This was supposed to be published this morning, before the news broke - so I am leaving it as written. The specifics of price are different but the content is the same.
Why is Microsoft buying Minecraft? For two billion? A kid's game? If you play Minecraft, I look forward to your comments and opinions. If you are the parent of a Minecraft player, I have a test for your child.
Ask your child if he or she knows what invar is used for. If the child blinks twice and starts speaking in a techspeak that you are unfamiliar with, Microsoft has already partially lost them, and is willing to pay two billion dollars to slowly recoup them over the next two decades. I will explain why below the squigglies.
YOU ARE playing the game, THIS IS the game!" Corey Laskin
Minecraft
Coming from nothing to starring in it's own South Park episode is what I consider to be the most successful sandbox game ever published. In my 35 years of gaming experience there has not been something quite like it. It has some large points going for it.
How I was pulled into minecraft was by a friend of mine, I had convinced him a year earlier to buy a new computer to play a "free" online game called World of Tanks - a casual "no blood first person shooter" that was designed for middle-aged reactions. A year later he begins disappearing for weeks at a time from this tanking game and finally he tells me that his children had turned him onto a game called Minecraft. They heard about it at school and showed it to him and before I knew it I had an account and I was whizzing away on a 16 bit looking minecart on some straight blocky rails looking at blocky mountains and blocky trees and blocky cows and blocky skeletons, (almost paying Qbert homage) and finding blocky ores underground to cook into metal for swords and picks and helmets and such. My friend had dyed his leather pants and I thought it was particularly funny that he had gone through the work of changing the color of something in a videogame.
Fast forward a few months, and a few videos and now we are a part of the modded community. Minecraft is a game that is very child appealing and rated G in it's vanilla form but played by adults in it's modded varieties.
What is modded Minecraft?
There are hundreds of people in a community of mostly volunteer programmers that support the modded versions of minecraft, and hundreds of thousands of players that play on some sort of a modded server. I took a break from creating my own modded server package because of a version upgrade that was going on through the community that requires substantial code-rewriting from (again, mostly volunteer) programmers. It is still a work in progress, and became enough of a headache for me that I put three months of development on hold and decided to weather out the storm on another popular established server that is breaking the ice on version 1.7.10 (Minecraft jargon). The administrators have now released 13 versions (2GB in downloads) in the first month of this particular server operating. There are times that the server crashes, then crashes repeatedly. Or a patch is released that causes a problem somewhere else in another one of these 145 independently authored packages that is not discovered until a player with whatever the new problem "minecraft item" is logs back onto the server. In general, since this is a found place on the internet in the Minecraft world, most of the players are adults and patient with these things. We all know that everyone is mostly doing their best to not create something that causes instability, and this version, beyond all others, is a jumping point for a better code path. So enough of this techspeak and why does Microsoft want Minecraft and what does invar have to do with it?
The minecraft mod community is player driven, but these gamers are in general terms more technical people to begin with. Developer communities have sprung up that make this all easier (more videogame, less PC hacking), and expanding every day. Last week I watched a 10 year old's eyes saucer when his parent told him that I own a minecraft server. We talked for a good hour about invar and such. I know he is never going back to vanilla. Which brings us back to why Microsoft wants to buy Minecraft, and why they are willing to pay a ludicrous sum. Microsoft is watching what was a neighborhood bonfire turn itself into a "Burning Man" that is not going away any time soon. I believe that it has become alarming enough that Satya Nadella would rather assume control of this festival and take a chance of breaking it then let it continue to draw the smartest and brightest of the computer kids into a digital world where the last time they need a Microsoft product is to run this USB installer. Ten years from now this might make all the difference of who is buying a PC and for what. I wonder with all the money talked about of what the mod community is going to do, and I wonder if Microsoft fully realizes what active volcano they are paying for the privilege to sit upon. I can only assume as a company they weighed this, and decided it is better to take the chance of it being a bad financial memory rather than a ever growing OS threat. Ask any 20 year old what they thought of Windows ME ("what?") and you will understand why Microsoft buying Minecraft only makes sense.