Minecraft - f13 Server is: chugging along... again (Read OP)

[K9]

He only cares about making games, so i'm not sure sure he is thinking this through, sometimes hes a bit to open with his thought processes.

Who knew developers wouldn't have any business sense? 

He already has enough money to live off the rest of his life while developing whatever he wants, so he doesn't really need it.

That was true, right up to the point he started a company and hired people.

I'm pretty sure he hasn't spent all of those millions of dollars yet on a few staff.

Seems like a guy a little out of his depth, which is understandable. I think a most people would struggle to know how best to handle a similar runaway success.

[Mrbloodworth]

That was true, right up to the point he started a company and hired people.

I'm pretty sure he hasn't spent all of those millions of dollars yet on a few staff.

I was not disputing this. However he has salaries to pay, giving it away won't work for them.

[Simond]

My guess is the first person who tries to clone Minecraft by stealing it is going to end up taking a look at the source code, trying to make sense of it, then pulling these faces:   

[Mrbloodworth]

Maps info dump with images.

[Malakili]

Very neat.

[Mrbloodworth]

I can dig it. Also, who knew Minecraftians (?) had two arms? Amazing.

[Bzalthek]

Hm, how does the ever expanding map work with that?  Are there controls?

[Mrbloodworth]

The blog goes into details. If you go out of the maps area, you won't map anymore, meaning one map does not fit all, you will need area maps for..well, areas.

[Amaron]

The leap was that satisfying modders would somehow stop this. The game can and will be cloned due to it's success, modders or not.

Oh no doubt but dollar for dollar even a simple modding api is going to produce far more minecraft content than whatever else he might work on.   That would at least keep him in the game.

[Samwise]

The leap was that satisfying modders would somehow stop this. The game can and will be cloned due to it's success, modders or not.

Oh no doubt but dollar for dollar even a simple modding api is going to produce far more minecraft content than whatever else he might work on.   That would at least keep him in the game.

And if there's a library of good mods (especially if some of those get absorbed into the main game), "cloning" it with all of that intact gets more difficult.  I mean, people are going to make Minecraft clones either way, but if Minecraft has a thriving modding community that gives it features the clones can't match, it's more likely to hold on to a good chunk of the market.

[Paelos]

Ok that makes a more sense. I still believe he's going to get steamrolled eventually because it's obvious he doesn't know business from his asshole, but let's hope we get some good gaming before that happens.

[Mrbloodworth]

I wont use mods if there is no API. I'm not to fond of giving that much trust out.

[Samwise]

Ok that makes a more sense. I still believe he's going to get steamrolled eventually because it's obvious he doesn't know business from his asshole, but let's hope we get some good gaming before that happens.

If Minecraft ceases to exist, it'll be because he makes the smart business decision and sells it to some jackasses who ruin it while he jets off to enjoy his retirement on Whore Island.  But from what little I know of Notch I think it's more likely he'll hang on to it and keep maintaining it even if it ceases to be profitable; he's got enough money already that as long as he doesn't blow it all he can support himself indefinitely and keep tinkering with Minecraft as a full time hobby project.  In which case it doesn't matter to his current player base if he gets "steamrolled" by competitors.

[Paelos]

Ok that makes a more sense. I still believe he's going to get steamrolled eventually because it's obvious he doesn't know business from his asshole, but let's hope we get some good gaming before that happens.

If Minecraft ceases to exist, it'll be because he makes the smart business decision and sells it to some jackasses who ruin it while he jets off to enjoy his retirement on Whore Island.  But from what little I know of Notch I think it's more likely he'll hang on to it and keep maintaining it even if it ceases to be profitable; he's got enough money already that as long as he doesn't blow it all he can support himself indefinitely and keep tinkering with Minecraft as a full time hobby project.  In which case it doesn't matter to his current player base if he gets "steamrolled" by competitors.

Why would I buy it? If I'm someone like LEGO for example, I look at his idea, realize I can do it on my own with better branding, and roll him over.

[Bzalthek]

Didn't lego already try that?  Like before minecraft?  How they doing?

[Fordel]

Didn't Valve offer to buy up Minecraft already, or am I making shit up again?

[Paelos]

Didn't lego already try that?  Like before minecraft?  How they doing?

Idk, I think they put out a Star Wars game recently? I don't know if they've ever tried this idea, I just tossed out a name.

I mean let's get Sid Meier teamed up with this guy. We could have Minecraft:Pirates!

Sailing to islands you built, establishing a miner economy, creating villages, pillaging, yaaaaaaaar!

[Amaron]

because it's obvious he doesn't know business from his asshole

He still doesn't have Minecraft on steam.   I feel like you need to go further in describing how bad at this he is. 

[Samwise]

Why would I buy it? If I'm someone like LEGO for example, I look at his idea, realize I can do it on my own with better branding, and roll him over.

Minecraft is unique enough from a technical standpoint that you'd need someone with some modicum of brain to clone it effectively.  (I.e. it's not like cloning Farmville or whatever where any monkey with a Flash dev kit could do it once they have the idea.)  And a real company can't just steal the source code because it opens them up to legal liability.  Add in to that the fact that he's already got a decent sized user base and good word of mouth that a clone would have to compete with.  It's easier (and more cost effective) to just buy him out, assuming he's willing to sell.

[Quinton]

Minecraft is pretty damn trivial technically in most ways (and suboptimal in others -- his network sync protocol has a lot of issues around totally swamping the server on client login or teleport, etc).  

Probably the most impressive technology is his landscape generation, which makes some pretty neat landscapes that are fun to wander around in.  He put a lot of effort into tuning this and the results are really slick.

The basic "sync a low resolution mutable 3d bitmap" underlying service and "visualize a 3d bitmap using modern graphics hardware which is massively overpowered compared to the problem space" stuff is just not that technically complex, and a competent and motivated small team (1-3 people) could reproduce that easily and quickly.  It's semester-project type work for a junior or senior year CS student.

If I were to build a minecraft-alike, I'd probably go for a simple, solid, and fast C++ implementation for client and server (keep the worldstate in sync, draw it efficiently), with a lightweight scripting language (lua is the obvious choice) for implementing game logic.  The modding system then becomes zipfile resource packs which contain texture and model data and scripts.  The modding API is whatever API you expose to the scripting language.  Now you can optimize and tune the core engine all you like, and periodically provide more functionality to the scripting environment.

Honestly, it sounds like a really fun project.  I'd probably want to find somebody with a bit of art talent to come up with a somewhat different look and feel (you could keep the sorta pixelated world and some of the nice properties it gives you but not just do a completely blatant clone, I think).

If I could arrange to take a 3-6 month sabbatical and find a friend or two to work with, this would be massively fun to do.

...

Of course Minecraft has a bunch of users and mindshare, which is why I think it's silly for him to go all half-assed on the API front.  If he builds an ecosystem around content creation, gives the creators a way to sell their content (to users directly with a cut to Mojang or to Mojang to be part of the core game), and build up some stickiness based on the content and momentum, he'd be in a much stronger position for keeping an audience against competitors in the space.

...

As to Minecraft on Steam, I'm really curious what Valve's terms are for Steam distribution -- it sounds like they're negotiated per-entity and they have no public standard terms listed anywhere.  Probably not horrible given how much content they are moving, but I could see that someone making brisk direct sales might not want to give up too much of a cut to a distributor.  I'd personally be tempted to stick with direct distribution until sales start tapering off and then look to Steam or other content networks to widen my audience.

EDIT: typos

[Samwise]

competent and motivated small team

Now imagine the companies that might want to clone Minecraft, and ask yourself if they'd be able to scrape together such a team internally.  

[NiX]

Didn't Valve offer to buy up Minecraft already, or am I making shit up again?

I don't think he ever said exactly what Gabe offered him, but he did turn them down for something.

[Mrbloodworth]

In a game where you have to be authenticated by a remote site, is it wise to give out your source code freely?

I Really really do not like the idea of the game effectively becoming open source. I wanted mods to work like texture packs, just drop in the zip. Sadly like I said before, notch just wants to make games, I don't fault this, but he should hire someone to do the API and security features if he does not want to do it.

And sadly, knowing some of his past, and working with some of his past work, I'm quite sure the case here is he does not want to put in the work to do it right.

[Malakili]

The way I look at it - the game isn't even out yet and I've already gotten more than my 10 bucks worth by a huge, wide, margin.  All the stuff hes added in the last few months is basically just gravy.  I haven't really caught on to the cult of Notch or Mojang so where things go from here isn't really too big a concern for me.  Granted, I understand for people that are more invested in the industry on the professional level Minecraft/Notch represent more than just a fun game to play.

[Modern Angel]

Ok that makes a more sense. I still believe he's going to get steamrolled eventually because it's obvious he doesn't know business from his asshole, but let's hope we get some good gaming before that happens.

I've been saying for four years now that, any day now, ANY DAY, someone is going to make Dwarf Fortress with real graphics, a coherent interface and a couple missions but keeping all the quasi-emergent behavior and the awesome world generation. And that someone is going to make an absolute fucking mint (that person should've been Will Wright, since I think there's an argument to be made that DF is largely the Spore we were promised in 2004).

It never happened. Suits don't think that way. Most studios of more than ten people don't think that way. It's never going to happen, ever, because it's not a platformer, not a MMO, not a war simulation FPS, not a RTS.

Same thing with Minecraft. Never going to happen. 10, 15 years ago? Absolutely. The industry's not the same.

[KallDrexx]

It never happened. Suits don't think that way. Most studios of more than ten people don't think that way. It's never going to happen, ever, because it's not a platformer, not a MMO, not a war simulation FPS, not a RTS.

Same thing with Minecraft. Never going to happen. 10, 15 years ago? Absolutely. The industry's not the same.

Dwarf fortress is a completely different type of game.  As in, the AI and interactions in DF is massively complex, and attempting to replicate the technical and non-technical aspects of DF is pretty complicated.  Minecraft on the other hand is more of a technical complexity of dealing with the randomization, storage, and memory requirements of the system but the core idea is pretty easy to map out and enhance in your own direction.

[Quinton]

In a game where you have to be authenticated by a remote site, is it wise to give out your source code freely?
[/qoute]

Java is trivially de-compiled and modified -- the existing modding of minecraft takes heavy advantage of that fact.  Shipping java binaries is not that far from shipping source.  Mostly you lose out on the variable names and comments (which in many source bases are crap anyway).

[Malakili]

It never happened. Suits don't think that way. Most studios of more than ten people don't think that way. It's never going to happen, ever, because it's not a platformer, not a MMO, not a war simulation FPS, not a RTS.

Same thing with Minecraft. Never going to happen. 10, 15 years ago? Absolutely. The industry's not the same.

Dwarf fortress is a completely different type of game.  As in, the AI and interactions in DF is massively complex, and attempting to replicate the technical and non-technical aspects of DF is pretty complicated.  Minecraft on the other hand is more of a technical complexity of dealing with the randomization, storage, and memory requirements of the system but the core idea is pretty easy to map out and enhance in your own direction.

I think his point stands though, even if it could be reasonably replicated from a tech standpoint, how are you going to "sell" the project to the people deciding which projects get funded?  They are used to Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Warcraft, etc.   Something like minecraft would probably get laughed out of the building.   It core mechanics are incredibly strong, and combined with the fact that the game has a free version you can mess around with, and the incredibly luck of going "viral" in part due to the smallish original contingent of people who built amazing things and posted screenshots it ended up being huge, but realistically speaking, the project could just as easily have failed.

[Hawkbit]

So Minecraft is circling the drain now.  I see. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Hardly, most of us are just commenting about how hes moving forward. He still broke 2 million sales last week.

[KallDrexx]

I think his point stands though, even if it could be reasonably replicated from a tech standpoint, how are you going to "sell" the project to the people deciding which projects get funded?  They are used to Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Warcraft, etc.   Something like minecraft would probably get laughed out of the building.   It core mechanics are incredibly strong, and combined with the fact that the game has a free version you can mess around with, and the incredibly luck of going "viral" in part due to the smallish original contingent of people who built amazing things and posted screenshots it ended up being huge, but realistically speaking, the project could just as easily have failed.

I started writing about that then I decided against it, but here goes.

I don't disagree with that assertion, but I see competition for Minecraft coming from indie sectors more than big corporate companies.  All it takes is a couple of programmers interested in creating a clone and working on it in their free time (that's how Minecraft started, except it was one guy).   Combine that with the fact that recreating that type of system (a completely random and malleable world) is actually a pretty interesting technical problem to solve, and it's pretty likely someone else will do something similar. 

Whether they will do better than Minecraft or not is unknown, but if someone can come in with a concrete (and obtainable) vision for the game then it's certainly possible.  I'm not saying that Minecraft is going down the drain or will die soon, but it certainly is a possibility.

[Mrbloodworth]

Terran generation for world like minecraft was in one of my last Game developers magazines.

Just sayin.

[KallDrexx]

Terran generation for world like minecraft was in one of my last Game developers magazines.

Just sayin.

World generation is only one part of the technical problem.  There's also streaming (both locally and across the network) and manipulating of the world in real time in a way that works with limited RAM and power.

[Mrbloodworth]

Yeah, done.

[KallDrexx]

Yeah, done.

Just because it's been done before doesn't mean it's not an interesting or enticing thing to do on your own, especially if you think you can adapt it in a different way, and have a different focus than you think Minecraft will take it.