Minecraft? Not at all. Please stop rewriting history. Minecraft definitely had a small dev team but it wasn’t a single persons effort and wasn’t close to being one. You don’t create a world changing video game by yourself.
Minecraft swung past the $10 million in sales mark, and was well on it's way to the $100 million mark, when he hired his first employee. It's not impossible that it would have hit a valuation of $1 billion without hiring on additional employees.
I have the same memories. Obviously we can never know for certain but if notch had decided not to hire anyone and continued to work on the game himself, I’m very confident it would have eventually made a billion. The core game hasn’t changed since 2010, and it was already absolutely captivating in those early days.
No. Jeb was the main developer from 2011 onwards, the moment Minecraft left alpha. Unless there's a time hole I'm not aware of that swallowed 2011, 2012, 2013 and most of 2014, Notch is pretty much only responsible for the very base of the game.
In addition, code is not the only thing that makes a game. Artists, music, management, and many more.
If you're going to forget that his girlfriend worked two jobs for 5 years to even support him being able to do that, yeah, he was "alone". Just like trust fund startup bros make it "alone" (with the 500k their parents gave them).
Yes this still counts as "alone". Stop diminishing hard work and talent. A lot of parents give their kids 6 figure amounts, almost all of them don't do anything with it.
I am curious which of the following (if any) you would define as alone:
1) one person but they take VC funding
2) one person but they use open source solutions
3) one person but they live with their parents
4) one person that lives completely off of what they earned themselves previously, but they did get government funded student loans that let them make money in the first place.
None of these. Even the guy who runs the Primitive Technology youtube channel, building up technology solo from literal sticks and rocks he gathers himself, would not be alone, because he did not too personally manufacture the digital camera he uses to record himself creating these things.
Also, was he not born? Can anyone be said to do anything alone, who did not themselves arise spontaneously from the primordial soup?
You're making some meta-point about "aloneness" where it's disqualified if they have some pre-existing threshold of wealth or connections. I disagree that's disqualifying, especially because you can play that game all the way to the bottom.
Q: was only a single person instrumental to the creation of (product/service)?
A: if yes, then yes; if not, then no. "Yes, but... [help from family / existing wealth / ...]". Irrelevant to me.
Most as in < 50%, sure. However a lot of parents do.
> Nearly 60% of households in the U.S. have a net worth of $100,000 or more after accounting for debts, with 29.2% having a net worth of $500,000 or more.
If you live your life thinking you could be great if you only had some 6 figure payout, you're delusional. Building something is hard.
This still counts as alone in the same way we don't consider Steve Jobs parents renting out their garage or Bill Gates mom bringing him into IBM boardroom executive meetings at the age of 12
It's certainly made a ton of money, and has generated multiples worth of that in fan content, but that's partly because Fox has been so liberal with policing trademarks/copyright.
No, Notch wasn't alone, even at the very beginning of Mojang: he founded the studio with Jakob Porsér and soon after Carl Manneh. It had 25 employees in 2012, and close to a hundred in 2014 by the time it got acquired.
No venture is ever done alone. Not just because founders are, as the article say, unable to even handle their own emails, but because every single founder in the world lacks talent. We all do. You're not good enough, and you never will be, especially not to hit a billion. That's a fact. Every single human creating has been a collaborative one, and Sam Altman's delusions don't change that.
How much of Minecraft as people think of it in its early days had already been done by the time Mojang was formed? It's sort of a Game of Theseus type question, at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".
> at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".
When Minecraft gets acquired for 2.5 billion by Microsoft. Anything before that isn't a billion dollar endeavour. It could have failed miserably. It could have gone nowhere. 0.0.1a was straight up crap, and barely more interesting than Infiniminer. It also hadn't sold for a billion dollars worth of copies either, so...
A business is worth a billion dollars when it either has made it through sales, or someone pays you for that amount. VC funds don't even count, as the vast majority of billion dollar VC funded companies are money hemorraging holes.
Minecraft was already wildly successful before a second employee was brought on board. As someone who was a teenager at the time, I can tell you that from 2009-2010 my friends and I talked about little else. None of the later updates fundamentally improved on that magic, they just added more content.
Here's a hacker news comment from Sept 2010 which talks about Minecraft's success in the past tense, and according to wikipedia that's the same month that Mojang's second employee was hired. It had already gone viral.
