I think it does.  People get tired of working on the same project for years, especially when it was never supposed to be that way.  Minecraft took over their studio and their lives.  It's obvious that they want to work on other ideas and concepts but didn't have the time.

I know the feeling.  I've owned two businesses.  I worked hard to build them up and was excited by that.  However, when I sold them off, years down the line, it was a relief, as running a business takes over your life.  Nothing like getting a phone call at 4am because someone has smashed your windows and broken into your store or at 6am on a monday because the employee who is supposed to open is "sick".  I can't even imagine what it's like with a company that's suddenly worth billions of dollars.  They're developers who probably spent a lot more time running their business than actually developing.

I'm betting they wanted their freedom back and most likely already have concrete ideas about what they want to do.  It will be really interesting to see if Microsoft bought Mojang's other projects or if they'll basically just be a Minecraft management team.

I dont think they will ever spend 2,5b in exclusives for their console anyway, they could have done it a long time ago if they wanted to.

my guess would be a free version with ads, or simply migrating the accounts system to xbox live.

theres no way, at all, theyre going to just leave it as is and upgrade it across all platforms equally.
theyre just not going to admit that right now in favor of not suiciding the pr

Pretty much what I figured and I don't blame him in the slightest.

yea, it seems this deal will see a pretty bad return of investment for MS

I don't doubt they can make another $1billion by continued sales of all versions of Minecraft + merchandise over the years, but $2.5billion now ofcourse is much more money in some years (inflation), especially if they had invested in something with pretty much guaranteed worth growth otherwise

so, MS is probably counting on a Minecraft 2 with similar success, although it might only come to MS platforms .. and I doubt that will happen

there will be a big fraction of people that simply don't need anything more than Minecraft 1; many will refuse to migrate to a different platform; a good chunk will migrate to the Minecraft clones with different/more features that pop up and will continue to be released; and lastly quite a few will not buy a Minecraft-like game again, because they got bored by that kind of game

In my opinion the situation will be similar to Nintendogs which lost ~85% of it's userbase on the 3DS, but I guess it won't be like Wii Fit, which lost ~98%

the game changed. sony is leading now they will have to do something.

its starting already

xbox bundle with 2 free games

tomb raider

minecraft

MS will probably spend billions on exclusives for X1 throughout the generation. They said they were going to spend a billion on X1 exclusives during launch.

Good news it stays on other platforms, if it didn't though they would have got some serious bad press etc so I never thought they would do that but all the same well done MS. The talent taking the money and leaving! Really should have asked for a discount! A waste of $2.5billion imo.

Financially, I don't see the value behind this acquisition. $2.5b when most of the revenue from Minecraft has been made. If MSFT eventually retools the series which they will, it most likely will not hit all platforms which is even less money. This is definitely for the mobile environment but I would love to see the logic behind the insane price tag.

and that was when thought they had this generation on their pocket