On this day 10 years ago, Microsoft acquired #Minecraft developer Mojang for US$2.5 billion.
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Mojang_Studios#History
In a blog post announcing the purchase, Owen Jones wrote: “Everything is going to be OK. <3”
http://web.archive.org/web/20140915131835/https://mojang.com/2014/09/yes-were-being-bought-by-microsoft/
Ten years later, Mojang now has been part of Microsoft almost twice as long as it has been independent.
It’s interesting to look back at the original announcement video from Xbox as well:
https://youtu.be/lXNWchwDiG8
Minecraft is one of the only base games on the market that is perpetually having content and features added to it. For free.
And I don’t know of any developer other than Mojang that prioritizes and targets bug fixing to such a high degree.
Edit: TIL, some people see the phrase “one of the only” and think it means “the only”.
Factorio is always the same price… and the big 2.0 update is next month… with a paid DLC Expansion coming.
Well, kinda the same price, they sometimes up it to account for inflation. I do see the DLC difference (this could be said to be an equivalent of for example Minecraft Dungeons with the amount of content, but I see how it is kinda “more of the same”). Anyway, the 2.0 update does bring a lot to the base game for free.
And it’s definitely worth the money! Just odd. I fully expected them to develop Minecraft 2 and 3 years ago to cash in and overwork some of the basics but that didn’t happen for better or worse, but probably better. It remains to be a truly unique game till this day.
Well, “Minecraft 2” was arguably Minecraft: Dungeons which as we all know categorically failed to set the world on fire.