Minecraft Goes Gold, Skyrim Devs Give Notch a Nod

Post by Steve Farrelly @ 11:55am 15/11/11 | 31 Comments

You may have seen the screenshot floating around, or even found the item yourself in the game, but despite all the hubbub surrounding the lawsuit going on between Mojang and Bethesda over use of the word "Scrolls" in Notch's upcoming game, the Bethesda Game Studios cats have seemingly given the crafty Minecraft creator a nod, naming a pickaxe in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim after him.

In related news, Notch himself has tweeted that Minecraft has indeed finally gone gold, so now he can make another gazillion dollars on his amazing out-of-left-field game that apparently saps the life out of players, leaving them gasping for so much square, pixelated player-generated air. Or not. But apparently it's really quite addictive.

Click here for a better look at the Notched Pickaxe.

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Latest Comments

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Eorl
Posted 12:44pm 15/11/11

The game itself is great, though lacking quite a lot of potential, though I guess the mod scene will help that, which is a shame. Notch, on the other hand, is lazy, greedy indie dev, who lost sight of making a great game when he got rich.

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carson
Posted 12:57pm 15/11/11

Notch, on the other hand, is lazy, greedy indie dev, who lost sight of making a great game when he got rich.

I agree.

I think the mod scene has picked up and made Minecraft better, but even the mod scene for MC is full of douche bags.

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fpot
Posted 01:00pm 15/11/11

I gotta say if I fluked it and made something like Minecraft I'd be taking the money and distancing myself from the weirdo internet community that plays it as well.

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Howler
Posted 01:13pm 15/11/11

Wow. If Notch is lazy and greedy then his company is half-way to being a real game developer. Case in point Bethsda's Skyrim version for the PC.

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Dazhel
Posted 01:16pm 15/11/11

Except he didn't just take the money, he started a company and recruited a bunch of other people that have provided regular free updates to Minecraft since it went viral.

That hasn't shaken all the narcissistic minecraft players from the belief that because they paid Mojang $15 a year ago they own everything Notch makes for eternity though.

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paveway
Posted 01:18pm 15/11/11

I gotta say if I fluked it and made something like Minecraft I'd be taking the money and distancing myself from the weirdo internet community that plays it as well.

+1

coke and hookers for realz

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Hogfather
Posted 01:20pm 15/11/11

Are they free updates though, really? Didn't all the people who bought in buy an alpha, so they pre-paid for all that? How many million has he made and how much had been invested in the product the people bought?

Confused. I suspect his profits on Minecraft are f*****g staggering, personally.

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copuis
Posted 01:21pm 15/11/11

I think what he is saying, is that while people paid their money, he really didn't have to do anymore from that point

he however did/has, and knew his own coding and management limits, he got in people to work on the game and the company and it is going well, (and tbh, far faster than if it was still notch coding by him self)

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trog
Posted 01:24pm 15/11/11

The game itself is great, though lacking quite a lot of potential, though I guess the mod scene will help that, which is a shame. Notch, on the other hand, is lazy, greedy indie dev, who lost sight of making a great game when he got rich.

Umm, hadn't he already made a great game? Why else would people have given him their $10 or whatever trivial amount he was asking for it?!?!

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Hogfather
Posted 01:27pm 15/11/11

Umm, hadn't he already made a great game? Why else would people have given him their $10 or whatever trivial amount he was asking for it?!?!

15 euros, that's full price for an indie game IMO. That's the sort of money you pay for Torchlight which is from an actual game studio.

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Khel
Posted 01:32pm 15/11/11

He made a lot of that money while it was in Alpha and Beta though didn't he? I got the impression people weren't so much giving him money because it was already the greatest game, they were giving him money because it had potential to be a great game. I've never played it though so I have no idea if it has delivered on that potential or not.

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copuis
Posted 01:34pm 15/11/11

khel, to sum up, it is digital lego, with monsters

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Dazhel
Posted 01:41pm 15/11/11

Hogfather: It depends on your perspective I guess & management of customers expectations.

All updates have been provided at zero cost since the initial purchase. The expectation was set early on "we're continuing to develop this, and you'll get the full version of Minecraft for free, whatever the full version is". From what I can see there's been lots of updates since when I bought it in late 2010 and so they've kept up their end of the bargain and simply declaring this version as "done". I think they've said that it's even possible that Alpha purchasers will continue to get future updates but obviously nothing is set in stone yet.

The only other commercial game that I can think set an extremely low price and provided free updates in perpetuity is TF2, and even that's morphed into some free to play Mann Co hat store supported monster these days.

I don't consider Notch to be beholden to me forever because I paid him a few bucks early on - I got my 10 Euros of value out of Minecraft playing within the first weekend, anything after that is a bonus. It's clear though that many other people don't share that perspective and I think that's unfortunate.

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Pinky
Posted 01:41pm 15/11/11

Case in point Bethsda's Skyrim version for the PC.

?

PC version not so crash hot?

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Khel
Posted 01:43pm 15/11/11

So speaking of suckers who pay for games that are still in development, hows Natural Selection 2 going?

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Howler
Posted 01:44pm 15/11/11

"I think what he is saying, is that while people paid their money, he really didn't have to do anymore from that point"
Actually I think Paypal were withholding funds over concerns about refunds if the product was never fully released. I don't know if they are still but I think Notch will pretty happy to releasing 1.0 shortly.

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Dazhel
Posted 01:50pm 15/11/11

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Howler
Posted 01:53pm 15/11/11

Case in point Bethsda's Skyrim version for the PC.

?

PC version not so crash hot?

Its a good game. I just think the port was a little lazy and just took some of the shine of it. The UI/keymapping issues driving me nuts mainly. All will be fixed, down the track, with patches or mods no doubt.

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Outlaw
Posted 01:56pm 15/11/11

People actually paid for that minecraft s***?

It amazes me what people will pay for on the internet for gaming.
Pay to Win Text Games like LOU, lul?
MineCraft. wtfeh

pickaxe looked s*** :(

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Howler
Posted 01:59pm 15/11/11

If it's the Paypal thing I remember in September 2010 it was about witholding funds because of potential suspicious activity when the account balance went ballistic I think. That one was resolved.
There might have been another Paypal dispute but I haven't heard of it.

Oh you're right, it was suspicious activity. Should have done a quick internet search rather than pass on word of mouth.

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Hogfather
Posted 02:10pm 15/11/11

Hogfather: It depends on your perspective I guess & management of customers expectations.

All updates have been provided at zero cost since the initial purchase. The expectation was set early on "we're continuing to develop this, and you'll get the full version of Minecraft for free, whatever the full version is".

I agree, and its possible that they failed on the management of expectations part.

When I bought into minecraft it was pretty clear on the site that were paying to support its development to release. The thing is that when millions of people paid their fifteen euros to support the game until release the expectations of what release would entail skyrocketed, and I'm not sure that's entirely unfair. I was stunned that he took the money to make that Scrolls bulls*** instead of Minecraft II, but hey he's the indie genius and I'm cutting web code to contract so I'm probably wrong.

Last time I played the server support was still horrible, hopefully that's all fixed now if its gold. I had fun with it, but the server instability 100% ruined it for me. I didn't whinge about it (alpha is alpha) but hearing about the Scrooge McDuck piles of money while the server was still a memory leaky pile of s*** was a bit frustrating.

The only other commercial game that I can think set an extremely low price and provided free updates in perpetuity is TF2, and even that's morphed into some free to play Mann Co hat store supported monster these days.

Diablo 2 was patched 3 weeks ago. Its a 11 year old game, I think that's the benchmark for tip-top post-release support. Granted Blizzard charged twice as much but still, that's a long free support cycle.

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carson
Posted 02:28pm 15/11/11

The biggesst problem I have with minecraft is that there are nagging issues that have yet to be addressed, yet they have been there for a few versions so far. While they keep adding new stuff rather than refining what they have made first. Things like being able to get saddles, but not control the animals you ride, minecarts in MP are s*** and laggy as hell, things like that. Also the server software is balls and a mega resource hog.

It's all stuff I would've hoped would've been fixed long ago, yet is still around. I get adding more content, but would rather they iron out s*** before adding more content in.

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Eorl
Posted 02:37pm 15/11/11

I'll say this to straighten things out. I have had an absolute ball in Minecraft. I got my money worth 10 times as much as any other game, besides Skyrim :P I hosted a multiplayer server for a while, and had a heap of fun with the mod scene. But that's where my problem is. To have a more interesting time, you need mods. There are mods out there that add heaps of s***, like trainable animals, dragons, skills, talent trees, villages, NPC's etc. It's just a shame Notch could never quite get to what he initially had planned, with a few different game modes, like zombies attacking a fortress, capture the flag, and another one I can't quite remember.

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trog
Posted 02:48pm 15/11/11

It's just a shame Notch could never quite get to what he initially had planned, with a few different game modes, like zombies attacking a fortress, capture the flag, and another one I can't quite remember.

I don't get it - if it's moddable, why does that matter?

I might be missing something but it sort of sounds like berating id Software for not including Team Fortress in Quake. The important thing was creating a game that was extensible, flexible and moddable and allowing people to take it in awesome new directions, surely?

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carson
Posted 02:49pm 15/11/11

I'll say this to straighten things out. I have had an absolute ball in Minecraft. I got my money worth 10 times as much as any other game, besides Skyrim :P I hosted a multiplayer server for a while, and had a heap of fun with the mod scene. But that's where my problem is. To have a more interesting time, you need mods. There are mods out there that add heaps of s***, like trainable animals, dragons, skills, talent trees, villages, NPC's etc. It's just a shame Notch could never quite get to what he initially had planned, with a few different game modes, like zombies attacking a fortress, capture the flag, and another one I can't quite remember.

This is how I've felt for a while. I really hope the official mod support makes installing and using mods a lot easier than it is currently, and I hope the server software is cleaned up a bit too.

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Dazhel
Posted 03:00pm 15/11/11

I don't get it - if it's moddable, why does that matter?

It's moddable, though barely because there's no official mod api.
I think the mods out there all do some form of Java class injection and rely on internal implementation details that can quite easily change and break with each release. Also, the Minecraft bytecode is obfuscated it can be a pain for modders to work out what broke and fix it every single time there's a Minecraft update.

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Hogfather
Posted 03:05pm 15/11/11

The important thing was creating a game that was extensible, flexible and moddable and allowing people to take it in awesome new directions, surely?

This wasn't done, the mods are hacks.

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carson
Posted 03:27pm 15/11/11

I don't get it - if it's moddable, why does that matter?

As Hogfather said, it's moddable, but it's done through hacks. There is no offical mod support yet.

It's a pain in the arse with mods, because if one f**** up it generally ruins the rest of them so you have to start with a fresh MC install. I was trying to run a modded server and we had all kinds of issues with the server and client software and it was hard as hell trying to figure out what was causing it. As we can't generally just disable a mod.

So hopefully when the offical support comes it fixes a lot of these issues.

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copuis
Posted 04:00pm 15/11/11

eh, the mods/hacks etc, all change the game to a way that the users wants,

there are not many other games that let you change the game play so much with a few basic mods

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Morax
Posted 04:45pm 15/11/11

Most importantly, does this mean we will get an Ausgamers server back soon?? :D

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Reality
Posted 06:16pm 15/11/11

So speaking of suckers who pay for games that are still in development, hows Natural Selection 2 going?

ahahaha :(

I bought it and was very unsatisfied. I don't think the game has what it takes to be a real successor to NS1 - it feels like you're walking through a swamp. I asked for a refund... I got the refund, but I still have the game on steam. double win for me :D

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