“Mojang” of course being an ancient Scandinavian word meaning “drowning under a sea of money.”
Sorry Minecraft fans, the unstoppable hand of Microsoft’s capital seems like it’s slowly closing around the neck of your game. News agency Reuters is now reporting that a $2.5 billion USD purchase (hey, it went up by $0.5 billion) of Mojang will be announced by Microsoft on Monday.
The angle taken by the Reuters piece is that Microsoft’s hope is that Minecraft will solidify it in the mobile market, although it takes some fairly wide leaps of logic to get there. Minecraft sells really well on phones and is made by Mojang. Therefore, buy Mojang and get them to make another amazing, must-have game that will only be on Windows phones and drive sales of the device. Perfect!
Except for that to work, Mojang has to make another game with the same once-in-a-lifetime cultural effect as Minecraft. No pressure lads.
Or you can just pump out Minecraft 2.0, fill it with microtransactions and other casino-styled get rich quick schemes, then quietly do away with any support for the original Minecraft. That’d probably be a bit of a “worst possible case scenario,” though.
According to Reuters, Microsoft is still declining to comment on the Mojang purchase, but the agency have a “source briefed on the matter” who presumably informed them of the date and value of the deal.
It’ll be interesting to see how this all turns out.
