One year ago, we started Mojang. Back then, Minecraft had sold between half a million and one million copies, and now we’re up to almost four million copies sold, we’re expanding to two new platforms, and we’re getting good progress done with our new game. In one month, we’re going to Las Vegas to celebrate the full release of Minecraft with our fans. And we’re getting sued by one of my favorite game developers.
We have made a few suggestions for cloak designs and we need your help deciding on the official cloak. Voting ends Monday, September 26th. Cast your vote here.
At PAX, I got asked why we’re not on Steam with Minecraft, and I had to answer the question straight out for the first time. So I’ll repeat what I said on here, because openess is awesome.
Steam is the best digital distribution platform I’ve ever seen. I’ve spent incredible amounts of money on it, and I own a crazy amount of games on it. It runs great, offers great services like that shift+tab stuff, and it remembers my credit card details so there’s no barrier for me when I want to buy a game. The only downside I can think of is that offline mode is a bit flimsy, and that the game list is sometimes full off DLC releases for stuff I don’t even own, and those are some tiny complaints!
But..
Being on Steam limits a lot of what we’re allowed to do with the game, and how we’re allowed to talk to our users. We (probably?) wouldn’t be able to, say, sell capes or have a map market place on minecraft.net that works with steam customers in a way that keeps Valve happy. It would effectively split the Minecraft community into two parts, where only some of the players can access all of the weird content we want to add to the game.
We are talking to Valve about this, but I definitely understand their reasons for wanting to control their platform. There’s a certain inherent incompatibility between what we want to do and what they want to do.
So there’s no big argument, we just don’t want to limit what we can do with Minecraft. Also, Steam is awesome. Much more awesome than certain other digital distribution platforms that we would NOT want to release Minecraft on.
I made a game in 48 hours this weekend, for the Ludum Dare competition.
It’s an action based dungeon crawler with six levels, four boss fights, and plenty of secrets and loot. It takes about 20-30 minutes to beat the game, and if you die, you need to start over from the beginning.
Hey, Bethesda! Let’s settle this! : The Word of Notch
The only negative thing going on at this moment is the Scrolls trademark lawsuit nonsense, and I think I came up with the perfect solution:
Remember that scene in Game of Thrones where Tyrion chose a trial by battle in the Eyrie? Well, let’s do that instead!
I challenge Bethesda to a game of Quake 3. Three of our best warriors against three of your best warriors. We select one level, you select the other, we randomize the order. 20 minute matches, highest total frag count per team across both levels wins.
If we win, you drop the lawsuit.
If you win, we will change the name of Scrolls to something you’re fine with.
: minecraft 
