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Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie
- wushupork 16y agoWhy would you work for a software company if you are making that much?
- aresant 16y agoThink Hollywood director type job offer. Use somebody else's money to build your dream product with a huge incredible staff. Get gauranteed, huge up front salary to do so. Take away a sizeable piece of the action on the success.
- icefox 16y agoAnd being forced to justify every small thing and have to use outlook.
- awakeasleep 16y agoWhen you're eminent in your field those sorts of things may become negotiable.
- messel 16y agoThe outlook burn was perfect, but you should have added monthly ethics training.
- davidmurphy 16y agoOr Lotus Domino
- jokermatt999 16y agoThere's also the advantage of them taking care of the business side. Reading some of his recent updates seems to indicate that the past few weeks have been spent dealing with administrative duties like lawyers, servers, and hiring. Were he to take them up on their offer, that could all be taken care of for him, if we wanted (I'm guessing). I'm happy that he's decided to stay independent, but I think Valve could actually handle a hire such as him correctly. They've got a great reputation with most of the gaming community for doing things right, and I'd be surprised if they screwed something like that up.
- wushupork 16y agoWhen you put it that way it makes sense. It all depends on what he wants right? Does he want the freedom of being able to do whatever he wants WHEN he wants or does he want to do a huge dream product w/ the dream team with all the bells and whistles.
- guynamedloren 16y agoI think you're missing something here... The entire reason Minecraft is so successful is because there IS NO HUGE INCREDIBLE STAFF. The game spawned from the thoughts, dreams, and abilities of just a single mind. Add more minds and the game becomes something it was never intended to be.
- jasonlotito 16y agoNot necessarily. And even still, that doesn't have to be a bad thing. Look at what Valve did with Portal. Compare it to the original game it was based around. I'm not saying he should have taken the job, but Valve has earned my faith that if they take on a project, they will do it justice.
- rdj 16y agoNot surprised. What could a job at either Valve or Bungie give him that he doesn't get now?
- pcestrada 16y agoQuite true. Notch has the potential to build his own 'Valve' or 'Bungie'.
- kevingadd 16y agoAsk the Portal team? Or the guys who made Team Fortress? Or the guys who made Counter-Strike? To be more precise: Working at a larger studio like Valve means you trade some creative control and (in notch's case) some short-term income for reliable long-term income and access to things you could never get in the short term as an individual, like access to devkits for consoles, access to well-trained, highly skilled QA/art/programming departments, decades of design and programming experience from leads and senior developers, etc.
- city41 16y agoThe Portal team was scooped up from Digipen. If their game was netting them over $200k/day, something tells me they wouldn't have been so eager to join Valve. Hey I f'ing love Valve, my all time favorite game company. No one is trying to suggest working for Valve is a bad thing. But a little perspective is needed here.
- klbarry 16y agoIt's kinda sad that the Dwarf Fortress creator only earns about 2k a day. It shows what some business savvy will do for you. Then ago, the DF creator is passionatr about his vision, so who knows.
- fossuser 16y agoNot sure if it's business savvy. While Dwarf Fortress is a great indie game I don't think it has the wide spread appeal of a game like mine craft. Mine craft's 3D world and game play is more intuitive to your average person. Not to mention Notch's luck with going viral certainly helps as well.
- zacharycohn 16y agoAgree. I played a bit of Dwarf Fortress, and there was definitely a learning curve. Minecraft has, essentially, no initial "how to play" learning curve.
- jamesgeck0 16y agoCrafting is the biggest part of the learning curve right now, although Notch has some ideas about how to address it. One way might be by having the player unlock "recipes" as they gather resources and experiment. Redstone is the other part of the game with an epic learning curve. It can be used to craft functional logic gates. Some guy on YouTube made a massive ALU using it...
- jbail 16y ago2k a day is well over half a million dollars a year. That's far from sad. Notch's earnings are exceptional. He is probably the only indie game developer (or one of a very small group) making $350K a day on his own.
- city41 16y agoI'd be in seventh heaven if I was making $2k/day on my own games.
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- aresant 16y agoThe most refreshing part of this story is that it's not about the Apple / Google / etc App stores. Shows that exceptional indie products can get huge traction on a traditional platform, sort of like Braid on XBOX / PC / etc. That said, also excites me for the future when MSFT's & Apple's standard OS come with a servicable app store baked in.
- nihilocrat 16y agoOn a similar note, Minecraft is written in... get this ... Java Which seems to be the dorkiest and most uncool language on the planet if you were to ask HN.
- derefr 16y agoEh, a good programmer can just treat Java as an object code format, compiling it in their heads from something like Scala or Clojure. The real problem isn't that Java is spent, it's that (most) Java programmers are dorky. I avoid the language mainly to avoid associating with the community.
- ido 16y agoFunny, the java community is one of the best and most helpful I've encountered. Much better experience than I've had with the supposedly enlightened lisp community. Also, Markus programs in straight java, not scala or clojure.
- derefr 16y agoI didn't mean to imply that Notch doesn't program directly in Java—just that, like a C programmer writing assembler will write assembler with C conventions (like almost always passing parameters on the stack, etc.), a programmer who knows [any other non-Blub language] writing Java will think of things in terms of higher-order functions, duck-types, etc., then just type it in in a way java understands (many small anonymous classes, wide hierarchies supporting simple interfaces, etc.) Let me restate the problem another way: there are many more programmers who only know Java, than programmers who only know [other language X]. Single-language programmers usually aren't familiar with very much theory, and don't know any design-pattern-like abstractions, borrowed from intrinsic features of other languages, that they can put in place instead of just writing tedious, repetitive, dorky (er, I mean, "enterprise") code. 90% of Java's libraries are very, erm, "enterprise."
- twymer 16y agoValve: "We heard you were making $350k/day, how would you like a job making $50k/year?"
- kevingadd 16y ago1) Health care, taxes, payment processing fees, development tools... There are a lot of expenses covered by an employer, especially when you're a game developer. 2) It's not $350k/day versus $50k/year, unless he can somehow sustain his current income indefinitely (he can't). 3) The value of games publishers and platform developers being willing to talk to you (and having access to development kits, etc) is hard to put monetary value on. Working at a studio like Valve gives you that, too.
- catshirt 16y agodude, we're talking about over $300,000 a day
- efsavage 16y ago"unless he can somehow sustain his current income indefinitely" If he sustains it for 2 weeks he's pretty much set for life.
- zacharycohn 16y agoHe's already sustained at least $250k/d for two weeks. These numbers are 100k bigger than the last ones I saw a few weeks ago. Pretty sure he could BUY Valve at this point. :p
- fredoliveira 16y agoI'm positive he can't ;-)
- sshumaker 16y agoConsidering he's made about 4mm, and Valve turned down a multi-billion dollar offer not too long ago, I think you might be a bit off-base. :)
- gavingmiller 16y agoI don't know where this website pulled their numbers from, but I think they're incorrect. According to Minecraft's stats[1], in the last 24 hours 12,025 people bought the game, times 9.95 Euro = 119,499.50 Euro, which is a bit less than $163k/day in American dollars. [1] http://www.minecraft.net/stats.jsp http://www.minecraft.net/stats.jsp
- bananaandapple 16y agoA week ago, he was selling up to 36000 copies a day.
- zeteo 16y agoEither give a reference, or you must be confusing sales and downloads.
- bananaandapple 16y agohttp://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/
- zeteo 16y agoThat shows the maximum as 25000, not 36000 sales per day.
- yafujifide 16y agoThe number of copies are in Euros, and there are 1.44 US copies per Euro copy, so the number sold is 36000 US copies per day.
- studer 16y agoThat's not how currency exchange rates work...
- vaksel 16y agotheir math is a little bit off, a copy sold every 3 seconds = 28,800 sales a day. Or 10.5 million copies a year. To tell the truth its pretty shocking how minecraft has taken off...the guy will probably end up making 100 million off the game. And if he sticks to iterating it, it might end up making over a billion over it's lifetime(say 40-50 years). Which may seem like a huge number, until you remember that World of Warcraft is making close to a billion a year. The reason the number looks that shockingly high, is because he is a one man show. My guess is that he is going to end up using his new found fame/resources to start his own game development company.
- noodle 16y agoi dunno about that. we're probably seeing one of his larger sales periods, as it enters into the mainstream from obscurity. it might continue to do well, but i'm skeptical that he'll be able to keep up the rate at which it is currently selling. either way, though, he's doing amazingly well for himself.
- vaksel 16y agoI think he'll be ok. Right now he is only selling to the early adopter crowd who doesn't mind the crappy graphics. Once he spends some money on graphic designers, he'll be able to get mainstream appeal. Once he has mainstream appeal, he can release it for the stores to sell. Which will boost his sales. But yeah...either way he has already made a ton of money off this game....at least a couple million. Which should give him plenty of room to perfect his product.
- clistctrl 16y agoI get the impression that this game was built because he wanted to build something he himself would enjoy, not something he could become rich off. Maybe there's something to that philosophy ;)
- jokermatt999 16y agoI agree, and I think that's a lot of it. Minecraft isn't a very typical game, nor a game that you would ever see out of a blockbuster publisher. It seems like its success is because of this, not despite it. Rather than be a formulaic FPS, RTS, RPG, etc, it's something (fairly) new that leaves it up to the player to have fun with. I've heard the comparison to Lego frequently, and I think it's an apt one. Most videogames today play more like movies, but sometimes it's nice to have a game that you can play with how you like. (This post started out about being about being willing to ignore conventions, but drifted somewhat into the nature of gameplay, sorry.)
- houseabsolute 16y agoMaybe. On the other hand, people do things every day for the love of it that get little traction in the market place. It seems more likely this confluence is just a coincidence.
- Groxx 16y agoI wonder if it might be a requirement (or nearly) for run-away successes though, while obviously not sufficient for it.
- zeteo 16y agoThe sales graphs are public: http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ The best day (9/23) had 25663 sales, or about $255k. This came on top of the server being down (0 sales) for 3 previous days. The recent average is around 10k sales ($100k / day). EDIT: As pointed out by bananaandapple below, the price is in euro not USD, which brings the best day to $347k. The recent average works out to about $136k / day.
- bananaandapple 16y ago€ not $
- vaksel 16y agoaccording to that he sold 230,441 copies which comes out to €2,292,887.95 euros. 1 euro = $1.36 USD so that comes out to $3,118,327.612 After all the fees and costs, that's 3 mil before taxes,
- bond 16y agoHe has sold 272,233 copies, making about $3.6million http://minecraft.net/stats.jsp http://minecraft.net/stats.jsp
- studer 16y agoHis company (Mojang Specifications) is a sole proprietorship, so the tax situation is interesting (i.e. most of it is taxed as personal income, and Sweden has a progressive tax system, and he has to pay insurance contributions as well). I can understand why he's scrambling to establish a real company :)
- barrkel 16y agoIndeed, a quick glance at online calculators indicates it's pretty horrific, i.e. that he'd be lucky to see more than 35% of gross, assuming that sole props get whacked for employer taxes too, which I'd expect to avoid a simple loophole.
- Groxx 16y ago>turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie Thank God. Not that they haven't been successful, but I really want this to stay entirely in Notch's control, as that's precisely why it's succeeding.
- mdwrigh2 16y agoThis may be a good thing ultimately, but if there was a gaming company I'd consider working for, it'd likely be Valve. They seem very community focused, and I imagine they'd give this guy the freedom to run the game how he likes, considering its his 'baby'. Plus, they'd give him some risk-free (to him) resources to build a second game if he needed it, and they probably have way more experience handling multiplayer side stuff that he could benefit from. But this is pure speculation. As it is, him keeping it is probably a good thing for the community.
- Groxx 16y agoEntirely agree. But "good for the community" = "good for me" :) And, given his success, he's likely near-guaranteed a job at high-profile companies for life if he ever wants one. No reason to jump now.
- weaksauce 16y agoJust look at the game that the team they purchased made: portal. The indie game was very ugly. The final game was polished, funny, and fun. If he were to bring his game to valve they could probably improve it a lot.
- tvon 16y agoHow do you know it wouldn't be better and more successful if it was a Valve product?
- Groxx 16y agoMore successful (assuming a sales-metric): quite likely, given a guaranteed advertising budget. But less of it (%-wise) would go back to Notch. Better: depends on your metric. Fewer customers = less feedback = more likely to get your idea implemented. More customers = more employees = more code backing the game (overall better), and likely more bugfixes and better-performing graphics. More control in the hands of one person = more personality-driven design decisions = ? (and I wish to point out that Apple works largely this way with Jobs - though again, "better" is still subjective) But, at an absolute minimum, being part of Valve will put more pressure on sales than there currently is. Even if they explicitly say "do anything, we won't even look", there's an implicit push in that direction. He's now made enough money to do literally anything he wants with this game, with no pressure to make more sales. I count that a purely good thing, because there is no game for everyone, and without pressure to appeal to more people it's more likely (IMO, also still subjective) to become better in its niche.
- msie 16y agoGood news: Indie developers can still get rich doing what they love. Bad news: You will probably not be one of them. ;-)
- messel 16y agoThere it is my hopes dashing on the rocky shore a few thousand feet off this cliff. I wonder how much time Mark Persson spends on HN?
- nihilocrat 16y agoProbably almost none. It's very rare to find a gaming-related story on HN that gets any popularity, because the HN community overwhelmingly focuses on web development and getting/being filthy rich, which are both uncommon things in indie gamedev.
- JabavuAdams 16y agoIt's kind of frustrating sometimes, because a lot of these web apps are so trivial technically, compared to games. OTOH one clear business lesson that experience has taught me is that it doesn't really matter how hard something is to do. What matters is how many people will pay for what you've done, and how much they'll pay. Difficulty can be a moat to deter competitors, but that's about it. Still, sometimes the "I wrote web app, I'm teh hot programmer!" can be annoying to us systems types. returns to putting money where mouth is...
- SwellJoe 16y agoBest news: You probably can make a pretty good living, even if you don't get rich.
- pirko 16y agoConsidering that he'd quit his job as a game developer to be able to develop indie games (http://www.minecraft.net/about.jsp http://www.minecraft.net/about.jsp) it's not so surprising that he turns down the job offers. And it also seems that he's in the beginning of starting his own company and hiring developers (http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1205447916/im-sorry-about-the-lack-of-updates http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1205447916/im-sorry-about-the-l...)
- rwhitman 16y agoThe question is how long will it take major game developers to build a similar game and turn on the marketing faucet? I don't know much about game development, but it sounds like it would be a pretty easy game to replicate, right?
- dasil003 16y agoIf he's already sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it seems like he's made significant inroads into the market. Not sure how much more the marketing faucet could do.
- taloft 16y agoApparently not difficult http://manicdigger.sourceforge.net/news/ http://manicdigger.sourceforge.net/news/
- yesimahuman 16y agoIt's not just the game. The community surrounding it is so damn loyal and enthusiastic. Notch is a god to them.
- SwaroopH 16y agoInspiring. I am going to work harder on my current personal project.
- simplegeek 16y agoAmazing stuff. Honestly, when I saw this post I thought man I should have been a games programmer (and the desire to learn how to create games started to surface). Then, I went searching on Google and it seems that this guy has found his luck after working hard as a games programmer for around 10 years (http://www.mojang.com/notch/ http://www.mojang.com/notch/). After reading this, I smiled & felt happy for the programmer and went back working ;)
- SwellJoe 16y agoBehind nearly every "overnight success" story is a reality of years of practice and persistence.
- steveklabnik 16y agohttp://startupquote.com/post/1164724792 http://startupquote.com/post/1164724792
- JabavuAdams 16y agoDownload Unity (http://www.unity3d.com http://www.unity3d.com). It's free, it's got great tools, and you can make games for the browser / PC / OSX. It's better than a lot of internally-developed "professional" engines I've been forced to work in, over the years.
- astrodust 16y agoHe's been actively developing Minecraft since March 2009, and back then he was getting only "tens" of sales per day, not the avalanche he's seeing now.
- messel 16y agoI bought it a few weeks ago but only played twice (no time). My first time playing the demo I immediately was struck by several opportunities 1) converting 2D images into 3D minecraft world for artists and lazy people 2) Connecting 26 adjacent worlds to have a fluid adaptive minecraft universe. As users move from one world to the next it pulls in the data from the next set of adjacent worlds (no crossing lag). Folks can host their own worlds and pay for virtual real estate (hosting) or lay claim to a parts of a big cube, Thematically clustered worlds would be fantastic (hell worlds, water worlds, sky citiies, shopping districts, space worlds.. etc). There's something oddly beautiful about building your own game world.
- pshc 16y agocough Second Life cough
- thumper 16y agocough Worlds Chat cough Seriously, we had that exact idea implemented around 1997 -- and it even supported multiple authentications (anonymous worlds, versus worlds with user accounts) all transparently. And it could even do VRML, crowd control, dynamic downloads (so you could link to new worlds), and a built-in world builder. It seemed that we had thought of everything... And then management took over.
- pshc 16y agoYou should have let marketing take over and built up unsustainable hype and corporate endorsement instead ;)
- antipaganda 16y agoUh, play the alpha: the world is procedurally generated and about six times the size of Earth.
- leafy 16y agoThe map is not bounded, it's generated as you approach the boundaries. It's only limited by your disk space to hold the map.
- bl4k 16y agoI wonder what the potential market size is for this game, and if he will reach a large part of that while the game is in alpha and on special. Something tells me he is selling it for too cheap, especially with all the buzz it is getting. The license is also a lifetime license, so he has ongoing server costs for the next 5+ years that need to be covered with what he is bringing in atm (minus the huge tax bill he will be hit with). He is selling what is a recurring service at a flat one-off rate, a subscription at $20 year may have sold just as well.
- ptomato 16y agoServer costs are minimal; about what hosting any other website with similar traffic would be. He is not hosting the game servers for it, just an authentication server.
- teamonkey 16y agoHe's selling it at $10 while it's in a preview state. The full RRP will be $20.
- bond 16y agoIt's 9.95€ and 20€, around $13 and $26...
- zenocon 16y agoAs someone who is quietly lurking on HN, and working on my own product nights and w/e, this gives me hope. I think the ISV model just feels right...at least for me. I've been wavering on quitting the day job. Kudos to this chap. Long live the ISV success stories.
- rospaya 16y agoI image he would make loads more if he used a simpler distribution platform like Steam.
- ugh 16y agoPayPal is not exactly hard.
- CGamesPlay 16y agoNotch's story proves what indie game developers have been praying for all along: Gameplay is everything.
- CrankFrank 16y agoLooks like that the site is down now :)
- retube 16y agothat's... $127,750,000 a year!
- mrtron 16y agoHe will earn...a billion dollars this decade!
- lujz 16y agoHis business model is very appealing to the customer: pay only once and receive all future versions. The "downside" is that, once market saturates, you have to come up with a completely new product.
- ido 16y agoThat's basically how almost all games work tho (with a handful of exceptions) - most people eventually get tired of playing the same game and move on to something else.