Lord of Minecraft

Yes, I think the big rush with getting better graphics cards and getting more and more memory was basically what drove it before - the bigger and bigger gaming rigs. And that kind of got out of control - once you got consoles, it was much easier to make that kind of game for everyone. Everyone knew they had the hardware for the game.

Yeah. I think that era is gone. [Laughs].

I think there are a bunch of fairly successful smaller studio games. I don't know the numbers, but I think Castle Crushers is doing really good and Super Meatboy seems to get a lot of press. Definitely there's room for small development teams to actually do something good. I haven't seen much advertising for Castle Crushers at all, but it seems always in the top spot on Xbox Live Arcade.

It's hard to see it working on consoles, partly because of the size of the map - it's a really huge map, and there's so much memory requirement. Also for multiplayer, who would host the server? It's very CPU-intensive. It seems like... it probably could work, I don't know how much memory the 360 has, 256MB or something?

Okay, yeah. You should be able to do something like this then, yeah.

I hope so. That means more games get made, more types of games get made. I don't know if they think Minecraft is a fluke or if they think it's something interesting.. Because I'm so very open with my numbers, I know there are other indie games which are making fair amounts of money, but they're kind of secretive about how much they're making. So perhaps [publishers] don't know that there's that much money in it.

Personally I like sharing that information, because I'm generally an open guy. But it feels a bit sometimes like it's a bragging page or something. That wasn't the intention, because originally it was for the people who had brought the game could see like a number increase on a webpage or something. I'm not going to remove it now because it's so mega-big... I think it's a good sign, if you're actually open with your development and you're also open about the sales, it feels like you're genuine in some sense.

I've checked around a bit, but it's a bit hard to find the right numbers. I think when we were doing really well we would have been in the top 10 list; right now it's probably somewhere lower down. But still, it's doing very, very well for us.

It's very hard to tell. Traditionally it's been very much tied up to how much I update and blog, the more I talk actively about what I'm doing on the game. But may be earlier on people were buying it much more based on the promise of what it might be perhaps. Now I'm really focused on setting up the company over the last month, now I'm fixing bugs for multiplayer... So it's going to be really fun to see what happens when we go into beta and start polishing and focusing on new content. That's when we can really start to make some predictions, I think.

Yes, we do have more games coming out after Minecraft. We're going to try and stay as a small studio, so I don't think we can realistically expect the next game to do what Minecraft did, because I think that's part skill and luck. But I think we should definitely be able to pull off some games that do some of what it did. We're in a really fortunate position, the community is really great - and really involved, so if I talk about making a game on a website, they know about it even though I don't advertise it. It's really nice. [laughs]

I'm not sure. We haven't really decided on the payment model there. I think one kind of small problem with Minecraft is it's kind of cheap, and people who want to pay more can't pay more. I'm a bit opposed to pointless DLC, but I think trying to think about the model a bit more makes some sense. Especially now that we're running a proper company... I'm not sure what to think about it really. I know I enjoyed some DLC before, when it feels like it's an expansion to the game which wasn't just there.. Like when I was playing Mega Man 9, and I have bought content that I have already downloaded, that felt a bit weird. But the Fallout 3 expansions, I enjoyed those. If you do it right, you can do it in a good way, I think.

Yeah, if I had more business sense I probably would have raised the price a while ago. [Laughs]. But I try to , if I promise something, stick to that... And Minecraft is making silly amounts of money so it doesn't need to do that. If we weren't self-funded, the board would probably insist on it.