Agreed. Too much cash to turn down.

I don't understand why MS is doing this though, unless they believe Minecraft can be used to successfully propel their XB and smartphone sales enough to make back their investment cost.

Minecraft sold alone on X360 around 12 million (and that number is from April).  The game is sold for 20€/20$ and then their is all the theme/skin packs...

That is a lot of money for just the X360 version and it is still in the top 10/20 lists..  

But we don't know what is in the deal it can be aswell that they buy him and his IP's for 1,5billion and at the same time will spend 1 billion for his new games...

Yet, despite all that, Mojang "only" made 130 million dollars last year, and that's across every single platfrom, and including money from merchandise.

I am also very happy. I can see their vision for Xbox One. One thing is sure that I dont want to be a part of that future.

and to think uncharted 2 costed like 21 million or so. 

130 million is very good considering it is profit and they also have to pay +100 million license fees to notch...    With the possible Minecraft TV show potentially the profit can rise up...

For comparison, what other IPs can be bought for $2.5b?

Just think about what you could do with $2.5 billion in the games industry, think about all the games you could fund, imagine Sony having $2.5 billion just toat hand that they could use to fund new first/third party projects. And all that for Minecraft? Well, I'll sure as hell be following what MS is going to do with this, they gotta have some plan to recuperate this money.

Rest in peace.

Incomprehensible. Is it even slightly possible they need a tax writeoff against all those non-U.S. profits they can't repatriate? Mojang were a Spanish SW co. originally. Otherwise it looks like about 1.75B down the drain. Not a fan myself obviously. :p