All because of one game it's a ridiculous amount of money. Guess it means playstation owners who like Minecraft won't be happy.
I seriously wonder what this will mean for the modding community. In the past many developers of mods such as bukkit, Forge or MCP have put in thousands and thousands of hours of free labor towards the game because Mojang never could be bothered to do such boring stuff as create a working API. Given how they were treated in the last weeks by Mojang I would be surprised if they will continue to basically work for free for a billion dollar corporation like Microsoft. Remember though, Minecraft is very popular with kids, and as such the trademark is extremely valuable, the market for merchandise is immense.
My bet is on Minecraft being used to gain market share for Windows Phone & Surface, it's among the best seller on both Android and iOS. IIRC Mojang said it wasn't going to make a Windows phone version because it only had a small share of the market, what better way to give people a compelling reason to buy into Windows phone/tablets than being able to play Minecraft on the move.
Very interesting look on the acquisition: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/micr...y-minecraft-maker-NKitEiLDROqn~HOzjEWTag.html Explanation from Notch himself: http://pastebin.com/n1qTeikM (pastebin because his blog seems to be under heavy load right now) The good thing is, they can't afford to change anything for the worse. A large portion of the Minecraft playerbase consists out of young children, exactly the group Microsoft wants to buy Xboxes and a lot of their games, and the group they want to get into the "Microsoft ecosystem" for the years to come. If they manage to upset this part of their audience and ruin their image, they'll be in a lot of trouble.
Minecraft Merchandise is already about and selling out everywhere. You can get minecraft books in your local Tesco now. It's just so popular. Sony fans won't be happy (though in my experience they never are anyway) and from what we know about microsoft's franchises, it will be a watered down shadow of it's former self with no modding support; or even worse, you'll have to use a premium subscription to be able to customise it.
Spot on. Go into HMV in the high street and you'll see Creepers, Minecraft books (essentially paper based wikipedia!) and all the usual stuff on the shelves.
