Minecraft Tops 100 Million Sales (engadget.com) 112
An anonymous reader writes: Mojang has announced today that its game 'Minecraft' has passed 100 million sales across all platforms, including PC, Mac, consoles and mobile. Nearly 53,000 copies of the game have been sold every single day around the world since the beginning of the year. What may be even more impressive is the fact that more than 40 million people actively open up a Minecraft world each month and play around with a blocky axe, shovel and sword. According to Wikipedia, Minecraft is the second-bestselling video game of all-time next to Tetris. Tetris has sold a whopping 495 million copies, so don't expect Minecraft to earn the number one spot anytime soon. Microsoft did acquire Mojang almost two years ago, and there has been no word on a sequel as the company continues to release Minecraft for new platforms like HoloLens and Samsung's Gear VR. Soon, there will even be a version made just for China too.
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Cheap Cheap Cheap (Score:2)
2.5 billion is a steal for a globally recognized brand. Disney bought Star Wars from Lucas for 5 billion, and if they don't make that back before the decade is out, I will eat my hat.
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Re:who did what, now? (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe that's not such a bad idea. Rename the company Minecraft.
Kinda like Philip Morris changing their name to the Altria Group, to help people forget about the horrible products [i]they[/i] made.
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Maybe that's not such a bad idea. Rename the company Minecraft. Kinda like Philip Morris changing their name to the Altria Group, to help people forget about the horrible products [i]they[/i] made.
They will even make more money if they bring out a version of Minecraft called "Call of Duty - Minecraft" or better yet to cover all bases "Minecraft Battlefront". :-)
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I'm leaning toward Overcraft or Minewatch.
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Right now Microsoft could rename themselves "Puppies, Candy and Fireworks Factory" and it wouldn't help their reputation...
Re:who did what, now? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:who did what, now? (Score:4, Informative)
It got a decent boost with Win7. Win8 was more or less underwhelming, but not disastrous. Now the current push for Win10 earns them reputation of some supervillain with a master plan.
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It got a decent boost with Win7. Win8 was more or less underwhelming, but not disastrous. Now the current push for Win10 earns them reputation of some supervillain with a master plan.
I installed MS Win10 in a virtual machine a few hours ago and as an operating system, it is fine, as I would expect it to be.
Here are my observations.
1) The base OS installed from the ISO is about 9.4GB.
2) Very pretty although that is subjective and you like tiles, although it is possible to hide them.
3) Verry intrusive into your private use.
4) Loves to make is fairly difficult for the average user to change the security settings. Fortunately, there are private tools (be careful) that can fix that.
5
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The full scale of the problems doesn't begin to show up until you begin to use win10 as a power user.
It's an okay system for a secretary for using MS Office and maybe an invoice program.
It's a bad system for a developer who needs to write embedded C, crosscompile for 5 different embedded platforms, support 20 various embedded protocols, often involving weird hardware plugged into the PC. The backwards compatibility modes are dodgy at times, the system poorly manages a large number of programs including mult
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Right now Microsoft could rename themselves "Puppies, Candy and Fireworks Factory" and it wouldn't help their reputation...
That's because they would feed the puppies the candy and then load them into the fireworks
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THIS.... none of those were simple renames. Software evolves and all of those products went through a great deal of change over multiple transitions.
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You're expected to replace the wrong words until it becomes an interesting, readable and factual article.
'tis no site for lazies.
Blocks? (Score:4, Funny)
Note the top two selling games of all times are about placing blocks.
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> yeah that vile c++ language, how dare it make it so easy for even experienced programmers to create buffer overflows.
FTFY.
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Turning Pac-Man into Ms. Pac-Man took more than 8 byte overlays.
If the update had been released in 2016, the sequel would have been called Pac-LGBT.
Re:Blocks? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but the fact that it's written in Java is, if anything, detrimental to its success. What makes it so great is that it can be modded, you identified that one correctly, and there are many other examples of games that are mediocre at best that had a lot of success mostly because they're easily modable, but Java is not the reason for this.
If anything, you could say that it was lucky Notch coded it in Java because he didn't think of making it modable and owing it to Java it can be modded easily. Well, not as easily as it COULD be if he actually created it with modding in mind in a sensible language instead of this memory hog clusterfuck, but yes, in a roundabout way, Java made Minecraft a success. But saying that Java is the reason is about as sensibly as saying the unsanitary conditions in Flemming's lab were the key to his discovery of Penicillin.
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Plus it runs like a dog on anything but a monster PC. While the console edition (being a native port) runs fine on my Xbox 360. When MS acquired it I was hoping for a native DirectX C++ port (with mod compatibility, magically somehow), but all they've managed is porting pocket edition to Windows 10 App Store. Meh
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I have an AMD box with an integrated GPU and Minecraft runs just fine. I'll admit, it runs pretty slow on some of the laptops I've seen with their sorry excuse for graphics processors, but on any basic desktop chip it will run just fine.
I think the problems are more to do with bad coding than anything to do with the language it is written in. On a slow computer you can see the tunnels that are miles away from you get drawn before the ground right in front of you. Why do they even bother drawing the tunnels
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voice of experience...
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I've heard this a few times, there must be something really odd going on with the game because my 2008 2.83ghz quad core with 8gb of RAM handles it without breaking a sweat at 1080p and above default settings for draw distance etc.
I'm not saying you're wrong, because I know someone else mentioned this once before that they had problems with a PC far more powerful than mine, but I'd argue that it doesn't inherently need a powerful PC, it's just that there is something that causes poor performance on some sys
Re: Blocks? (Score:1)
Take a trip over to the Reddit feedthebeast, a mod-development community centered around the mod loader Forge. These guys continuously complain about how every recompiled MC version means all the mods need to be ported by hand, and many are quitting now that their packs have to move to 1.9 (and 1.10 pre reserve was just announced). The community is littered with abandon ware.
Mojang promised a modding API with hooks and never delivered. The modding community still plows on with known bugs, memory and FPS
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Minecraft is popular because it is written in Java.
Did you really just say "Minecraft is popular because it's {Insert thing 90% of the population don't know about, and the remaining 10% don't care about}"
Did you really just say that? What were you hoping to accomplish with that comment?
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What makes it so great is that you are given a basic set of tools and allowed to play however you like.
I bought it back when it we less than $10 USD and have never really used any mods except for Opitfine.
Being in Java was important because it let a one man team release it to the world on Mac, Window, and Linux with very little platform specific work.
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room scale? soo.. like 7x7x7 blocks?
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Nah, not 7 blocks tall. The player fits in 2-high but not 1-high, so you could reasonably call a block a meter. Unless you're in some commercial building with really high pipes and vents and stuff, and no drop ceilings, I don't think you'd get much higher than 4 blocks high, and even that might be pushing it.
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Microsoft Owns Mojang (Score:1)
Waiting for news on how MS will monetize Minecrack.
My 12 yo son is a Minecraft addict. On weeknights and weekends he pouts if he can't play. He's even got me into playing weekends on private servers and paying for his Realms account. Waiting on news on how they're turning the game into profitable accumulated player data.
I just know they'll turn my minecraft model of the Geisel Library [wikipedia.org] into profit, somehow.
Still trying to figure out how to make it dance [wikipedia.org].
It will have to involve Redstone, I'm sure...
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Waiting for news on how MS will monetize Minecrack.
He's even got me [...] paying for his Realms account.
Well, I know at least one answer to your question...
But they're making it in a load of different ways. Direct sales, DLC skin packs, Minecraft Realms operations, licensing deals, accessories like shirts and hats, and the list goes on. Even if the average selling price for each copy of the game was just $10 (which is far less than the actual number), they'd have made over $1B from direct sales alone.
Earth (Score:2, Interesting)
My dream is to play a Minecraft world that is a 1:1 mapping of Earth, with proper terrain and biomes. I did find a map called Earth long time ago but it was really scaled down and not very realistic (still impressive, though).
I wonder if you could modify the chunk generator to download from Google Earth and generate realistic chunks on the fly...
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MCPE just got a new river-biome village.. so progress is happening.
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MS has never really been a consumer focused company. I would say that this is their entrance to the consumer world more than anything.
As far as keeping the company afloat... well, that would be Azure. Minecraft is a drop in the bucket.
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It's that thing that failed to compete against the Intellivision and Colecovision, isn't it?
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There are TONS of ideas that could be done. Anyone who reads /r/minecraft [reddit.com] will be aware of them.
i.e.
* Separate the geometry from the texture, so you don't have to wait for half-block, stair, equivalents of a new material
* Shared / Co-operative building
* Steam Workshop
* Actual magic
* Actual quests
* New block types. i.e. Think Lego
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I don't think there will be a sequel.. Think the focus will just switch to the MCPE code base. It is already shared across multiple platforms...
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Their has not been a legit free-to-play version available since the demo a few years back. Lots of hacked versions, but many of them have trojans too.
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Parrents have been asking for this. They do not want their kids playing on unmonitored public servers so MS is rolling in the code to let you play people on your XBox friends list.. or whatever they call it.
When did Microsoft change their name? (Score:2)
Minecraft did acquire Mojang almost two years ago...
I think what you mean is
Microsoft did acquire Mojang almost two years ago...
And that is JUST the game... (Score:2)
Microsoft didn't just get the game, they got the rights to the BRAND. Minecraft merchandise is huge. I know, I have three kids who love it.
What I like about it is that my kids all share 1 account... they don't go out on servers to play, they just build worlds and do all kinds of stuff locally. I even set up a server for them, but they don't use it. They just open their worlds up to LAN access and have fun.
I also like that it is set up (currently) so you buy the game and you are good. No paying for upgr
Raspberry Pi (Score:1)
I just wish they would put a bit more effort into rekindling the support they had for the Raspberry Pi platform. There are quirky hacks to get the full version to work but it shouldn't have to be that complicated.
Re:Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
I will not care until Minecraft is open source.
Well, you could try "Minetest" or any of the following here [alternativeto.net]
Re:Open Source (Score:4)
How strong is your grasp on assembly?
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Which has nothing really to do with actual assembly language, in terms of either syntax or performance.
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Re:Open Source (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, following some leaks, decompilation, forgotten debug symbols etc, full source of Minecraft is available. Not legally, but still.
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Actually, as a former Mojang developer (hi, I'm TheMogMiner), you're full of shit. There have been next to zero leaks other than some minor screenshots from when Markus was still developing it single-handedly literally years ago, and the decompiled source code has the following issues:
1) It's 100% crowd-sourced, and with the Minecraft community being comprised mainly of kids and teenagers, some of the community-supplied symbols are fucking dumb as hell and not at all accurate.
2) Nowhere near 100% of the sou
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I think TheMogMiner is right, if their had been any leaks it is likely we would have heard about them.
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