mojang

Tickets for MineCon 2015 are going on sale today. Tickets will be sold in two waves; the first 5,000 tickets will go on sale today (March 27) at 6pm …
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The $2.5 billion deal that saw Minecraft change hands from creator Markus “Notch” Persson to Microsoft all started with a tweet, reports Forbes.

“Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life?” Persson tweeted in June of last year. “Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.”

Mojang CEO Carl Manneh read the tweet, and, by his estimation, the phone rang just 30 seconds later. A most interested party was on the line: Microsoft. The console holder and software giant wanted to know if Persson was serious. So did Manneh.

As it turned out, the Minecraft mastermind had written the tweet half-jokingly, but things quickly turned serious when Persson realized this was his chance to divorce himself from Minecraft. He had once sworn he would never sell out, but after years of dealing with caustic communications — sometimes in regards to content changes Persson wasn’t even aware of, let alone responsible for — Persson had a change of heart.

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Minecrafters, get ready to build your best Big Ben, because you’re headed to London. Mojang announced earlier this week that its Minecraft convention, MINECON will be held July 4-5 …
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Microsoft shelled out $2.5 billion to acquire Minecraft studio Mojang, and now we’re starting to see why. In its published earnings report, Microsoft announced a revenue of $171 million for its …
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Hi-diddly-ho, Minecraftorino.
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Telltale Games and Mojang has announced Minecraft: Story Mode, coming to Xbox 360 and Xbox One next year. It will be an choice-driven episodic game, just like Telltale’s current …
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Warner Bros is working towards a potential Minecraft film, but the studio has yet to find the right story. Shawn Levy, director of Night at the Museum, proposed a Goonies-style adventure film which was ultimately shot down by developer Mojang. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Levy explained how it all happened.

“What happened simply is Warner’s asked me to develop, ‘How might this ever be a story for a movie?’ Because it’s not a narrative game. And we came up with an approach that felt good to us, and I discussed it with Mojang. And they’re like, ‘That doesn’t sound like what we want. If we’re going to see a movie get made, we don’t know what we want, but that doesn’t feel right.’ And I said, ‘OK, well that’s a movie I can envision.'”

So just what was his idea? He goes on to explain, “It was not a comedy. It had a bit of a Goonies flair… [I]t was an adventure movie, and I thought it could have been a lot of fun and fulfilled a lot of the qualities that people love about the game.”

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It’s official: Mojang is now a part of Microsoft. The news was tweeted by Xbox head Phil Spencer, who welcomed the developer as the newest member of Microsoft Studios. …
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When Microsoft announced in September that it would acquire Minecraft developer Mojang for the price of $2.5 billion, no one outside the company seemed to be able to agree on what it should do with its new asset. Many gamers, journalists and analysts did agree on one thing, however: a sequel probably isn’t a good idea. Microsoft apparently isn’t ready to prove them wrong.

Speaking in an IGN podcast, Xbox head Phil Spencer insisted that his company knows it must first satisfy the needs of the current Minecraft community before expanding the franchise. That means that a sequel to the almost inconceivably popular world-building game may not be in the plans.

“I don’t know if Minecraft 2, if that’s the thing that makes the most sense,” said Spencer. “The community around Minecraft is as strong as any community out there. We need to meet the needs and the desires of what the community has before we get permission to go off and do something else. It doesn’t mean that everything we’re going to do is going to map to 100 percent of their acceptance, because I don’t know if there is any topic where 100 percent of people agree. But we look at Job 1 is to go out and meet the needs of the Minecraft community first, and then we can think about ways that we can actually help grow it. That’s our sole focus.”

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Minecraft: Xbox One Edition was developed by Mojang and 4J Studios and published by Microsoft Studios. It was released on Friday, September 5 2014 for $20 and is also available to owners of the Xbox 360 Edition for $4.99. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Well, someone had to do it. And that someone is me. Drawing the review for Minecraft: Xbox One Edition may have been the most challenging assignment of my XBLA Fans writing career, simply because there isn’t much left to write which hasn’t been written a million times before. When he reviewed the Xbox 360 version of this seminal mining/crafting/adventure game over two years ago, our reviewer opened with the throwaway line that even the most casual of weekend gamers must already have heard of Minecraft – and he was absolutely right.

So where does that leave us? Well, my review of the recently released Xbox One version will reinforce Minecraft‘s core elements for those already familiar with giving newcomers an introduction to those same elements. At the same time, I’m going to lay out some of the changes, no matter how subtle they may be, that differentiate this version from that of the last generation of consoles. Let’s dig in.

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