Minecraft and Microsoft: What now? Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News
If you want to understand why Minecraft-maker Mojang is being bought by Microsoft, just play the game.
Single-player is about a single individual who survives in a harsh world that relies on their ingenuity and creativity to stay safe. Their very survival depends on them building a home and battling monsters employing only tools and weapons they make with their hands.
It would be easy for computer games to be compared to novels. This could be interpreted as a metaphor for Markus “Notch”, Persson, the game creator. He has talked about his childhood, about being “relatively impoverished”, and whether he will have the same “demons” as his father.
Notch’s family, friends and the success he made with his hands helped him thrive in this harsh world. But, that success has also brought him other challenges. These are even more difficult to overcome.
Minecon 2012 was a clear example of what had happened. Notch was unable even to walk more then a few feet before being grabbed by yet another fan who was eager to shake his arm, take a photograph, or sign his foam sword.
People power
He was never happy with his transformation from a humble programer responsible only for his code to the leader a global organization. His heartfelt explanation for why he was leaving Mojang – “it’s about my sanity” – demonstrates that.
He is aware that Minecraft is about managing a community, not just maintaining and developing a codebase.
Microsoft may have a problem here.
It has a solid history of managing large-scale computer infrastructures that serve millions of customers. This is evident with Xbox Live and other cloud services. That will be vital when it starts running the behind-the-scenes systems that keep Minecraft going.
Microsoft will alienate the community if it doesn’t understand how personal the game is for Notch and many others. It’s where they meet their friends and make new ones, where they express themselves, where they show off their technical and creative prowess, where they find themselves.
I have seen this with my own children. Gaming They play it in very diverse ways. One is a big fan of modified versions that involve arena battles or capture-the-flag-type competitions. The other spends hours building intricate homes around swooping tracks of minecarts. Sometimes he builds treehouses that span forests. They also regularly go adventuring with their friends seeking treasure, avoiding creepers, and battling spiders, zombies and skeletons.
This is possible because Minecraft allows for freedom and openness. Millions of people like them can do it. They can change the game to their liking due to its flexibility. This is possible by giving users a degree of access that Microsoft’s business software has never offered. This is what has worried the millions of Minecraft players. These Minecraft fans don’t want Microsoft to interfere with their freedom of creating and altering the game as they like. They feel a deep sense of ownership over the games they create.
There’s no doubt that will be a tricky job for Microsoft to achieve given how critical that community can be.
It will have a lot of work to overcome the two biggest enemies of online gamers: downtime and lag (aka delay). Microsoft is likely to be responsible for any future problems with the game’s availability, regardless of whether it is the company’s fault.
If the game is not managed well, drastic changes in the game’s operation, such as charging people for things that are currently free, or restricting what they can tell the rest of the world about their activities, could turn a large percentage of the community against Microsoft.
That would be bad, given that many of its players are now children who will grow up to be the gamers of the future. Microsoft is sure to impress them by the way it manages Minecraft. If it does not do the right thing, it could end-up being one of the monsters that people would love to take on.