Gota's thoughts on commercial game development

[smoth]

It was, he liked infiniminer and wanted to make something like it and a few other games which I cannot remember. He has always been honest about that.

[MidKnight]

Theres already a minecraft project thats opensource:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcuHy63T5gY

look at the dislike amount: 1335 ahhahaha, and only 153 likes XD

guys so jelly

LOL and this whole time I thought minecraft was notch's idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k

This is a very early test of an Infiniminer clone I'm working on. It will have more resource management and materials, if I ever get around to finishing it.

[Machete234]

Make shitty looking buggy unbalanced game, test just a bit, release make everyone crash out than hope they like it?

those are the steps to fail not the steps to win mate

Go look at some real games, definitely this formula can be (commercially) succesful!

Modern Warfare 2, BFBC2 , black ops

[dizekat]

I think that if minecraft was free open source it would not have gotten even hundredth of the userbase it has. If my game was free and open source, ditto. The spring's userbase was initiated by TA, a commercial project. Just see BA vs all others.
Not only open source games do not pay off, they do not even get played.
They give no incentive for users to get other users to play, and they have no money for marketing.
Commercial games give users incentive to make friends buy it too (the money keep development going), and they generate money, meaning they can get a lot of exposure (e.g. via Steam). Furthermore, commercial game is the author's full time job.

[TradeMark]

yeah, people will buy anything if it has a price, even if its total crap like minecrap or...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaHUpWuqNHY

It was, he liked infiniminer and wanted to make something like it and a few other games which I cannot remember. He has always been honest about that.

I bet we see some court case after few years from the makers of infiniminer, they'll gonna get share from the money. thats what they all do, wait few or 10 years until theyve got too much money and then take half of it.

[dizekat]

well somehow people don't buy 1 million copies of every random crap out there that has a price...

[TradeMark]

well, then its not c00l enough liike facebook or myspace or iphone... or minecrap. you see the pattern

[scifi]

Gona quote this article i find interesting

Why The Hell Minecraft Is So Popular Even When It Does Everything ÔÇ£WrongÔÇØ

If a game developer I was to approach a venture capitalist and say that hereÔÇÖs the situation:

* The game is in alpha state (meaning itÔÇÖs still in very early development)
* The game has blocky graphics
* The game has no tutorial, but you can check some youtube videos players make
* The point of the game is to blace blocks while running from skeletons (or something)
* The developer itself has no company (no time to mess with the legals side of things yet)
* The game development is done like this: ÔÇ£ThereÔÇÖs no design doc, but there are two lists; one for bugs, and one for features I want to add but think I might forget.ÔÇØ

 I think the venture capitalist wouldnt say that sounds like a recipe for a game thats sure to make 3,5M+ euros! Im sold!

Back to earth
I donÔÇÖt really know why Minecraft is so popular but hereÔÇÖs couple of things that caught my eye:

1. First of all, itÔÇÖs based on already fun game, Infiniminer. Minecraft dev said that this game idea looked fun, and saw that it could have tons of potential.
2. Secondly, the game idea itself is about building/creation/exploration. People like these things. Think of Sims, or think of Farmville. Or think of older games: Civilization 1 for example. Or even older, games like Populous. Man is good at destroying things, but thereÔÇÖs something strangely satisfying in building something. (Since you get the bragging rights).
3. Thirdly: I donÔÇÖt know exactly how, but Minecraft got good publicity from Steam (and was selling pretty neatly before that too) and then ÔÇ£Paypal froze 600 000 eurosÔÇØ story, then Twitter and everywhere. Of course this probably wouldnÔÇÖt happen unless the game was phenomenonal, but I think also marketingwise things worked out pretty slick.

I look at Minecraft development and think that its just amazing. Everything around it. It does things differently. Every advice Ive got about doing things by the book really are ready to be thrown out of the window.

Really makes you stop and think for a moment.

so imo i think minecraft will fade off, its a game of the moment people will play it yes, but its not a lasting game thats my final opinion.

the dev has gained a lot of money good, objective over, but the game itself isnt going to survive that many players, asking for stuff and features.

[TradeMark]

Thats all i knew already... seems like nobody really knows why its as popular as it is... i just think its one of these trendy things like iphone etc.. you just have to have one copy.

Or is minecraft really the first game where you can build stuff, that isnt opensource? i doubt that.

[scifi]

Thats all i knew already... seems like nobody really knows why its as popular as it is... i just think its one of these trendy things like iphone etc.. you just have to have one copy.

Or is minecraft really the first game where you can build stuff, that isnt opensource? i doubt that.

i agree with the first part of your post.

no minecraft isnt the first comercial game that you can build stuff, there were a lot of old games that did this well and in a excelent way.

even this game has a free sandbox mode

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1ug6fExJAY

[KaiserJ]

would be a poor idea to release minecraft source for the devs atm, its a beta, not a finished game, and also is a pay product... as soon as he released the source it would be easy enough to create a hacked client to play online

i read that notch planned to release the source at the end of the development cycle for modders etc; makes sense to me

not that releasing the source tomorrow would suck, we'd probably end up with some really cool games coming from it, but from a commercial perspective its really a horrid idea, esp if minecraft is still generating a ton of revenue

you're complaining that its boring, not finished etc, but at the same time its in beta phase, none of us really have any idea what it'll be like at the final outcome, maybe it wont NEED any modding

[Cheesecan]

It's super easy to decompile the class files to get the source code(java sucks in this sense).

[TradeMark]

rofl. seriously? haha... another reason to never use java.

[scifi]

would be a poor idea to release minecraft source for the devs atm, its a beta, not a finished game, and also is a pay product... as soon as he released the source it would be easy enough to create a hacked client to play online

i read that notch planned to release the source at the end of the development cycle for modders etc; makes sense to me

not that releasing the source tomorrow would suck, we'd probably end up with some really cool games coming from it, but from a commercial perspective its really a horrid idea, esp if minecraft is still generating a ton of revenue

you're complaining that its boring, not finished etc, but at the same time its in beta phase, none of us really have any idea what it'll be like at the final outcome, maybe it wont NEED any modding

what i said is at the current stage its unexplainable that the game got so many sales.

since there are a lot more games out there from indie origin that are good and have more features

im not trying to remove the merit to the game, but just try explain its sucess so that we can at least have some good ideas when making our mods.

because taking from the example of minecraft we could comercialize spring in the first year of development.

EE expand and exterminate could be comercialized gundam RTS e.t.c..

these mods and games had so mutch complexity and so mutch more potencial compared to minecraft at its current stage that i wonder whats going on

its just unfair that that game got so mutch atention, it is, its true, so mutch unknown work out there that deserves a lot more money and atention

steam games like star ruler, or even impulse/stardock indies, great projects 0 AD a couple years ago the grafics for that game were a blast, they tryed releasing it, founded a company e.t.c.... no atention was given, and the game was in the same stage of development as it is rigth now.

Unreal tournament 3 mods, half life fps and RTS/FPS mix

new completely made indies based on sage engine and unreal engine.

Unity browser based FPS with great grafics/gameplay all free, and no atention.

its just unfair and weird to say the least, just discourages me tbh.

its like all indies that try to have comercial quality grafics and good gameplay all fail in the end, indie games only get atention from theyr nostalgia and easy play factor.

Minecraft deserves a good playerbase and that people pay for it, i agree but so many other indies out there that deserve so mutch more, that its unthinkable.

[Cheesecan]

rofl. seriously? haha... another reason to never use java.

Well that's exaggerating things a bit. Java is a great language for very many things.
Other languages can also be decompiled(especially those that use byte code/intermediate language like java does e.g. python, smalltalk, ruby, .NET etc). Java is very fast, probably the fastest language that runs on a virtual machine. It's easy to debug which makes it ideal for concurrent and distributed systems and much more..imho java is the best language to start with if you want to learn programming.

[Gota]

scifi..what are you talking about...
All you need ot use minecraft is to register download a single file and press it!
and thats it you start playing.
Spring games...you sometime need to spend hours just to play a single game and than a year to learn it.

[TradeMark]

imho java is the best language to start with if you want to learn programming.

oh? i heard java is the worst language to start with

[Jazcash]

Yeah, diving straight into Java with no previous knowledge of even just programming logic in general is a bad idea imo.

[KaiserJ]

java is pretty easy; easier still in webpages