Several gaming industry sources tell BuzzFeed News that the Minecraft creator’s planned departure following the close of its $2.5 billion sale to Microsoft might actually be a good thing for the future of Mojang within Microsoft.
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"Thank you for turning Minecraft into what it has become, but there are too many of you, and I can't be responsible for something this big," wrote Markus "Notch" Persson, the game's beloved creator in a blog post following the announcement that Microsoft was buying its parent company Mojang for $2.5 billion. "In one sense, it belongs to Microsoft now. In a much bigger sense, it's belonged to all of you for a long time, and that will never change."
Unlike most deals of this nature, which are as much about acqui-hiring the creators of the game as the game itself, Persson will not be joining Microsoft. Instead, following the deal's closing, he will step aside. In doing so, Persson is opting for the clean break instead of the "rest and vest" mentality that is often present in Silicon Valley deals, particularly in the gaming industry.
"It's not about the money," wrote Persson, who will make more than $1.5 billion himself on the deal. "It's about my sanity."
Persson's planned exit is further stressing out Minecraft's users, who are already anxious over the game's future under Microsoft's control. But several well-connected gaming industry sources told BuzzFeed News that his departure might actually be a good thing for the future of Mojang within Microsoft. As the saying goes in Silicon Valley, the same CEO that built a company from zero to 20 people is not necessarily the right CEO to go from 20 employees to 200.
"Many of the great games, the inventor didn't have much to do with the sequels," Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Bing Gordon, a long time executive with Electronic Arts and investor in Zynga, told BuzzFeed News. "Like the Sims, like Sid Meyer, like the people working on John Madden football that's been going on since the 80s. All kinds of people have changed along the way. One has to judge in advance if the original creators going to be the best re-inventors, or who's going to be able to do it."
Chuck Berman/Chicago Tribune / MCT
Mojang has entertained the idea of selling since at least 2012, when it was fielding offers of around $1 billion, according to a number of people familiar with Mojang's operations.
Even back then it was minting incredible profits, raking in around $95 million in earnings before interest and taxes on revenue of $235 million for the 2012 fiscal year. At the time the game had already sold collectively more than 20 million copies.
Yet, Persson had already begun work on his next project, dubbed "0x10c." Indeed, in December 2011 Persson handed off development of Minecraft to Jens Bergenstein.
"A relatively long time ago, I decided to step down from Minecraft development," Persson wrote. "Jens was the perfect person to take over leading it, and I wanted to try to do new things. At first, I failed by trying to make something big again, but since I decided to just stick to small prototypes and interesting challenges, I've had so much fun with work. I wasn't exactly sure how I fit into Mojang where people did actual work, but since people said I was important for the culture, I stayed."
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