're going to turn the Minecraft franchise into a Xbox/Windows exclusive. Obviously that's going to piss off a lot of folks, but it's still going to result in a ton of XBox sales - at least as many as Halo was responsible for. They'll iterate on this for the next 10 years and my guess is they'll do it quite successfully.

[rcamera]

The thing is that what makes Minecraft strong is its community, unlike Halo. You won't see Minecraft succeeding at being Windows exclusive, or by making Minecraft 2, 3 or 4. There is a plethora of community mods made and being made for MC, you won't see that happening for any sequel, not at the same level.

[ryandvm]

I don't think that's true - at least not for children.

My kids are fairly young, but both of them play Minecraft on the Xbox purely for the creative outlet. They've only played a few times with other kids on Xbox live.

I suspect as they grow older they'll be more interested in online multiplayer. However, like most parents, I haven't figured out how to let that happen and still shelter them from the frothing insanity I used to regularly encounter when I'd play Halo back in the day.

[gknoy]

Private servers, with whitelists. Because the other players are not anonymous, they're less likely to behave poorly. As the admin, you can ban them, and either call their parents or let your kids deliver the news in person, much as you could if someone came over and started breaking things in person on a play date.

""" Hi, this is Alice's dad. Mal has been really mean to her when playing on our Minecraft server. It's a shared creative world that Alice, her friends, and cousins have been cooperating to build a city in together. Mal decided it would be fun to destroy most of the city, and cover the rest of it in lava.

This really Alice's feelings, as she and the others have spent a long time building together.

Unless Mal will apologize to Alice and the rest of their friends, we aren't willing to let Mal play with us this way. """

There's probably a better way to give the "your kid's being a jerk to my kid" than what I came up with off the top of my head, of course. I suspect that the rest of your kids' peers would swiftly ostracize griefers, as well.

[ryandvm]

Great idea. Thanks!

[forax]

I don't think it's fair to call Bungie a one-hit shop. Pathways into Darkness, Myth, and Marathon were all successful and well respected. Halo definitely moved them onto the big stage by pushing them off the mac platform. I agree with everything else you say though.

[k__]

Aren't they a little late?

Halo wasn't released anywhere when they bought it, so they could use it as a cash cow for the XBox.

Minecraft is already everywhere.

[ryandvm]

You aren't thinking uncreatively enough. There will be Minecraft 2, Minecraft 3, Minecraft: Reach, Minecraft MMO, Minecraft Web Series, Minecraft: The Movie, ad nauseam...

[mikeash]

Bungie had at least three hits (Pathways into Darkness, Marathon, and Myth) even if you don't count the successful sequels to successful games. Halo was likely to have been a huge hit (relative to Bungie) if they had been able to finish and ship it. (That may have been a big "if", as my understanding is that they were struggling financially after the Myth 2 installer debacle, but their ability to produce aside from finances was well established.)

Call it three or four hits, depending on how you count Halo, or the Halo-that-never-was.

[rtpg]

>considering it is unlikely Minecraft will sell millions of copies more (it is already the most sold game ever made).

Pretty much every machine on the planet on which you can sell software has a copy of Tetris. Ports of Minecraft could also exist into infinity in a similar sense.

[gregpilling]

Since there is an aisle of Minecraft related merchandise in my local Target, I think the future cash will come from that. The Cars franchise has been worth billions in merchandise for Pixar/Disney. Regarding CARS "In the five years since its 2006 release, "Cars" has generated global retail sales approaching $10 billion, according to Disney. That ranks the Pixar film alongside such cinematic merchandising standouts as "Star Wars," "Spider-Man" and "Harry Potter," as well as its own paean to playthings, "Toy Story," according to researcher NPD." http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/21/business/la-fi-ct-ca...

In my house of kids (10,7,4,1) Minecraft is more popular than Lego, and it is a point of interest shared by many kids. I have been instructed several times that a Minecraft related gift would be good for a kids birthday party. Since the kids provide the design, entertainment, etc like Lego, I think this has a long long way to go.

My kids are still playing on the Xbox, and have not learned about mods or anything else yet. I am sure it will come soon.

[jccalhoun]

I heard some theory that MS had earnings from outside the USA and if they brought it back into the USA they would have to pay USA taxes on it. So they wanted to spend it on something outside the USA.

If that is true, I'm sure that is just a small part of it.

[graywh]

The same was said about the Nokia deal.

[lmedinas]

Maybe this is just part of the strategy of "keeping Microsoft cool and ready for the next decades". Making young generation aware that Microsoft is cool and forgetting what happened in the last decades.

[scrabble]

It seems silly to me, but there has been speculation that Microsoft wants the users. Minecraft is the number 1 paid app on iOS and Android, and Microsoft wants to push its mobile offering and take some of those users.

I can't see it actually working -- do users really switch phones for a single game? Even if a new version were to become exclusive or measurably better on their platform?

[n09n]

If they didn't do that with skype or office why would they do that with Minecraft?

[Cthulhu_]

Well, 54 million copies across all platforms means that there's still seven billion potential customers. With the Firefox OS and new Android One phones, as well as other efforts to increase the amount of computers in the non-rich western world, I can see Minecraft becoming the next Tetris for a lot of people in the near future who never had access to computers before.

[kstop]

They have reduced uptake amongst the next generation and need to find a computing experience they can ruin for them specifically. This is about $20/player, which is pretty good value compared to the cost and effort required to convince school departments to make 100 million kids sit through Excel 101 classes.

[delecti]

Minecraft is third, or second if you exclude Wii Sports because it was bundled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game...

[rcamera]

My mistake to point out, it is the best selling PC game of all time.

[keypusher]

I don't think Microsoft has any interest in building their own Steam, beyond just building an all-purpose App Store on the Windows platform. Games For Windows Live was a disaster, and their main focus on games today is with the XBox, not the PC.

[Joona]

I think Steam competitor idea is interesting, but forcing it on your playerbase is generally quite a bad idea (see Origin or Uplay). I'd love to see more competition though.

[squeaky-clean]

Forcing it on your playerbase is definitely going to upset people, but that doesn't always make it a bad idea. A good enough product can cause an ecosystem like that to actually gain the mass of users it needs to succeed.

Could you imagine if tomorrow, every Minecraft player needed to create a MS account and use some new sort of steam-like MS Games service to launch it? Sure, a few would quit, but not the majority. Overnight you could gain enough users to compete with Steam.

I'm not saying this will happen, or is even likely. Just that it makes sense to me.

[Monk_NT]

Steam was originally forced on users IIRC

[rlu]

Yep. HL2 was the first game to require it. You would buy the game at best buy and then you'd need to go download this strange program and tie the game to your account.

A lot of people were super pissed. Gabe Newell said "I know, I know, but trust me: this is going to be AWESOME in the future" - boy was he right :)

[nilved]

Yeah, I love DRM!

[wavefunction]

Games have always tried to implement DRM, whether it was requiring a game disk to be inserted or a funny graph to be consulted or a word on a specific page from the manual to be entered.

You know what happened when you lost any of those physical assets before the rise of the Internet? Go buy a new game.

As someone who feels that it is a moral imperative to pay for creative works or forgo them, Steam is just fine by me.

[squeaky-clean]

Steam didn't bring about DRM in games. Games not listed on Steam still have DRM, and generally have much more restrictive DRM than Steam. DRM isn't even a requirement for selling on Steam. Some games (though not many, I know Bastion is one example) will run without Steam, and Steam is just used for updates and achievements.

[Fuzzwah]

And was universally hated.

[MartinCron]

Until it was nearly universally loved. You can take away a bunch of different lessons from the Steam story.

[giancarlostoro]

There's also realms and their massive PC community. Although they've been nose diving their PC community lately.

[droopybuns]

Minesweeper ip is expiring?

[jacquesm]

At a guess, minecraft users are are very loyal and Microsoft will now first update the Xbox version. That will presumably drive Xbox sales.

[n09n]

Just like they first update skype on Windows Phone, right?

[jacquesm]

No, not quite like that.