4 ms·
From what I heard, his "groundwork" was a terrible mess of spaghetti code that was awfully hard to work with. Most likely the only thing he left behind was the
by rootlocus 11y ago
From what I heard, his "groundwork" was a terrible mess of spaghetti code that was awfully hard to work with. Most likely the only thing he left behind was the IP and fan base.
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y agoI meant more the initial marketing and community involvement that helped the game get popular in the first place. Much as it pains me to say it as a developer, code quality isn't everything...
- rootlocus 11y agoYou're right. I'm positive that every time a large company acquires a small one, it's because of their community and IP. Code is easily rewritten, and startups aren't making breakthroughs in algorithms. It's not like microsoft didn't have engineers capable of making a minecraft clone. They didn't have the rights to do so.
- andrepd 11y agoExactly. Obviously MS didn't pay 2.5bil for a messy Java codebase. They paid for the brand, the IP, and the fanbase.
- tomjen3 11y agoSo? It obviously did its job well enough and if it no longer does then you refactor it. It is so, so much more difficult to make a game successful than to make successful game.
- mikekchar 11y agoIf you go look at my githb account you will see lots of spaghetti code that will never be sold for $2.5 billion ;-) It doesn't matter how poor the code was, it was incredibly valuable before anyone else joined the company.