I'm a fan of Minecraft, I encourage my kids to play, I have a server that I manage myself and all sorts of merchandising. I'm not a doubter.
Minecraft is the creation of a turbofriki named Markus Pearson better known on Twitter as @Notch; he alone wrote all the code of the first version of the video game that has become the digital Lego, only that Lego is protected to exhaustion and our geek decided to make Minecraft open to modifications of aesthetics and functionalities (mods and plugins). He didn't have much merit to have written it by himself because the Minecraft Alpha was a simplistic and unrefined Java program.
Markus Pearson chose a good programming language - Java, a good music - that of another kid, better known as C418 - but above all he chose a way of representing things with cubes one by one by one by one; something that has ended up becoming a standard for representing reality.
As Notch was successful with that first version he created Mojang, which is today a company of just over 10 people where one of the co-creators answers my emails (you too if you write to him), and today it has been sold to Microsoft for 2.5 billion dollars, that is, 250 million dollars per worker.
Minecraft is not a video game or even an open software ecosystem. Minecraft is a simplified model of representation of reality on a one by one by one scale.
Microsoft comprando Mojang entra por derecho en el sector de la education, donde Minecraft está empezando a arrasar precisamente en los países más punteros del mundo, a saber los nórdicos. Este videojuego es un pozo sin fondo para enseñar a trabajar en equipo y por proyectos pero además es fácilmente modificable en estética y funcionalidades, es decir se puede cambiar en un servidor por el mero hecho de ser de software libre y por tener un magnífico ecosistema.
Moreover, it teaches children programming, how to handle servers and 3D rendering, how to make tools, how to crafting all sorts of things and it is also growing at an unstoppable speed. It is because of this and a few other things that it seems to me that Microsoft has made a great deal.
Tampoco debemos olvidar que Microsoft lleva ya años apostando por el software abierto especialmente a nivel de servidor y que Minecraft se instala en un servidor para que los jugadores compartan un mundo, de modo que la compra de una frikada como Mojang por esa barbaridad de dinero es bastante coherente con esa filosofía de software libre montado en los servidores. Y probablemente luego aparezcan business models tanto de Sofware as a service – SaaS -, como de consultoría. Mojang lo da todo gratis pero la autenticación contra el servidor oficial viene con una licencia de 20€ y además salen licencias de merchandishing.
I believe that microsoft can carry out the necessary code optimization, the only problem I see is if the Community will continue to develop on a platform that now belongs to those of the little windows.
