Goldminecraft: Lovely Notch Is Lovely & Rich

from Elemental Forums

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/09/29/goldminecraft-lovely-notch-is-lovely-rich/

So sez the money-minded onlooker, anyway, though I imagine there’s some room for adjustment.

According to one-man Minecraft wonder-king Notch, he’s currently selling a Minecraft account every three seconds. Which in itself is about the greatest “that’ll show you, creators of identical, soulless brown-grey games about shooting soldiers” I can imagine, but on top of that it means he’s earning $13.30 a second. Or $15,000 an hour, Texyt calculate. Or, $300- 350,000 a day.

A day. A day. A day. A day. A day. A day. A day.

Quick calculation of lifetime earnings, based on the number of purchasers listed here: he’s earned $3,554,638 from Minecraft to date. But add $13.30 a second to that.

First up: congratulations, sir, you totally deserve it. That neither the ‘but it looks kinda crude!” sentiment or the slight ‘oh, it’s what all those achingly hip young Twit-witterers are on about so I’m not going to play it out of spite’ backlash have harmed his fortunes is wonderful. It’s an incredible game, and we keep on posting about it here with good reason.

Secondly: it’s very unlikely to sustain those kind of levels (which hit a high of around 26,000 in a single day) for that much longer, so he’s probably not going to be buying more than one island. However, the price is going up to $15 once the current alpha version becomes beta, so he’s got a fair whack of cash yet to come.

A day. A day. A day. A day.

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What can I say? Amazing....isn't it? :O

117,764 views 36 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Not really. If you plot a graph of viral interest, world of warcraft and hot females this fact will become very clear.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Well, guess he could buy Dwarf Fortress and wrap it all up into one game.
But then the internet would probably explode and the dead start rising from their graves.

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

I just heard about the game about a week ago in a stream chat. I had thought it was a mod for Starcraft 2(it was an SC2 stream). I was pointed to a stream of someone playing it and was immiediately looking at something a 16bit console could do better. I'm not usually a gfx whore, but it was so bad I couldn't even tell what was going on. I see now though part of it was the guys stream quality(and the laggyness didn't help), but even so I never thought it would be something that people were paying for. There must be something appealing to it though, so i guess I'll give it another look. Maybe in a few months when I finally get tired of SC2, he'd have put some of that money to use to give it a little more visual appeal.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

game seems interesting and unique. $13 is semi hefty for an independent alpha game.

Anyone here like it? And why?

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

It's life-size LEGO with zombies. If you like exploring and making stuff, it's worth the price.

You can get a feel for it from the free old version on the site (builder only mode, no enemies, crafting, or gathering).

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

As long as his engine is solid, he should be good to go.  If he hits a performance wall, he's got some serious overhauling to do and his new found wealth is going to end up eating a 5 year development cycle on a AAA engine build to run what he's designed with something besides 8 bit cubes.

Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top

The build only mode was pretty cool. Played it for about an hour just building stuff, I might actually pick it up. Stardock should publish it.....

Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

My current base:

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

The game is very popular, even kryo likes it! :) Hmm...weird stuff, because I only play with Dwarf Fortress...I simply love it, but I am not a big fan of Minecraft. Ah well....but hats off! Really...this guy who created this game is a genius.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting kryo, reply 8
My current base:

<image removed for quoting purposes>

That is surprisingly much like my own base, although I haven't worked on it for about a week. Currently it's an unfinished brick tower.

Brick. Tower.

For anyone trying to construct something larger than a hut out of bricks in Minecraft, I'll let that sink in.

Worst. Decision. Ever.

Still, I had no idea he made that kind of money on this. That's amazing. I am also amazingly jelous right now.

Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Tormy-, reply 9
The game is very popular, even kryo likes it! Hmm...weird stuff, because I only play with Dwarf Fortress...I simply love it, but I am not a big fan of Minecraft. Ah well....but hats off! Really...this guy who created this game is a genius.

How can you not like Minecraft when it's so similar to DF? I'm assuming it's the whole first person controls vs god in the sky controls, but the interaction between people in game really sells it for me.

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Myles, reply 11
How can you not like Minecraft when it's so similar to DF? I'm assuming it's the whole first person controls vs god in the sky controls, but the interaction between people in game really sells it for me.
I was just thinking how incredibly DIFFERENT they are. They have little to nothing in common, other than the fact that you STRIKE THE EARTH in both.

I can't wait for Minecraft to have proper multiplayer. It's going to be awesome, with communal work on projects. :D

Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Luckmann, reply 12

Quoting Myles, reply 11How can you not like Minecraft when it's so similar to DF? I'm assuming it's the whole first person controls vs god in the sky controls, but the interaction between people in game really sells it for me.I was just thinking how incredibly DIFFERENT they are. They have little to nothing in common, other than the fact that you STRIKE THE EARTH in both.
I can't wait for Minecraft to have proper multiplayer. It's going to be awesome, with communal work on projects.

Really? Yea the mechanics of getting things done is quite different, but in both you mine the earth and create stuff with the resources around you. In the end, besides a little bit of enemy thwarting, you just create stuff for the hell of it. I know it's a bit of a simplistic breakdown, but Minecraft really seems like a 3D FPS version of DF to me.

Reply #15 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Luckmann, reply 12



Quoting Myles,
reply 11
How can you not like Minecraft when it's so similar to DF? I'm assuming it's the whole first person controls vs god in the sky controls, but the interaction between people in game really sells it for me.I was just thinking how incredibly DIFFERENT they are. They have little to nothing in common, other than the fact that you STRIKE THE EARTH in both.


I can't wait for Minecraft to have proper multiplayer. It's going to be awesome, with communal work on projects.

Yep, they are very different games indeed.

Reply #16 from Elemental Forums Top

Any game that lets you build something on this scale :
Quoting hannahb, reply 14
Any game that lets you build something on this scale :
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn2-d5a3r94&feature=player_embedded
deserves every penny it gets.

Bat crap crazy.
I'm waiting for a Minecraft 1:1 scale model of the solar system.

Then the above would have the proper setting...

Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top

I love this game. Good for notch.

also, how in the hell can clay be so rare? Cartograph tells me that there are 490 clay blocks on my map.

There are over 5000 blocks of Obsidian.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF-

Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top

Well, that tells you how clay is so rare.  Too many volcanoes. :)

Reply #19 from Elemental Forums Top

The creation of clay takes millions of years of lieing around in one place.

Not gonna happen in a game full of crazy diggers.

Reply #20 from Elemental Forums Top

This is why I love Minecraft.  I start a new game to be a pirate (can not mine anything I don't see.  If I place something I can not pick it back up, torches & craft included.  I traveled by sea, and my goal was to find gold).  Instead, I started with this as my terrain.

http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/168/javaw2010100223280554.jpg
http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/5841/javaw2010100223285932.jpg
http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/9291/javaw2010100223292901.jpg
http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/1478/javaw2010100223293995.jpg
http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/7931/javaw2010100223294752.jpg
http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/9379/javaw2010100223304641.jpg
http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/8938/javaw2010100223310290.jpg
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/6781/javaw2010100223305534.jpg
http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/162/javaw2010100223324946.jpg

 

The entire world turned out like this, that cave system with the 2 zombies outside of it had a massive shaft that had magma going into it at the very bottom, with 2 waterfalls.  I had to leave it and set sail - running across multiple islands like this.  Unfortunately I ran into a bug that corrupted my save file. 

Reply #21 from Sins Forums Top

This is actually my third save. In the first there was an incident with creepers and lava lights, The second was pretty much all sheer cliffs which I hated, and the third is my current one. It's semi boring around my spawn, but there are cool cliffs off in the west.

Reply #22 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Rnick, reply 21
The second was pretty much all sheer cliffs which I hated, and the third is my current one. It's semi boring around my spawn, but there are cool cliffs off in the west.


I generally find something (I do one "project" per world) to do with whatever world is generated, my second world had a random giant spire of rock in it, which I took to hollowing out to make a sinister castle of, because you know, it seemed the thing to do. similarly my 3rd world was mostly ocean and sand in small islands, so I am making an underwater glass house in the middle of the ocean. 

Reply #23 from Sins Forums Top

I tried for a fourth world tonight just to check it out. I spawned in water that was three deep and the world was almost completely flooded. All could think was MAPGEN UMAD?

Reply #24 from Elemental Forums Top

Latest shot:

Reply #25 from Sins Forums Top

What would happen is you switched on anti-aliasing in a minecraft world?