
Makes sense
The blocky minecraft theme matches the IFKAM perfectly well. Perhaps mineccraft will be the new home screen. Perhaps BoB was just a tad too early.
New Microsoft boss Satya Nadella has set his sights on Minecraft maker Mojang as his first major acquisition, according to whispers. The move is probably worth the rumoured $2bn price tag in “woah” value alone, since it's practically the only thing that could have diverted attention away from Apple's iStuff launch on Tuesday. …
"The blocky minecraft theme matches the IFKAM perfectly well"
I can see Microsoft upgrading Minecraft to full HD and integrating it with Project Spark. That could be a winner...
" Couldn't be worse than the Java code it seems to be written in at the moment"
+1
If my experience is anything to go by, porting it to .Net would improve performance by a factor of ~ 10 and reduce security vulnerabilities by a factor of ~ 100....
Same here. My 6 year old plays Minecraft no problem on my old Acer laptop which runs a Core2 Duo 1.8ghz CPU and Geforce Go 7600. I just worked out that the laptop is seven and a half years old.
The Java used to be a real resource hog on 1.7.9 Minecraft, but seems much better on 1.7.10 (not tried 1.8).
I'm happy for the founders. Well no, not really. 2 BILLION? Oh hell NO!
On the other hand, it's the death nail for Minecraft. See my other posts about "without warning" disappearances of MS services.
(kewpie doll to anyone who knows where "death nail" came from)
quote: "I'm pretty sure you could use a nail as a lethal weapon, would that not be a death nail?"
Nope, that would probably be better referred to as a killing nail (like a "killing blow"). Although I've not heard the term before, I'd suggest a "death nail" might be a nail (toe or finger) removed from a dead person, potentially for commemorative purposes. Similar to a death mask being a cast of the dead persons face, used as an aid to commemoration.
Searching "Death nail quote" leads to an extensive list of pages using it (incorrectly) as a substitute for death knell. The one link I saw which correctly surmised it should be death knell then used "for all intensive purposes", (should be "all intents and purposes") so I am now officially a sad panda, dis langwij iz fuked innit :(
It was fun while it lasted.
I'm happy for the founders. Well no, not really. 2 BILLION? Oh hell NO!
On the other hand, it's the death nail for Minecraft. See my other posts about "without warning" disappearances of MS services.
Yup, it's the death nail in the coffin (to build on your phrase) for Minecraft. It will now go the way of all acquisitions by that famed killer of usability. I had to work with Visio a few weeks ago, and I didn't recognise the formerly elegant and rather fast program *at all*. To butcher an interface that badly is no accident, it takes skill and an iron determination not to leave anything usable intact. Criminal.
Thus, so long Minecraft - may your grave be calm and rectangular.
The 3D UK Minecraft 'map' provided a 10m resolution but was only a few hundred megs in size as a download (IIRC), and uncompressed to less than 4GB. Now, think of a map service using the same technology for all of Europe - it would probably be less than 50GB, which is within the capabilities of the latest smartphones. Even if just used as a frame, with a background service downloading Googlecar-like, stitched-together photos to go onto the frame, it would allow for a pretty impressive navigation service. Microsoft may be looking at more than just games for the code.
TWO BILLION? Two billion US dollars? Are you sure it's not two billion Zimbabwean dollars or something?
Nadella must be off his chump.
Quick! If we all chip in a fiver we could buy Second Life from whoever owns it, rename it 'Lifecraft' or something crap, and flog it off to Nadella for at least a billion!
The numbers are large, but it's not actually insane.
The company has revenues of $2.9 billion, but a tiny profit of $150 million. It looks like they're being fleeced by their infrastructure costs (or someone's building an volcanic island lair in the Caribbean)
Under MS ownership, I can see those costs dropping dramatically, mainly because Microsoft will be paying a hell of a lot less for their IT infrastructure than the current owners do. Get the profits up to 20% of revenue, and that $2bn doesn't look like a bad investment.
If you want insanity, have a look at Facebook and Instagram. Instagram had, um, zero profits, but it made them off zero revenue too, so on percentage terms, I guess it wasn't so bad, right?
"The company has revenues of $2.9 billion, but a tiny profit of $150 million. It looks like they're being fleeced by their infrastructure costs (or someone's building an volcanic island lair in the Caribbean)"
Or they are not making much profit per unit because they price is low? Although it isn't really for an indie game, so yes, no idea where Minecraft (couple of guys in an office) spent $2.75bn in a year.
quote: "TWO BILLION? Two billion US dollars? Are you sure it's not two billion Zimbabwean dollars or something?
Nadella must be off his chump."
Ask Zuckerberg how much he paid for WhatsApp, on the back of less profit per year.
Either big companies are staffed with utter fuckwits (possible) or some purchases have other reasons than simple profit seeking (also possible).
Personally, I reckon MS have looked at it, and decided what Minecraft really needs is in-app purchases, and that they are just the people to wring every last cent out of it. I will now go observe a 2-minutes silence for platform-independent, independent games development :(
If they decide to "integrate" it into the Microsoft infrastructure or only develop the Microsoft platforms, then it will be a bad thing.
I disagree.
By shoving it onto Azure, MS can reduce the infrastructure costs to a rounding error and that means more of that $2.9bn sales revenue becomes profit.
Presumably MS are betting big that interesting exclusives will 'make' the XBone, in the same way that the original XBox was 'made' by Halo. I think the big battleground of this console generation will be who best supports/captures the resurgent Indie games.
When you think an engaging concept with retro graphics like Minecraft or Hotline:Miami can make AAA money off a shoestring budget, it's a no-brainer really.
(EDIT: to clarify, courting Indie studios is what I consider to be the no brainer, MS have most likely overpaid for Mojang bigtime in true Corporate Monolith form.)
>>"Presumably MS are betting big that interesting exclusives will 'make' the XBone, in the same way that the original XBox was 'made' by Halo. I think the big battleground of this console generation will be who best supports/captures the resurgent Indie games."
Possibly, but you do that by backing the next big thing, not the current or last big thing.
I already get offered updates for Microsoft applications, such as Silverlight, that I haven't installed. So, I can only assume it won't be long before I get pestered on Patch Tuesday* with MineCraft updates.
Or perhaps MS can integrate it with SQL Express and then we can have Data Mine Craft additions...
Sorry, it's a slow day and I can't get my head into coding mode at all. Is it Gin and Tonic o'clock yet?
There's so many derivitives of MC on the portable platforms now that losing MC to MS will be no great hardship, I fully expect that there's already plenty of open source alternatives to MC on various platforms.
Same old tale, a great success story but the big boys only move in late. They realise they've bought a duff one but they push on. They mess with it trying to get their money back but because it's been cloned and copied, usually bettered, they fail and then they "bargain basement" the product back to the original maker!
I'd almost put money down on MS buying it for stupid money and selling it back to Notch for a $150m in 3 years time!
No good can come of this unless you're a founder who wants their own plane. Modding is what makes Minecraft special - certainly that's what keeps my kids playing - but MS don't do variety/community at all well. A vanilla console version has a limited span which MS will shorten further by integrating 'Live' crap. Hope to god this is just a way to distract from the slow public decline of Apple.
Flight sim said differently. Untill they made it harder in FSX and then killed Flight Simulator off entirely by closing ACES studio! And then came the gamified piece of shit that is Flight, with its payed DLC and completely closed environment. Which promptly got killed as well.
Okay. I take back my last two posts. I thought this was a massive waste of $2bn dollars.
But seeing the agonized reactions of so many Microsoft-haters? Totally worth it! :D
And by that comment you have progressed to the level of the True El Reg Commentard spirit.
I salute you, oh newly anointed. And get the beer.
Imagine a search tool and mapping tool that is truly interactive, a kind of Bing Search/Maps meets Second Life. You go to Bing and search for a clothes shop in your area, and it offers the results, the routes to them, and you can fly over it or walk/drive through it in the virtual copy of the real World, and the environment reacts to your presence. You pass a shop and it not only tells you what the shop is but the underlying code makes it truly interactive - you can tap on the door and take a virtual tour, even a real 3D tour of the shop if the shop's owners pay for the Minecraft mod work to create the shop environment. You can browse their stock and click on items to download real shots of the products, place orders, talk to virtual staff, or carry out any interaction the game can be coded to allow. With the power of Azure behind it the same interface could run on mobile phones as on full desktops and provide an experience and service Google cannot currently match. Make access a free app purchase download and then charge those that create shops or sites inside the 'World'. It could be Second Life done right, based not on some fake world but on the real World, and there could be nice sideline of selling the game and development kits and pay-to-play virtual worlds (say a Minecraft MMPORPG mod of Arthurian Britain, only with real map data). Maybe not such a daft purchase after all.