So it turned out that the rumours were true - Mojang has sold its phenomenally popular franchise Minecraft to Microsoft for the very reasonable price of $2 billion chuffing pounds.
“I don’t see myself as a real game developer,” Notch writes. ”I make games because it’s fun, and because I love games and I love to program, but I don’t make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don’t try to change the world.”
The pressure of becoming the poster boy for indie games development has clearly affected Notch, and by selling Minecraft he is looking to step out of the public eye. ”I’ve become a symbol,” he writes. ”I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me. I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.”
“As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.”
The developer admits that the sale goes against some of his previous comments on big-money acquisitions, but says he was never the ”symbol of some perceived struggle”, but just a person ”right there struggling with you.” A somewhat richer person, admittedly, but you can’t fault Notch for accepting the ludicrous sums that Microsoft were throwing at him.
“Thank you for turning Minecraft into what it has become,” he finishes, ”but there are too many of you, and I can’t be responsible for something this big. 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.”
“It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.”
