Minecraft and Microsoft

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Of Minecraft and Microsoft

minecraft-xbox-one Monday the news broke that Microsoft would be buying Mojang, the company behind Minecraft for 2.5 billion dollars.  Since then I’ve seen a lot of varied reactions on this, but I had not quite formulated my own thoughts yesterday morning so I didn’t mention it.  I admit I am a bit scared for Minecraft as a game to be in the often ham fisted hands of Microsoft.  The thing is this is my own personal biases showing through.  While I make my living supporting Microsoft products, in truth I have not been a huge fan of the company since Bill Gates ejected himself from the picture.  I’ve felt that they’ve made a significant number of missteps on a many fronts, more importantly to the topic of this conversation on the gaming front.  In a way I feel like this makes Microsoft look like they are making a desperate grab at relevance by purchasing the juggernaut that “all the kids are playing”.

From the standpoint of Notch I completely understand why he did this, and I support his decision.  Notch has always been one of those figures for which the spotlight has burned a little too much.  He blew up his own blog Notch.net when he posted this statement, so it made its way over to Paste Bin.  In the statement he explains how he feels like he had become this symbol, and not a person and for those of you who haven’t not watched the This is Phil Fish video Notch mentions you should really check it out.  It talks about the weird relationship we have to developers, especially in the indie world.  I honestly feel like Notch has always wanted to be this guy who worked on interesting projects, and just had the fortune or misfortune depending on your point of view of one of those projects going viral behind his wildest fevered imaginings.

So we have this odd marriage.  Microsoft desperately needs to claw its way to relevance, and Notch needs a company with the infrastructure to support his creation.  The Minecraft community can be extremely awesome, but they can also turn on a dime into an unruly mob as they did over supposed terms of service changes.  I highly suggest you check out Notch’s “Literally Worse than EA” post to see the point at which I think he decided he was getting out.  As an avid player of Minecraft since the early days of beta, my only hope in all of this is that Microsoft can keep from fucking it up.  They have this golden opportunity to prove to the world that they are not these clumsy and confused overlords.  Do right by this game and you might have just won yourself a lifetime of supporters.  Do wrong by this game and you likely caused the next few generations to hate you.  Ultimately this is not about me or my generation, but the children growing up with Minecraft as their generations Lego.

The Story Barrier

ffxiv 2014-09-16 21-43-56-381 Last night we had the intention to go do the next few parts of the Coil of Bahamut raid.  We did not however have the necessary well geared bodies to pull this off, so instead we opted to do the two instances that come at the end of the main story of the game.  Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium are both 8 man dungeons that are extremely story and cut scene heavy.  They often act as the bottle neck for players who have just finished leveling to 50, since so much of the end game content cannot be completed until you have finished this step in the main story quest.  This is one of my biggest complaints about the flow of the game, is that you have this massive gulf to cross when you think you are nearing the end.  You can of course queue for these two through the Duty system, but there is a significant problem with that.

Folks have figured out tricks to run these dungeons extremely quickly, and if you do so they are worth are lot of Tomestones of Mythology for limited work.  As such folks tend to power pull these dungeons and anyone who stops to watch the story gets lost in the mix, often times missing entire boss fights because they are locked in a cut scene.  This is extremely frustrating since so much of the final act of the story gets played out in these two dungeons.  As such we try and wait until we have several 50s that need these before running them, since to run the two dungeons while watching waiting on cut scenes is around a two hour long Endeavour.  Last night we had a block of time when we had a bunch of individuals online at the same time so we knocked them out for Thalen.

It had been a long while since I had watched all of the cut scenes and I have to say I am still impressed with the events at the end of this game.  I don’t want to go into spoilers but the conclusion of the main story sequence is so satisfyingly “Final Fantasy”.  It has all of the elements that make a game like this feel epic.  Big boss fights, orchestral music with the requisite choral requirement, huge spell effects and large scale devastation.  You cannot come out of The Praetorium without feeling like the big effing hero of the day.  This is the way the ending of every video game should feel.  The awesome thing here is that the story just keeps going, and in fact I feel like we are building to just as big and exciting of a conclusion somewhere down the line.  I find myself actually waiting with baited breath on the next segment of the storyline coming with 2.4.

Recruitment and Games

I had a situation happen last night when two of my friends officially declared that Final Fantasy XIV was the worse.  In truth I think they were referring to the hassle that is the Square Enix account management process, and in that I absolute agree with them.  Square seriously needs to rethink the number of hoops you have to jump through to be able to play their game.  Someone has to be pretty damned committed to giving them money to suffer through that bullshit.  That said it did bring up a slightly different point, that I thought I would talk a bit this morning.  I get super excited about video games, and in my enthusiasm I feel like I need to share that experience with others.  As such through a series of posts on my blog I gush about various features of a game, and some of my friends have taken to calling me the “games pusher”.  At its core, I want to share the enjoyment I am having with my friends… because I want them to feel awesome about things too.

The thing is this doesn’t always work, and that is completely okay if it doesn’t.  People enjoy games differently, and as such the things that might be perfect for me are not going to be perfect for everyone.  So if you see me gushing about a game, it does not mean that I expect you to like it just as much as I do.  Hell I find it awesome that people have even tried to play whatever it is that I am playing.  Of the folks who have taken the “FFXIV challenge”, a few of them have tried and decided they loved it.  Still others have decided this game is not for them at all and walked away from it.  I still love both camps equally, and for the folks who fought through the struggle that is account management to try it…  I am especially appreciative that they push so much effort into it.  Ultimately not every game has to be just right for everyone.  We can play different games and still be awesome friends.  That said I don’t think I will ever stop trying to get folks playing the game I am playing and on the same server I am playing.  That is just too deeply ingrained in my nature.

#FFXIV #Minecraft

9 thoughts on “Minecraft and Microsoft”

  2. @Ocho “They’ve said they will completely recoup the money from Minecraft by next summer. All $2.5B of it. ”

    Actually I read an explanation of this statement that says it doesn’t mean what you and I think it means. Maybe there’s an accountant reading Bel’s blog, but the gist of it was it was a GAAP (???) projection. Basically they had that $2.5 billion in the bank and it was earning interest. So when they say they’ll make their money back, it means by next July they will have generated more income from Minecraft than they would’ve made on the interest of that $2.5 billion in the bank (which accountants figure at something like $25 million) and of course they’ll still own Mojang which they’ve valued at being worth $2.5 billion. So by July they’ll have earned everything back.

    If I can find the post again, I’ll share the URL. But it made the whole statement make sense. Because at $20/copy of Minecraft you’d have to sell 125,000,000 copies to make back $2.5 billion, and that assumes the cost of each copy was pure profit. That’s a lot of copies of a game that’s already been out for a number of years.

  3. Balmer I think did a lot of damage to Microsoft and their image, but Msft has been far from irrevelant. They hold something like 90% of the PC/laptop market share. If anything, their games division is just a form of marketing themselves to younger audiences. … Which is why they bought Minecraft. Minecraft is essentially the “Lego” of current generations. Every single kid I know under the age of 10 plays it. A lot. Obsessively. But this might be for money and rights, too, something Msft likes collecting on. They’ve said they will completely recoup the money from Minecraft by next summer. All $2.5B of it. In order to get it back, they might not even need to change much at all except make it more available to the public.

    I’m not a Msft apologist, but the same way that Apple is changing for the better after Jobs passed away, MSFT is on a complete new path since Balmer stepped down and Satya Nadella took over. Just look at some of the changes he’s made and tell me they’re not on a better path.

    • Oh don’t get me wrong I think the post Balmer era is a lot better off already. As I said I make my living off of Microsoft products and with Microsoft technologies, so I have a love/hate relationship with them. That said they are in trouble in a whole bunch of markets namely their next to nonexistent presence in the tablet and phone markets. The Xbox One is starting to recover but PS4 still has a significant lead on it. I think more than anything the purchase of Minecraft will allow them to start throwing it in as a preinstalled item on new “windows” platform devices. Business sales aside, when I say relevance I am talking in the hearts and minds of gamers here.

    • I will likely play some of the Nightmare Tides expansion but I can’t really see going back to that game full time. The thing that is keeping me from leaping again in FFXIV is just how much fun I am having with the community. It is the way things used to be back in early games, where folks were generally pretty friendly. I’m party of a handful of social channels, and folks are chatty and friendly and constantly offering spots to do interesting sounding things. So long as that stays the case FFXIV will probably be a resting place for me.

  5. Pusher indeed. You should be in sales instead of web work. :p

    I bet ms won’t mess with minecraft much, maybe bundle it on their phones and tablets. Probably see some spin offs from the IP, Age of Minecraft or something goofy. Hell, they probably don’t know what they are going to do.

    I’ve been trying out the FF free trial. Its a good game. Its just so very Japanese…I hate feeling cute and giggly. Though the quest text is at least tough, there was some mention of chopping off manhood in a quest I ran yesterday. 🙂

  6. “….my only hope in all of this is that Microsoft can keep from fucking it up. They have this golden opportunity to prove to the world that they are not these clumsy and confused overlords.”

    I share your hope but I am dubious. In order to make back that $2.5 billion they’re going to have to monetize the dickens out of this game. I expect a flood of DLC based on every franchise (movies, mostly) popular with young people. They’re going to try to turn Minecraft into virtual Legos.

    In the worst possible case, they try to shut down modding so they can sell ‘expansion packs.’ Though I’m not sure even Microsoft is that ham-fisted.

    I also expect them to let the Playstation and Android editions to wither on the vine, though I’m not quite as sure about that. We’ll see.

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