Microsoft has officially acquired Mojang, the Swedish game development studio behind Minecraft, for $2.5 billion. Xbox Chief Phil Spencer confirmed the deal earlier today, after weeks of rumors. Mojang will move over to Microsoft’s own game development studio, alongside the studios who create Halo and Fable, amongst other titles.
Minecraft continues to be one of the biggest video games, with around 100 million buyers on all platforms. The original Minecraft game was developed on PC and still has a vibrant community of modders, who implement new features into the game. The console version is ported over by 4J Studios, who have worked on iterative updates for each console platform, we are not sure how this will work with Microsoft in charge.
Why Mojang?
There has been a lot of weird acquisitions recently, Apple’s acquisition of Beats Electronics for $3 billion, Amazon’s acquisition of Twitch.TV for $970 million and now Microsoft acquiring Mojang for $2.5 billion. The big question is why Mojang, and the answer most people will find is Minecraft, by far the most popular game the indie studio has made.
Minecraft made Mojang $100 million in 2013 and will continue to sell on new platforms like the PS4 and Xbox One this year, but we expect Microsoft wants more from the studio. We might see different implementation of Minecraft under Microsoft’s rule, perhaps new features that add characters from other Xbox games.
Microsoft might even be looking to hit the modding community, by implementing the same type of features in the console version, but only for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. This would be a huge plus for Microsoft, plenty of console gamers want to try out mods, currently only available on the PC edition.
Markus “Notch Persson
Another big question mark, Notch, the creator of Minecraft and founder of Mojang. Notch has officially stated he will be leaving Mojang and his reasons reflect why this deal went down. It isn’t anything to do with Mojang wanting to be acquired, it is about the owner of Mojang and Minecraft not wanting to be famous or a “symbol” any more.
Sometimes, fame in the games industry is torturous, we see people like Phil Fish and creator of Flappy Bird Dong Nguyen try to get back out of the spotlight, by jumping out of games development all together. Notch backed out of Minecraft in 2011, but he is still the face of it, and he wants that to go away, so he can work on other smaller projects.
Minecraft as an entity is definitely worth a lot, it might be the hottest game of the decade and now Microsoft can port it wherever they want. The Oculus is now open and if they are working on their own virtual reality headset, Minecraft could the first exclusive. The rest of Mojang will be moved over to Microsoft’s game studio.
