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Some thoughts: 1. My understanding is that by the time Minecraft _utterly_ blew up they had a full fledged company going. Some people were probably there from
by phillmv 11y ago
Some thoughts:
1. My understanding is that by the time Minecraft _utterly_ blew up they had a full fledged company going. Some people were probably there from the "a million or two" to "hundreds of millions" of dollars transition.
2. Notch didn't really have a lot of risk going. He wrote a game and it blew up and he hired people off the preorders.
3. Notch got lucky. It's not clear that he's an especially savvy business person, or manager, or etc. He owned most of the IP, but… he had an idea that was waiting to happen, and then it went supernova and infected the minds of most children in the western hemisphere.
If you sacrificed nights and weekends to get the thing to ship, and massaged it into production, and wrote most of the code, and strung most of the deals together, and basically made it work beyond a crashy demo… and it was all just dumb luck anyways, I think it's perfectly natural, human reaction to be resentful that your boss made an insane killing when he rage quit and didn't share much of it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ tricky to navigate
- marknutter 11y ago> Notch got lucky. Lucky that he made a product that millions of people were willing to pay hard cash for? Luck is a funny word, and it can be used to dismiss people's sacrifices and hard work too easily. If I plunk down 1 dollar to buy a lottery ticket and I win the jackpot, that's very lucky. Sure, I sacrificed a dollar, but that has very little impact on me. The risk is low. If, however, I plunk down a couple million dollars to buy lottery tickets and I win, it's less lucky because my chances of winning are greater and of course my risk is much higher. In spending his time working on Minecraft when he could have been doing any other number of things he was putting the equivalent of the amount of money he could make working for someone else down on the table as stakes. Sure, there's an element of luck, but it doesn't mean he doesn't deserve to reap the benefits of his risk having paid off.
- Sharlin 11y agoIt was a hobby. Something he did for fun, as a leisure activity. Life is not about working, and for most people leisure time is not fungible with more work.
- marknutter 11y agoA hobby is just work you like doing. Countless companies have been started as "hobbies". So in that respect, life is about working, so you might as well try to find work you like to do.
- talmand 11y agoThere are lots of people that work hard and nothing comes from it. Working hard is not the only variable in the formula. Luck does have a great deal to do with it. I would say not considering luck as a factor implies a dismissal of the hard work of someone who didn't have a successful outcome. History is full of people who worked hard and someone else got the glory for numerous reasons.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- caskance 11y agoPicking the right project to work hard on is not a matter of luck.
- Axsuul 11y agoIt can be. You can be lucky to meet the right co-founders. You can be lucky to have the right idea at the right time. You can be lucky in the sense that working on your current mediocre startup allowed you to luckily come upon a problem or idea that is even bigger. There is and always will be an element of luck to success. What it comes down to though is nurturing an environment where that luck is more likely to happen than not.
- talmand 11y agoWhat if two people pick the same project independently of each other, work equally hard, and only one comes out successful. Did the one that did not come out ahead not work hard?
- caskance 11y agoIf your premise is that they both worked equally hard, why even ask such a pointless question?
- moron4hire 11y agoBy any sane measure, Minecraft was a "successful" product by the time even the first developer was hired. The risk was over.
- ncallaway 11y agoThis is a pretty inaccurate description of life in a game studio. Games are incredibly unpredictable. Even after Minecraft blew up in popularity, there were tons of risks. Plenty of games have blown up, only to fall off in popularity quickly. Minecraft has been far stickier than most games, which is an easy thing to acknowledge in hindsight, but a pretty challenging thing to predict.