Those who’ve been puzzling over why Microsoft spent $2.5 billion on Minecraft developer Mojang many need to puzzle no more.
Jeff Teper – the “father of SharePoint” and Corporate Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Mincrosft – explained the thinking behind Microsoft’s Micecraft acquisition quite succinctly during a recent tech conference.
“Minecraft is a development tool, “Teper told attendees of the UBS Global Technology Conference in Sausalito, Calif., “People build worlds out of it. If we can get eight-year-old girls and boys building worlds and getting inspired by creating content digitally, as they grow up they’ll want to create in PowerPoint or Visual Studio. And in addition to being one of the few gaming franchises that doesn’t have to be fermium, Minecraft can actually charge money. It turns out it’s a great business with lots of upside”
Mojang has partnered with Merlin Entertainments to build the world's first Minecraft theme park in the UK.
Ben Porter from Newzoo explains that the player base has very little overlap with mainstream hits such as Assassin's Creed: Shadows and Ghost of Yōtei
I used to buy cheap games thinking I’d play them later, but I always ended up returning to my favorites. Now I skip the deals unless I know I’ll play the game soon.
This is very true, my nephews grew up on these two games and whenever I introduce them a AAA game whether old or new, it's like seeing an alien try to make sense of it and then quickly lose interest in it.
Can’t really expect a 8 year old Roblox kid to go buy resident evil 9 lol
Gaming trends are so weird to me now. Like, I’m old school and games were consumed essentially how movies were. You play through a title and look forward to the sequel or other things that came out. Now, that is so not the norm.
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"If we can get eight-year-old girls and boys building worlds and getting inspired by creating content digitally, as they grow up they’ll want to create in PowerPoint or Visual Studio."
So they bought it as a means to get kids hooked on their products young so they'll be more likely to use their products when they get older.
Sure sounds like they're all about gamers /s
I just hope that Star Wars mine craft stuff doesn't stay xbox exclusive just bought the game for ps4 (not started it yet but will get there) but saw the star wars stuff earlier loved it looks brilliant would definitely start it up if I could use that.
this will probably get integrated into project spark
I think as big as 1 is, part 2 will be huge. I'm ashamed everytime I looked at it years ago I would say surely the gfx will improve and then I will jump in.
Recently heard it was so educational so I downloaded it for my kids and was drawn to it as much as them, was great, but hard since we didn't know the ui or controls yet.
At 6 and 8 a balance of real Legos and Mc should be good for them...
Wow... people will believe anything these days.
Just how hard would it be to make a dev tool game simple for kids to use? This was ALL about getting exclusive rights to a high selling multiplatform game.