5 ms·

The price paid by Microsoft is approximately LEGO'S yearly revenue. A bit too steep?

aaronbrethorst 12y ago
Now, certainly. But it seems like Microsoft is always the last one to show up at the party, and always seems to spend a staggering amount of money to acquire what they're after (Skype for more than $8bn, e.g.). Lego knew just how passionate the community was almost three years ago. They could've acted when Mojang could've possibly been acquired for a much lower price. They didn't. Okay, we get it. You have a passionate community who wants to see Minecraft themed LEGO sets. It just took three server outages to prove it to us, but yeah, we're listening. ;-) We never expected a project to meet the threshold this quickly while still in beta. It took our first launch, the Shinkai 6500, 420 days to reach 1,000 votes in Japan. Hayabusa took 57 days to 1,000. With the start of Mojang’s Minecraft CUUSOO project it took just 48 hours to get 10,000 worldwide. We admire your passion as a community first and foremost of Minecraft fans, and second as LEGO fans. https://ideas.lego.com/projects/4038/official_comments https://ideas.lego.com/projects/4038/official_comments
- wlievens 12y ago
  True, they literally saw it, and aside from those few spin-off sets, they didn't act. On the other hand, LEGO has no experience managing a software product, the LEGO themed games are all outsourced, and around that time they had a pretty big "failure" project (Lego Universe), so they would've been wary of a big risky investment.
- dwild 12y ago
  I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft were in talk with Mojang since 2011. They knew what they were doing. When Oculus was brought by Facebook for $2 billions, Notch said that he already refused a similar offer. It's clear to me that Lego would never be able to get the price lower and I'm pretty sure that Microsoft manipulated them to be able to make them sell, but that's nothing more than an assumption.
  - kjs3 12y ago
    Not strictly true, actually. Mojang isn't a publicly traded company, so they could have in theory sold themselves to whomever they wanted for whatever they wanted. It doesn't sound like Notch was in it for the money, and he famously derided M$. Sounds almost like he wanted to do a deal with Lego, a bunch of non-money stuff screwed that up, and when M$ showed up with $2.5B, he said "Fuck it. Give us the check and I'm out".
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]

Now, certainly. But it seems like Microsoft is always the last one to show up at the party, and always seems to spend a staggering amount of money to acquire what they're after (Skype for more than $8bn, e.g.). Lego knew just how passionate the community was almost three years ago. They could've acted when Mojang could've possibly been acquired for a much lower price. They didn't. Okay, we get it. You have a passionate community who wants to see Minecraft themed LEGO sets. It just took three server outages to prove it to us, but yeah, we're listening. ;-) We never expected a project to meet the threshold this quickly while still in beta. It took our first launch, the Shinkai 6500, 420 days to reach 1,000 votes in Japan. Hayabusa took 57 days to 1,000. With the start of Mojang’s Minecraft CUUSOO project it took just 48 hours to get 10,000 worldwide. We admire your passion as a community first and foremost of Minecraft fans, and second as LEGO fans. https://ideas.lego.com/projects/4038/official_comments https://ideas.lego.com/projects/4038/official_comments

wlievens 12y ago
True, they literally saw it, and aside from those few spin-off sets, they didn't act. On the other hand, LEGO has no experience managing a software product, the LEGO themed games are all outsourced, and around that time they had a pretty big "failure" project (Lego Universe), so they would've been wary of a big risky investment.
dwild 12y ago
I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft were in talk with Mojang since 2011. They knew what they were doing. When Oculus was brought by Facebook for $2 billions, Notch said that he already refused a similar offer. It's clear to me that Lego would never be able to get the price lower and I'm pretty sure that Microsoft manipulated them to be able to make them sell, but that's nothing more than an assumption.
- kjs3 12y ago
  Not strictly true, actually. Mojang isn't a publicly traded company, so they could have in theory sold themselves to whomever they wanted for whatever they wanted. It doesn't sound like Notch was in it for the money, and he famously derided M$. Sounds almost like he wanted to do a deal with Lego, a bunch of non-money stuff screwed that up, and when M$ showed up with $2.5B, he said "Fuck it. Give us the check and I'm out".
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]