Hi everyone. Bit of breaking news. Microsoft has
bought Minecraft. Now this news was rumoured
on Friday of last week but it does now appear that Microsoft has made it official.
2.5 billion dollars. Not bad for a game that started off
quite literally as an alpha and pretty much kick-started the idea of getting
gamers to help develop your game by paying small amounts of money to fund it.
So it's come full circle really for Notch
and the teams over at Mojang. They have basically exited the company
and taken 2.5 billion dollars with them.
Beautiful play there from a financial point of view. From a gaming point of
view
it's going to be very interesting to see what Microsoft now does with its
acquisition.
If they're smart, they'll treat it just a little bit like Amazon is treating
Twitch, give
it loads of resources and just leave it alone. Let's take a look at what Microsoft
have to say about their acquisition of Minecraft.
So I'm here in Stockholm, really excited that we just signed to
acquire Minecraft, Mojang's studio. A studio we worked with for many years.
Three years ago we started working
with the studio on Minecraft when we announced at E3 that we would be bringing
Minecraft
to the Xbox 360. At that time we really didn't know what we were
getting into. The next year we shipped it and it became the best-selling
online game of all time for us on Xbox 360,
and if you've looked over the years it's always stayed at the top
of Xbox live useage. One of the things that's pretty special to me about
Minecraft and Mojang in my relationship with Marcus and
Karl and Jacob is just watching the three of them
evolve as individuals with the success that they've had
through the first time we went out to dinner right before E3 in 2011
which was frankly the first time I had met them face-to- face.
We had literally just signed the deal to bring
Minecraft to Xbox 360. They were
seeing the growth on PC but still very early in the growth of what was to
become
what we can see is Minecraft today. And as individuals, as friends
I'm really happy for the success that they've built.
This has been a life-changing event for them.
The game industry can be a tough place with hits in
people working really hard that's not always true that the most effort goes
into the biggest hits. This is
definitely an example where a team of very committed people,
people that I know and have known for many years now, have put just their
their heart and soul into what Minecraft has become and
to see the results turn out so well for them is just really nice.
This is a game
that has found its audience on touch devices, on phones, on iPad,
on console, and obviously its true home on PC.
Whether you're playing on an Xbox, whether you're playing on a Playstation and
Android,
I O S device, our goal is to continue to evolve and innovate
with Minecraft across all those platforms.
So the things that are special to us about Minecraft is
the broad set of gamers that play this game. You have young and old, male, female
there's truly very few things in the market
where there are games, movies, TV like it with the
amount of, just excitement engagement from the community.
The people, the community out there of user-generated content and servers that
have made this such a vibrant
and active community for so many gamers for so many years.
Those are critical to what have made Minecraft great today,
the things that we're going to want to continue to work on, continue to
work with the community and with the studio here in Stockholm.
One thing that's really going to be clear is Microsoft, the team at Xbox
our focus on gaming, we're going to learn a lot as an organisation
in what it means to work with a community that's as vibrant
as the Minecraft community. And they should know from us that
we come at this with obviously a plan
and a real cornerstone of that plan is listening to the feedback from the
Minecraft community and what they'd like to see
and just as we've made some changes and improvements in our
Xbox program, I want to keep that same level
to the Minecraft community as we go through this experience together.
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