Minecraft generated 5 million euros in March for Mojang

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/04/08/minecraft-generated-about-5-m-euros-in-march

by vilpponen • 15 years ago

39 24 15 years ago

the gaming industry is slowly but surely morphing into the movie industry as the frictional costs associated with creating games goes down.

Joakal• 15 years ago

You say it as if the gaming industry is becoming worst. Isn't the article a sign that the demand for games still exist?

DarkShikari2• 15 years ago

The comparison is actually more valid than it sounds.

Like the movie industry, it's becoming easier and cheaper than ever to make professional-looking films, but making "A-grade" blockbusters is becoming more and more expensive.

This sort of transition inevitably hurts the biggest-budget producers, as they're forced to spend more and more money to compete. Similarly, it helps the lowest-budget producers, as they can make millions of dollars off what would have been 10 years ago been considered a hobby project.

People tend to look at the most absurdly successful indie games like Braid, Touhou, or Minecraft and dismiss them as one-hit wonders or exceptions to the rule. But how many exceptions to the rule it takes before the rule becomes invalid -- especially as games begin to compete more and more on features besides graphics?

Many of these features are cheaper to develop and benefit from the agility and risk-taking abilities of a smaller development team as opposed to the designed-by-seventeen-committees-in-separate-cupboards approach of the big game studios.

ugh2• 15 years ago

You can now add Tiny Wings (an iPhone game) to that list. The 'exceptions' keep piling and piling. It's really quite astonishing how succesful so many indie games have become.

haribilalic• 15 years ago

I thought that ease of distribution through things like Steam and the App Store would be the big changer for indie games. I know I wouldn't have bought Peggle and many other indie games if it weren't for Steam.

It doesn't help the big players that a lot of the big games are franchises (what's the difference between Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops?) that are nickle-and-diming players through Xbox Live and PSN. It costs more to buy a few hours of new content in Fallout: New Vegas than it would to buy many indie games.

rcamera• 15 years ago

Not only that, but big game developers think the industry is a hit-based one, and, as a consequence, have stopped designing completely new games and instead making endless sequels to their already successful franchises (you can see this in their financial reports, under the risks section). This also helps to explain why some indie games are so successful, as they create completely new games with some interesting combination of gaming mechanics.

This article is evidence to the whole long tail concept all over again, but now in the gaming industry.

rorrr• 15 years ago

> but making "A-grade" blockbusters is becoming more and more expensive.

That's not even true. Adjusted for inflation, the most expensive movie was made in 1963:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films#Mo...

rudiger3• 15 years ago

Incredible. Who could have anticipated this small game would make tens of millions of dollars (more than any single app in the iOS app store)?

xal2• 15 years ago

I can guarantee you that there are apps who make far in excess of 10m in the app store.

rudiger3• 15 years ago

Which apps have made that much in the app store?

Minecraft has made somewhere around 30 million U.S. dollars, with incredible growth (7 million U.S. dollars in the past month) and they'll probably sell millions more. And since they do their own distribution (Amazon Web Services, I believe), they don't give Apple 30%.

jedsmith• 15 years ago

It was revealed [the week of March 9th] that Rovio's hit mobile title Angry Birds cost only $140k to create and has already generated an estimated $70 million.

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/angry-birds-one-of-the-mo...

rudiger3• 15 years ago

I thought maybe Angry Birds was more; tough to say though.

asb• 15 years ago

There used to be a graph of sales over time available at http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ - but it's down now (and has been for at least a few weeks). Does anybody know an alternative site which collects and displays this data? It's just taken from http://www.minecraft.net/stats.jsp but as I'm interested in how it changed over the past few months it's a bit late to scrape it myself now.

ugh2• 15 years ago

I don't have the raw data but I have checked the stats page every week or so during the last few months. Minecraft consistently sells around 9,000 copies per day. I also got the impression that that number grew from around 8,000 to around 9,000 during the last months but I could be wrong about that. That rate of growth doesn't seem to grow anymore but it also doesn't seem to shrink. 9,000 copies per day at 15€ is a huge amount of money.

citricsquid• 15 years ago

Hey! That's my site (m00d.net) unfortunately minecraft.net had about 90% uptime a few months back it screwed my poorly built application, without error checking it filled the db with junk so I took it offline and never brought it back. Mojang told me that they liked looking at the data so I expected they'd throw their own online, a more accurate one.

I'm considering talking to them again and seeing if they'll provide me a dump of sales data (just the timestamp of purchases) so I can re-grapgh everything, it would be cool.

morgantwenty2• 15 years ago

I say well done to Notch. I am not a fan of Minecraft but I think he has done a great job in how he has managed the business and development. He has been very open, never promised too much and kept to his word in continuing development. He has built up a lot of respect from the gaming community and people such as myself as a person who has integrity. I wish him all the best in the future with Minecraft and any other ideas he has. I like the way he has done things so far and I have no doubt if he continues what he is doing he will continue to be successful. I just hope he doesn't let the money change him and he just ditch Minecraft after it hits 1.0 or sells it off. I highly doubt he will though.

Herwig• 15 years ago

A game like this is truly innovative and amazing. It is so interesting to throw people into a world and see what they do first and what they build (how they behave). I also consider this a drug cuz its highly addictive!!

srgseg• 15 years ago

Please could someone explain Minecraft to me?

I've watched the video at minecraft.net, and I've read the entire Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft

Despite this, I still can't figure out what the element of this game is that makes it addictive and what convinces people to have spent a total of $30m+ on this.

It's easy to see why Angry Birds or Portal or CounterStrike or Desktop Tower Defence or Need for Speed is fun - but Minecraft's draw confuses me.

Is it something that can only be understood by playing it?

morgantwenty2• 15 years ago

> Is it something that can only be understood by playing it?

Pretty much exactly that.

alexgaribay• 15 years ago

I would agree with that. I saw my roommate playing it and thought it was completely idiotic. I bought the game a few weeks after he did. I was definitely addicted for while.

Can't....stop....digging!

nickknw• 15 years ago

For me, it's got kind of the same appeal that lego did as a kid. And The Incredible Machine.

It has other appealing elements, for sure. Exploring large dark randomly generated cave systems with danger at every turn, combining items with other items to make new, more exciting items.

But ultimately, Minecraft taps into the same kind of fun as lego. IMO, it does it even better.

Minecraft generated 5 million euros in March for Mojang

Related Stories