8 ms·

$250,000-a-day Minecraft strikes indie game gold

254 points by starnix17 16y ago

ctkrohn 16y ago
"Perrson cites games such as Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper and Inifiniminer among key influences on Minecraft's anything-goes nature and blocky 8-bit style." Blocky 8-bit style? Those graphics would have been cutting edge in 1993, almost a decade after the heyday of 8-bit systems.
- windsurfer 16y ago
  It's a style, not a technology anymore ;)
- sbierwagen 16y ago
  Additionally, they are cutting edge now. The textures are so small for budget and performance reasons. When generating new terrain, my i7 920 system with a HD 4850 drops to 40 fps. You can download higher-resolution third-party textures, and they turn the game into a slideshow.
  - Gormo 16y ago
    That may be more to do with the Minecraft running in Java and not making full use of the GPU. There's no reason that graphics of Minecraft's quality shouldn't be blazingly fast on current hardware.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      Hmm I'm not sure. Look at World of Warcraft, it looks OK-ish (by today's standards) but mostly because of the great texturing; poly count is way low. The reason is that the world is just do damn big, and I suspect it's the same with Minecraft. Even with advanced LOD algorithms, the open-ended world concept requires so many polygons to render that today's hardware is simply not sufficient to render it. Processoers and GPUs need to improve 10-fold in performance, and games like these will still easily use all that power. (by that time it may be more efficient to just raytrace them, especially as we'll have dozens of cores in a few years...) Also, I suspect the Java and GPU points are moot, as I cannot image it doesn't use OpenGL. Now the Jave OpenGL implementation or intermediary or whatever may not be as fast as 'native' calls but I think it's not going to make a magnitude difference. TL/DR: IMO it's not about the graphics quality but about the sheer amount of it.
      - mrbgty 16y ago
        "Even with advanced LOD algorithms, the open-ended world concept requires so many polygons to render that today's hardware is simply not sufficient to render it" What? It's been awhile but ~ 5 yrs ago I remember implementing a quadtree LOD algorithm that pretty much allowed me to make the world as big as I wanted considering only the area nearby would be rendered. If its out of view, its a flat world.
        roel_v 16y ago
        "considering only the area nearby would be rendered" Well yeah if you make the area around you small enough, then sure. Taking WoW as an example again (because it's what I'm familiar with), decreasing the view distance is the single most influential parameter to improve performance. When you fly across a landscape and mountains pop up out of nowhere as you approach them, in triangles, it very much takes away from the realism. Of course this is not just about rendering triangles any more, LOD is constrained by the CPU and memory, but more raw poly pushing power would lessen the burden on the CPU... (experience drawn on a NVidia 9800 video card, not top of the line but a rather average casual gamer card I'd say)
    - sbierwagen 16y ago
      I like how you apparently came to that conclusion based on the language it was implemented in, and without any knowledge of its internal structure. I just fired it up with the ATI Catalyst panel open, and it said a maximum of 53% GPU utilization. Which isn't bad, since Minecraft wouldn't be using any of the shader units. Well, presumably, since I know as little as you do about how Minecraft is designed.
      - astrodust 16y ago
        The rendering engine is pretty primitive by modern standards, and shows signs of being implemented by someone new to OpenGL. It displays all the performance issues that a typical first OpenGL implementation does like significant lag when turning around quickly where objects are swapped in and out of memory in a blocking manner. It could benefit from significant optimizations in terms of algorithm and these would probably make it perform an order of magnitude even faster than porting the same code to C++ would ever do. The OpenGL layer is not being utilized effectively. I think the game is currently CPU/VM bound and simply can't keep up with the GPU. More aggressive use of the GPU, like through OpenGL or OpenCL calls, would improve performance considerably. I'm not sure how viable the OpenCL angle is on Java, though.
    - jcromartie 16y ago
      Java can make full use of the GPU. The game uses LWJGL, a wrapper for OpenGL and other native/accelerated libraries. You can even use shader programs from Java.
- harry 16y ago
  I suppose if you average Dungeon Keepers graphics with Dwarf Fortress's stock ASCII set, you'd get something close to 8-bit styling.
ugh 16y ago
A word of warning: Highly addictive, and not in a good way.
- clofresh 16y ago
  can you explain?
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    Perhaps the commenter is too busy playing the game to explain. Or eat.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - jjs 16y ago
      This must be the 'survival horror' aspect they were talking about.
  - johnswamps 16y ago
    Basically the game is a really enjoyable way of spending hours and hours collecting resources and using them to create giant buildings and structures. It's a lot of fun but you're still sinking a huge amount of time on it. Sure, I had fun building that 30x30x30 (one unit is maybe 4 feet) castle but why did I spend 20 hours working on it over the weekend?
    - teamonkey 16y ago
      It's OK, you're allowed to have fun.
    - daychilde 16y ago
      Very close guess on the scale - each block is a cubic meter.
  - thorax 16y ago
matthew-wegner 16y ago
Minecraft has been a huge success, but $250,000-a-day is a little misleading. The site was down for the last few days due to mentions from Penny Arcade and elsewhere (PA ran two comics on Minecraft, which is insane exposure to a huge gaming audience). Notch turned the downtime into a free-to-play period, but you couldn't buy Minecraft while things were down. The $250k/day number actually represents a few days of sales pressure, but it's still awfully impressive...
- RossM 16y ago
  To add: in order to continue playing Minecraft after the free-to-play period you have to buy a subscription, however I agree with the idea there have been recent spikes as people do buy it. I read somewhere that Notch had accrued at least two million in PayPal but can't vouch that it's accurate.
  - ptomato 16y ago
    Certainly not two million in PayPal all at once, but if you want to know how many copies he's sold the numbers are right here http://minecraft.net/stats.jsp http://minecraft.net/stats.jsp and I don't think the price has been below €10.
MrFoof 16y ago
Having picked it up a few weeks ago, the game is an odd blend of open-ended creative sandbox, epic-scale exploration and survival horror. It taps into that feeling of opening up a bin of Lego and not having a specific model instruction booklet. Its feature-set is still very fluid. Yet it seems to out-do Civilization's "one more turn". This is a game where if you picked it up tonight at 7PM and started out, you'd hear your alarm clock going off in another room as morning rolls in. The game has essentially gone viral at this point. Multiple webcomics are covering it. There's decent coverage on social news sites. Industry rags have picked it up. Industry veterans (I have a friend at Disney Interactive, and another at BioWare) have absolutely taken notice, Valve in particular. Some review sites are seriously considering it as their "game of the year" candidate. This weekend the website (and authentication service) collapsed under load. With some outside help it's up and fine after some refactoring and offloading things to S3. Today he cracked 25,000 unit sales for the day, or about $340K USD in gross revenue. Yes, he. Until very recently, it was basically a one-man show. There's a few dedicated folks coming on board now, but that's what's humbling. Today, Markus eclipsed my day's compensation in just 88 seconds.
- drtse4 16y ago
  If you'd like to check daily (as i do) the progress of the minecraft sales and other statistics just go here: http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ (official data taken from the minecraft site graphed with Google Chart API).
- mambodog 16y ago
  What I think is interesting about the free-to-play period (due to website collapse) is that it may actually be a massive boost, because it gets the game client onto a lot of machines. That doesn't sound like much, but here's where it gets interesting: the client auto-updates itself, bringing in new content and features as they are built. To continue to get updates (AFAIK) you must log in with your paid credentials. You can continue to play the 'free weekend' version without doing so, but you won't get any updates. Thus people can continue to play and be addicted, and that 'Register' link is there waiting on the main menu when the urge for the new hotness overcomes them. Also, kudos to Notch for supporting Mac and Linux. I guess we're getting to a point where, for indie games at least, a very compelling experience can be built using a less-than-optimal platform (in this case being Java, which heretofore hasn't been used for games a whole lot). By the way, it has even had TV coverage here in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?pres=20100920_2030&story=5 http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?pres=201...
joshu 16y ago
So, uh.... anyone for an HN SMP server?
- absconditus 16y ago
  I am interested. There are several other members of #startups who would likely check it out as well.
- TeHCrAzY 16y ago
  If you are in Australia, try simplicity.classexception.com :)
- kd0amg 16y ago
  Might be enough to get me back into SMP. I haven't played in a few updates, but I usually get intimidated by a long-running server that already has a lot of large scale construction projects finished (not to mention frustrated at trying to find a good build site for myself).
DrStalker 16y ago
It really does feel like Minecraft has made a new genre of game here, something that genuinely deserves the name "sandbox" because other than the bedrock way down below every single piece of the world can be dug up and manipulated. It manages to tweak every single one of my addicting-game buttons, and even if no new features get added I'd happily rate it my Indie Game of the Year or possibly even Game of the Year.
teej 16y ago
I spent 12 years waiting for Starcraft II. I bought the collectors edition. I played to Diamond rank and beyond. But the day I started Minecraft was the last day I played Starcraft II. This game is really good.
- wizard_2 16y ago
  Same dam story for me too - I'm not a big gamer, I don't have time to play normally and minecraft has won over starcraft 2 for the past week.
slay2k 16y ago
Holy. Shitballs. My hat's off to this man. Perhaps the thing I envy most here is the fact that this guy's achieved this doing what he loves. According to his personal page, he's been building games for many, many years, and has entered dozens of small competitions. He seems to genuinely love building games, and would almost certainly continue doing it regardless of money.
crux_ 16y ago
Of note: Notch seems to be a regular in the LD48 (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/) competitions. (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/notch/ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/notch/) I'm, um, an irregular. (Entered twice, finished once.) Here's his screen-capture timelapse for the last one, which was a bit over a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629810 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629810
shajith 16y ago
Here's something that illustrates the sort of thing you can do in this game: a 12x5 LED display built in-game[1]. Reminded me of the Dwarf Fortress Computer[2]. [1] http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=24213 http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=24213 [2] http://www.geekosystem.com/dwarf-fortress-turing-machine-computer/ http://www.geekosystem.com/dwarf-fortress-turing-machine-com...
invisible 16y ago
I think it is inaccurate when it says "sales grew to over 6,000 a day during this period." The sales when the Paypal account was locked HAD to have been ~$44k/day (or around 4,700 sales per day after taking fees imposed into consideration) as he said he had around $800,000 (USD) on September 10th (starting around the week of August 22nd).
codexon 16y ago
Can someone explain the appeal? I normally enjoy indie games with low-end graphics like Dwarf Fortress or Adom. My first impression as I logged into a server was a giant landscape of multicolored blocks devoid of any meaning whatsoever. There was no survival horror element I could make out in 30 minutes of playing. I decided to try building something only to be bored of drawing something block by block, like being a pixel artist that had to waste 10 seconds every time you wanted to zoom out. Then I tried following someone around who was also not doing anything interesting. I attempted to dig a bottomless pit under him until he presumably logged off, and at that point I also logged off due to boredom.
- stonemetal 16y ago
  Multiplayer is just a free for all, endless world sort of thing. In the single player portion of the game you build by day and are attacked by the undead at night.
- ZachPruckowski 16y ago
  Unless it's changed in the last week, Multiplayer Survival mode is bugged (it's an alpha) so that monsters can't damage you. So most multiplayer servers are in Creative mode, where you just build stuff. Single player survival still works, and is a lot of fun. The first day cycle is about getting a pick, a shelter, and some coal for torches before nightfall and zombies/skeletons come out. Then you spend the next few day/night cycles building up, and people usually start exploring around Day 5-10. And get horridly lost and have to construct shelter as the sun is setting to avoid monster attack. And to get the good resources like iron and diamond and gold and redstone, you have to go spelunking in caves, where monsters can spawn in any dark spot. Even coal is only available in small amounts on cliff faces, so you have to either mine or spelunk for that too past the first few pieces.
- hamai 16y ago
  Took a while for me, but things got interesting when I started crafting. From there and I had to go deep mining to find metal, and then I crafted my first diamond tool. Down there I had a few scary moments, only survived because of the metal armor I did. Until now I'm not very fond of building, I just build the necessary. Tried to start some fancy stuff, but lacked a lot of materials, so for now I'm just filling some chests and crafting tools and small stuff. Here's a good start for crafting: http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting
endlessvoid94 16y ago
I just paid $13 and discovered the 'classic' game has been suspended? I downloaded the alpha and it's....pretty basic. I understand that it's just an alpha and shouldn't expect anything fantastic, which is fine. But I'm unable to play the game (I think, unless I've overlooked something). Any ideas?
- Groxx 16y ago
  Unable to play? Or unable to find things to do? (serious question)
  - endlessvoid94 16y ago
    The latter. It's totally possible I'm missing something, but I checked the site's wiki and can only seem to pick up flowers, beat cows to get meat, and pick up tiny little trees. How does one actually PLAY?
    - Groxx 16y ago
      An utterly massive part of the game is through crafting: http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting You can't get anywhere without it, and yes, it's very boring if you're not a total-sandbox-fan playing multiplayer. And the game does utterly squat to inform you that it exists. It took me an hour of poking around before I found that page, and then it all clicked. So maybe I should warn you: it gets way more interesting when you start crafting. You start planning. Exploring. Fighting back against the zombies. Some caves are massive - light them up and find veins. Earning the ability to build your floating fortress is strangely rewarding. It's also an oddly beautiful game in its simplicity - your lit caves are visible from a long way off with a soft glow, and you'll quickly find that light means safety... until the spider-riding skeletons start chasing you when you venture too far. And it's kind of creepy how quickly you start to feel ownership over what you've made.
      - endlessvoid94 16y ago
        Yeah, I found that page. The problem is, I don't see any zombies. All I see is terrain and flowers. And the occasional cow/sheep. Do I just need to keep looking? What am I looking for? How do I get the different types of blocks? I found some by hitting the sheep (or whatever they are) but the same thing didn't seem to work on trees or terrain. Gah. I do enjoy the freedom of the game. But I need to do something soon or I just lose interest and quit.
charleso 16y ago
I really hope the fellow behind Dwarf Fortress sees this success and starts charging a small amount for his releases. I think the following DF has (despite its rough state) would provide impressive revenue and allow him to bring on employees to help build his game while earning him a comfortable living.
- ptomato 16y ago
  The thing is, minecraft is far, far more accessible than dwarf fortress will ever be without some major changes, and has a vastly greater potential audience.
- wlievens 16y ago
  DF makes about $30k in donations per year. It's insane to see MC make more than that per day. Poor Toady.
  - z0r 16y ago
    Just donated to Toady. Dwarf fortress is a masterpiece in progress, thank you for reminding me of his financial woes
rsaarelm 16y ago
The initial game with the day cycle and the monsters coming out at night is genius. Really taps into a primal light-and-shelter instinct. Also the light management with cave exploration is great. However, once I figured out a wooden shack with a door built in a couple of minutes completely thwarts the AI enemies, I lost most interest. The setup is player against the world, but the world doesn't know how to do anything you'd need a huge stone castle or a massive trapped dungeon to fight against, so the great build system feels a bit pointless now. Got to hand it to the author for making excellent core mechanics from a very simple set of ingredients. I hope he can keep up working on the style and figure out enemy mechanics you actually need serious constructions to fight against.
- parallax7d 16y ago
  Yeah, the survival aspect is the most appealing to me as well. Hopefully some more survival elements will make it in before the beta.
- jockc 16y ago
  Yes a simple base is 100% safe, however if you spend 90% of your time exploring/mining caves (I do), you will find plenty of danger. That's really the point of the game--not building a base that's going to be attacked by mobs.
  - rsaarelm 16y ago
    I get this. My problem was that I'm not feeling an incentive for even gathering the stuff, since survival is already guaranteed and there are no further in-game goals. I guess I need reasonably constant and threatening waves of attacking aliens to keep my "games are meaningless, I am wasting my life here" instincts from waking up.
    - andywood 16y ago
      You really need to set your own construction goals. I had the urge to build a big house in a nice location. The I wanted to protect it, so I built a low wall around it. Now I want to landscape the hill that it's on. Next I'll want to irrigate and start a farm....
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
sbierwagen 16y ago
I attended MinecraftCon 2010 in Bellevue back in August. http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/08/31/wherein_bbot_gets_rained_on_with_nerds/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/08/31/wherein_bbot_gets_r... It was scheduled maybe a month ahead of time, and located days ahead of time, and held in the middle of a field, in the rain; and still a about hundred people showed up. Just to see Markus. Minecraft fans are dedicated, I'll give them that.
adlep 16y ago
Great idea. Kudos to the creator. I've heard about the game few weeks back, but assumed it is some sort of a viral copy of a Starcraft hack. Also C64 graphics > New "photo realistic" games...
- ido 16y ago
  Nothing on the c64 looks even remotely like minecraft... You'd have to get to the late 90s to get close.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
A few minecraft related comics: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/17/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/17/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/20/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/20/ http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=292 http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=292
- tome 16y ago
  http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/17/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/17/ Can someone please explain this one to me?
  - sbierwagen 16y ago
    Half the game-- more than half the game is the crafting system. You make sticks out of planks, out of raw wood. You then make a hoe out of sticks and stone, plow some dirt, plant wheat seeds, water the wheat, harvest it when it's full grown, bake it into bread in a furnace out make out of stone and fueled with wood... There's a lot more in this vein. Gabe has a well known weakness for stuff like this.
    - eru 16y ago
      If you like this stuff, you can also have a look at Dwarf Fortress, a game that inspired Minecraft.
  - ubernostrum 16y ago
    That's how the game starts :) You have nothing but your own two hands. First order of business is to harvest some wood off the nearby tress, which you can make some tools out of. From there it's just a matter of building, crafting new stuff and staying alive. This guy's video series goes over most of the basics, if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/user/paulsoaresjr#p/u/0/0VWnQHS-ffs http://www.youtube.com/user/paulsoaresjr#p/u/0/0VWnQHS-ffs
godDLL 16y ago
Looking for a comment that has "is Sims for men and hackers" in it.
Rickasaurus 16y ago
My only worry is that the newly rich author won't work on this fantastic project anymore.
swah 16y ago
After reading it is written in Java, I remembered Yegge's Wyvern and how he wished he had written it in Python or something. I wonder how many lines of code this is...

254 points by starnix17 16y ago

"Perrson cites games such as Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper and Inifiniminer among key influences on Minecraft's anything-goes nature and blocky 8-bit style." Blocky 8-bit style? Those graphics would have been cutting edge in 1993, almost a decade after the heyday of 8-bit systems.

windsurfer 16y ago
It's a style, not a technology anymore ;)
sbierwagen 16y ago
Additionally, they are cutting edge now. The textures are so small for budget and performance reasons. When generating new terrain, my i7 920 system with a HD 4850 drops to 40 fps. You can download higher-resolution third-party textures, and they turn the game into a slideshow.
- Gormo 16y ago
  That may be more to do with the Minecraft running in Java and not making full use of the GPU. There's no reason that graphics of Minecraft's quality shouldn't be blazingly fast on current hardware.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Hmm I'm not sure. Look at World of Warcraft, it looks OK-ish (by today's standards) but mostly because of the great texturing; poly count is way low. The reason is that the world is just do damn big, and I suspect it's the same with Minecraft. Even with advanced LOD algorithms, the open-ended world concept requires so many polygons to render that today's hardware is simply not sufficient to render it. Processoers and GPUs need to improve 10-fold in performance, and games like these will still easily use all that power. (by that time it may be more efficient to just raytrace them, especially as we'll have dozens of cores in a few years...) Also, I suspect the Java and GPU points are moot, as I cannot image it doesn't use OpenGL. Now the Jave OpenGL implementation or intermediary or whatever may not be as fast as 'native' calls but I think it's not going to make a magnitude difference. TL/DR: IMO it's not about the graphics quality but about the sheer amount of it.
    - mrbgty 16y ago
      "Even with advanced LOD algorithms, the open-ended world concept requires so many polygons to render that today's hardware is simply not sufficient to render it" What? It's been awhile but ~ 5 yrs ago I remember implementing a quadtree LOD algorithm that pretty much allowed me to make the world as big as I wanted considering only the area nearby would be rendered. If its out of view, its a flat world.
      - roel_v 16y ago
        "considering only the area nearby would be rendered" Well yeah if you make the area around you small enough, then sure. Taking WoW as an example again (because it's what I'm familiar with), decreasing the view distance is the single most influential parameter to improve performance. When you fly across a landscape and mountains pop up out of nowhere as you approach them, in triangles, it very much takes away from the realism. Of course this is not just about rendering triangles any more, LOD is constrained by the CPU and memory, but more raw poly pushing power would lessen the burden on the CPU... (experience drawn on a NVidia 9800 video card, not top of the line but a rather average casual gamer card I'd say)
  - sbierwagen 16y ago
    I like how you apparently came to that conclusion based on the language it was implemented in, and without any knowledge of its internal structure. I just fired it up with the ATI Catalyst panel open, and it said a maximum of 53% GPU utilization. Which isn't bad, since Minecraft wouldn't be using any of the shader units. Well, presumably, since I know as little as you do about how Minecraft is designed.
    - astrodust 16y ago
      The rendering engine is pretty primitive by modern standards, and shows signs of being implemented by someone new to OpenGL. It displays all the performance issues that a typical first OpenGL implementation does like significant lag when turning around quickly where objects are swapped in and out of memory in a blocking manner. It could benefit from significant optimizations in terms of algorithm and these would probably make it perform an order of magnitude even faster than porting the same code to C++ would ever do. The OpenGL layer is not being utilized effectively. I think the game is currently CPU/VM bound and simply can't keep up with the GPU. More aggressive use of the GPU, like through OpenGL or OpenCL calls, would improve performance considerably. I'm not sure how viable the OpenCL angle is on Java, though.
  - jcromartie 16y ago
    Java can make full use of the GPU. The game uses LWJGL, a wrapper for OpenGL and other native/accelerated libraries. You can even use shader programs from Java.
harry 16y ago
I suppose if you average Dungeon Keepers graphics with Dwarf Fortress's stock ASCII set, you'd get something close to 8-bit styling.

ugh 16y ago

A word of warning: Highly addictive, and not in a good way.

clofresh 16y ago
can you explain?
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Perhaps the commenter is too busy playing the game to explain. Or eat.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - jjs 16y ago
    This must be the 'survival horror' aspect they were talking about.
- johnswamps 16y ago
  Basically the game is a really enjoyable way of spending hours and hours collecting resources and using them to create giant buildings and structures. It's a lot of fun but you're still sinking a huge amount of time on it. Sure, I had fun building that 30x30x30 (one unit is maybe 4 feet) castle but why did I spend 20 hours working on it over the weekend?
  - teamonkey 16y ago
    It's OK, you're allowed to have fun.
  - daychilde 16y ago
    Very close guess on the scale - each block is a cubic meter.
- thorax 16y ago

matthew-wegner 16y ago

Minecraft has been a huge success, but $250,000-a-day is a little misleading. The site was down for the last few days due to mentions from Penny Arcade and elsewhere (PA ran two comics on Minecraft, which is insane exposure to a huge gaming audience). Notch turned the downtime into a free-to-play period, but you couldn't buy Minecraft while things were down. The $250k/day number actually represents a few days of sales pressure, but it's still awfully impressive...

RossM 16y ago
To add: in order to continue playing Minecraft after the free-to-play period you have to buy a subscription, however I agree with the idea there have been recent spikes as people do buy it. I read somewhere that Notch had accrued at least two million in PayPal but can't vouch that it's accurate.
- ptomato 16y ago
  Certainly not two million in PayPal all at once, but if you want to know how many copies he's sold the numbers are right here http://minecraft.net/stats.jsp http://minecraft.net/stats.jsp and I don't think the price has been below €10.

MrFoof 16y ago

Having picked it up a few weeks ago, the game is an odd blend of open-ended creative sandbox, epic-scale exploration and survival horror. It taps into that feeling of opening up a bin of Lego and not having a specific model instruction booklet. Its feature-set is still very fluid. Yet it seems to out-do Civilization's "one more turn". This is a game where if you picked it up tonight at 7PM and started out, you'd hear your alarm clock going off in another room as morning rolls in. The game has essentially gone viral at this point. Multiple webcomics are covering it. There's decent coverage on social news sites. Industry rags have picked it up. Industry veterans (I have a friend at Disney Interactive, and another at BioWare) have absolutely taken notice, Valve in particular. Some review sites are seriously considering it as their "game of the year" candidate. This weekend the website (and authentication service) collapsed under load. With some outside help it's up and fine after some refactoring and offloading things to S3. Today he cracked 25,000 unit sales for the day, or about $340K USD in gross revenue. Yes, he. Until very recently, it was basically a one-man show. There's a few dedicated folks coming on board now, but that's what's humbling. Today, Markus eclipsed my day's compensation in just 88 seconds.

drtse4 16y ago
If you'd like to check daily (as i do) the progress of the minecraft sales and other statistics just go here: http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ (official data taken from the minecraft site graphed with Google Chart API).
mambodog 16y ago
What I think is interesting about the free-to-play period (due to website collapse) is that it may actually be a massive boost, because it gets the game client onto a lot of machines. That doesn't sound like much, but here's where it gets interesting: the client auto-updates itself, bringing in new content and features as they are built. To continue to get updates (AFAIK) you must log in with your paid credentials. You can continue to play the 'free weekend' version without doing so, but you won't get any updates. Thus people can continue to play and be addicted, and that 'Register' link is there waiting on the main menu when the urge for the new hotness overcomes them. Also, kudos to Notch for supporting Mac and Linux. I guess we're getting to a point where, for indie games at least, a very compelling experience can be built using a less-than-optimal platform (in this case being Java, which heretofore hasn't been used for games a whole lot). By the way, it has even had TV coverage here in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?pres=20100920_2030&story=5 http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?pres=201...

joshu 16y ago

So, uh.... anyone for an HN SMP server?

absconditus 16y ago
I am interested. There are several other members of #startups who would likely check it out as well.
TeHCrAzY 16y ago
If you are in Australia, try simplicity.classexception.com :)
kd0amg 16y ago
Might be enough to get me back into SMP. I haven't played in a few updates, but I usually get intimidated by a long-running server that already has a lot of large scale construction projects finished (not to mention frustrated at trying to find a good build site for myself).

DrStalker 16y ago

It really does feel like Minecraft has made a new genre of game here, something that genuinely deserves the name "sandbox" because other than the bedrock way down below every single piece of the world can be dug up and manipulated. It manages to tweak every single one of my addicting-game buttons, and even if no new features get added I'd happily rate it my Indie Game of the Year or possibly even Game of the Year.

teej 16y ago

I spent 12 years waiting for Starcraft II. I bought the collectors edition. I played to Diamond rank and beyond. But the day I started Minecraft was the last day I played Starcraft II. This game is really good.

wizard_2 16y ago
Same dam story for me too - I'm not a big gamer, I don't have time to play normally and minecraft has won over starcraft 2 for the past week.

slay2k 16y ago

Holy. Shitballs. My hat's off to this man. Perhaps the thing I envy most here is the fact that this guy's achieved this doing what he loves. According to his personal page, he's been building games for many, many years, and has entered dozens of small competitions. He seems to genuinely love building games, and would almost certainly continue doing it regardless of money.

crux_ 16y ago

Of note: Notch seems to be a regular in the LD48 (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/) competitions. (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/notch/ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/notch/) I'm, um, an irregular. (Entered twice, finished once.) Here's his screen-capture timelapse for the last one, which was a bit over a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629810 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629810

shajith 16y ago

Here's something that illustrates the sort of thing you can do in this game: a 12x5 LED display built in-game[1]. Reminded me of the Dwarf Fortress Computer[2]. [1] http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=24213 http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=24213 [2] http://www.geekosystem.com/dwarf-fortress-turing-machine-computer/ http://www.geekosystem.com/dwarf-fortress-turing-machine-com...

invisible 16y ago

I think it is inaccurate when it says "sales grew to over 6,000 a day during this period." The sales when the Paypal account was locked HAD to have been ~$44k/day (or around 4,700 sales per day after taking fees imposed into consideration) as he said he had around $800,000 (USD) on September 10th (starting around the week of August 22nd).

codexon 16y ago

Can someone explain the appeal? I normally enjoy indie games with low-end graphics like Dwarf Fortress or Adom. My first impression as I logged into a server was a giant landscape of multicolored blocks devoid of any meaning whatsoever. There was no survival horror element I could make out in 30 minutes of playing. I decided to try building something only to be bored of drawing something block by block, like being a pixel artist that had to waste 10 seconds every time you wanted to zoom out. Then I tried following someone around who was also not doing anything interesting. I attempted to dig a bottomless pit under him until he presumably logged off, and at that point I also logged off due to boredom.

stonemetal 16y ago
Multiplayer is just a free for all, endless world sort of thing. In the single player portion of the game you build by day and are attacked by the undead at night.
ZachPruckowski 16y ago
Unless it's changed in the last week, Multiplayer Survival mode is bugged (it's an alpha) so that monsters can't damage you. So most multiplayer servers are in Creative mode, where you just build stuff. Single player survival still works, and is a lot of fun. The first day cycle is about getting a pick, a shelter, and some coal for torches before nightfall and zombies/skeletons come out. Then you spend the next few day/night cycles building up, and people usually start exploring around Day 5-10. And get horridly lost and have to construct shelter as the sun is setting to avoid monster attack. And to get the good resources like iron and diamond and gold and redstone, you have to go spelunking in caves, where monsters can spawn in any dark spot. Even coal is only available in small amounts on cliff faces, so you have to either mine or spelunk for that too past the first few pieces.
hamai 16y ago
Took a while for me, but things got interesting when I started crafting. From there and I had to go deep mining to find metal, and then I crafted my first diamond tool. Down there I had a few scary moments, only survived because of the metal armor I did. Until now I'm not very fond of building, I just build the necessary. Tried to start some fancy stuff, but lacked a lot of materials, so for now I'm just filling some chests and crafting tools and small stuff. Here's a good start for crafting: http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting

endlessvoid94 16y ago

I just paid $13 and discovered the 'classic' game has been suspended? I downloaded the alpha and it's....pretty basic. I understand that it's just an alpha and shouldn't expect anything fantastic, which is fine. But I'm unable to play the game (I think, unless I've overlooked something). Any ideas?

Groxx 16y ago
Unable to play? Or unable to find things to do? (serious question)
- endlessvoid94 16y ago
  The latter. It's totally possible I'm missing something, but I checked the site's wiki and can only seem to pick up flowers, beat cows to get meat, and pick up tiny little trees. How does one actually PLAY?
  - Groxx 16y ago
    An utterly massive part of the game is through crafting: http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting You can't get anywhere without it, and yes, it's very boring if you're not a total-sandbox-fan playing multiplayer. And the game does utterly squat to inform you that it exists. It took me an hour of poking around before I found that page, and then it all clicked. So maybe I should warn you: it gets way more interesting when you start crafting. You start planning. Exploring. Fighting back against the zombies. Some caves are massive - light them up and find veins. Earning the ability to build your floating fortress is strangely rewarding. It's also an oddly beautiful game in its simplicity - your lit caves are visible from a long way off with a soft glow, and you'll quickly find that light means safety... until the spider-riding skeletons start chasing you when you venture too far. And it's kind of creepy how quickly you start to feel ownership over what you've made.
    - endlessvoid94 16y ago
      Yeah, I found that page. The problem is, I don't see any zombies. All I see is terrain and flowers. And the occasional cow/sheep. Do I just need to keep looking? What am I looking for? How do I get the different types of blocks? I found some by hitting the sheep (or whatever they are) but the same thing didn't seem to work on trees or terrain. Gah. I do enjoy the freedom of the game. But I need to do something soon or I just lose interest and quit.

charleso 16y ago

I really hope the fellow behind Dwarf Fortress sees this success and starts charging a small amount for his releases. I think the following DF has (despite its rough state) would provide impressive revenue and allow him to bring on employees to help build his game while earning him a comfortable living.

ptomato 16y ago
The thing is, minecraft is far, far more accessible than dwarf fortress will ever be without some major changes, and has a vastly greater potential audience.
wlievens 16y ago
DF makes about $30k in donations per year. It's insane to see MC make more than that per day. Poor Toady.
- z0r 16y ago
  Just donated to Toady. Dwarf fortress is a masterpiece in progress, thank you for reminding me of his financial woes

rsaarelm 16y ago

The initial game with the day cycle and the monsters coming out at night is genius. Really taps into a primal light-and-shelter instinct. Also the light management with cave exploration is great. However, once I figured out a wooden shack with a door built in a couple of minutes completely thwarts the AI enemies, I lost most interest. The setup is player against the world, but the world doesn't know how to do anything you'd need a huge stone castle or a massive trapped dungeon to fight against, so the great build system feels a bit pointless now. Got to hand it to the author for making excellent core mechanics from a very simple set of ingredients. I hope he can keep up working on the style and figure out enemy mechanics you actually need serious constructions to fight against.

parallax7d 16y ago
Yeah, the survival aspect is the most appealing to me as well. Hopefully some more survival elements will make it in before the beta.
jockc 16y ago
Yes a simple base is 100% safe, however if you spend 90% of your time exploring/mining caves (I do), you will find plenty of danger. That's really the point of the game--not building a base that's going to be attacked by mobs.
- rsaarelm 16y ago
  I get this. My problem was that I'm not feeling an incentive for even gathering the stuff, since survival is already guaranteed and there are no further in-game goals. I guess I need reasonably constant and threatening waves of attacking aliens to keep my "games are meaningless, I am wasting my life here" instincts from waking up.
  - andywood 16y ago
    You really need to set your own construction goals. I had the urge to build a big house in a nice location. The I wanted to protect it, so I built a low wall around it. Now I want to landscape the hill that it's on. Next I'll want to irrigate and start a farm....

deleted 16y ago

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sbierwagen 16y ago

I attended MinecraftCon 2010 in Bellevue back in August. http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/08/31/wherein_bbot_gets_rained_on_with_nerds/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/08/31/wherein_bbot_gets_r... It was scheduled maybe a month ahead of time, and located days ahead of time, and held in the middle of a field, in the rain; and still a about hundred people showed up. Just to see Markus. Minecraft fans are dedicated, I'll give them that.

adlep 16y ago

Great idea. Kudos to the creator. I've heard about the game few weeks back, but assumed it is some sort of a viral copy of a Starcraft hack. Also C64 graphics > New "photo realistic" games...

ido 16y ago
Nothing on the c64 looks even remotely like minecraft... You'd have to get to the late 90s to get close.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

A few minecraft related comics: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/17/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/17/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/20/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/20/ http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=292 http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=292

tome 16y ago
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/17/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/17/ Can someone please explain this one to me?
- sbierwagen 16y ago
  Half the game-- more than half the game is the crafting system. You make sticks out of planks, out of raw wood. You then make a hoe out of sticks and stone, plow some dirt, plant wheat seeds, water the wheat, harvest it when it's full grown, bake it into bread in a furnace out make out of stone and fueled with wood... There's a lot more in this vein. Gabe has a well known weakness for stuff like this.
  - eru 16y ago
    If you like this stuff, you can also have a look at Dwarf Fortress, a game that inspired Minecraft.
- ubernostrum 16y ago
  That's how the game starts :) You have nothing but your own two hands. First order of business is to harvest some wood off the nearby tress, which you can make some tools out of. From there it's just a matter of building, crafting new stuff and staying alive. This guy's video series goes over most of the basics, if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/user/paulsoaresjr#p/u/0/0VWnQHS-ffs http://www.youtube.com/user/paulsoaresjr#p/u/0/0VWnQHS-ffs

godDLL 16y ago

Looking for a comment that has "is Sims for men and hackers" in it.

Rickasaurus 16y ago

My only worry is that the newly rich author won't work on this fantastic project anymore.

swah 16y ago

After reading it is written in Java, I remembered Yegge's Wyvern and how he wished he had written it in Python or something. I wonder how many lines of code this is...