One of the biggest video game news of 2014 was Microsoft’s purchase of an indie video game developer.
This was Stockholm-based Mojang, the developer behind Minecraft, a wildly popular game about building and survival in an open world.
Also, the fact that Microsoft paid an exorbitant amount of money for the game and its maker Mojang left few people indifferent – after all, it’s not every day that a major company like Microsoft pays $2.5 billion dollars for a game, no matter how popular.
And buying Minecraft has certainly paid off for Microsoft. After all, Minecraft is right now the second best-selling video game ever behind Tetris, having shifted about 100 million copies since Microsoft made the purchase back in 2014.
This means quite a few people – especially younger folk – are enjoying the game these days, while many expected the game’s creator Markus Persson (known by the handle “Notch” online) would retreat into obscurity to live the life of a billionaire.
However, since leaving Mojang and Minecraft behind, Notch has been making some controversial comments via his Twitter account, comments which smack of racism and sexism and are disparaging to other minorities too.
This has led to Microsoft excluding Minecraft creator Notch from the game’s 10th anniversary celebrations, including a special press event at Mojang’s Stockholm studio this month, as was recently reported on Eurogamer.
Microsoft thought that Notch’s comments and opinions were controversial enough to distance itself from the swede, including the removal of references to his persona from Minecraft in a recent patch.
Meanwhile, Minecraft’s popularity continues to soar, and the game currently has tens of millions of players at the time of writing, and shows no sign of slowing down, being even more popular than Epic’s all-conquering Fortnite. So it would be a great thing if the game continued to grow, and that Microsoft’s upcoming celebrations serve remind people what a great pastime gaming can be thanks to the success of video games such as Minecraft.