I'm guessing he hasn't. He just wants to get away from it, I feel bad for him. It's because of how much hate he has gotten. All he wanted was to make games and have fun.. right?
He just wants to get away from it, I feel bad for him. It's because of how much hate he has gotten. All he wanted was to make games and have fun.. right?
Response in spoiler:
Yeah, and he has, Billions of tax-sheltered dollars worth of fun. If he can't manage to have fun with all that money then he has no imagination at all. I'm pretty sure most people would gladly have everyone on the planet hate them in return for that much money.
And I doubt he needs you to feel sorry for him; there are billions of people actually working hard everyday at jobs they hate trying to support families yet barely surviving that you can feel sorry for instead.
- I doubt he's actually played Minecraft as a game for years now, even when he was developing it.
.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
See inside spoiler for my response to that silliness:
Perhaps not, but what you can do with it certainly can. Proven time and time again. Again, imagination. And if you still have problems with finding happiness (despite having billions) at least you can afford the best therapists to help you find it while laying on a nice warm comfy couch instead of only being able to grumble to other homeless people while sitting in the cold wet gutter. And if you have no imagination, you can just hire someone who does to be your personal concierge in charge of entertaining you. Endless solutions are available to those who can afford it so don't kid yourself.
Also; 99.99% of those surveyed without any money were not happy and wished they had some. They were tired of starving and watching loved ones die because they couldn't afford hospital bills or expensive operations that even universal healthcare will rarely provide on time if at all. Money can give you more time with loved ones, it can stop pain, etc etc. I wish people would let that old meaningless cliche "Money cannot buy you happiness" wither away.. That saying has been taken out of context more often than it has ever been actually understood.
* And please please don't anyone twist anything I've said in this thread to mean that I think Notch/Markus shouldn't have the money he has or shouldn't be happy. Quite the opposite! If people chose of their own free will to give him the money he has then by that standard he deserves to have it. I say kudos to him! And I hope that he does find all the happiness he's looking for, same as I wish it for everyone.
All I was saying was that he has made games and had fun, just like you say he wanted, and on top of that made billions of dollars while doing it! Not too shabby. I just have a hard time understanding where in all of that he needs for you to feel bad for him? Do you want him to get the Nobel Peace Prize too? I mean geez.. He did pretty damn well for copying a simple open source game and adding a few more features to it. I think the world has given him more than enough in return, but if he's also able to somehow get you to squeeze out a tear for him on top of all else, then good for him I guess...
** You know what would be a really classy thing for Markus to do? Out of the billions of dollars he has made off of the Infiniminer idea (open source), it would be really cool if he handed the creator of Infiniminer a million dollars or something. Not only could he easily afford it, but I'm sure it would make a huge difference in that persons life. After all, if someone added a few features to something that you created and gave away for free, then made billions off of it and got all credit for it.. You might just drink yourself to death.. Just saying, it would be a really classy thing for Markus to do.
- Notch tweeted and possibly even posted a very long time ago that he was burned out on actually playing Minecraft after all the time he spent coding on it. But who knows? He might still dink around in it now and again.
.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
He does have a lot of money but I do not agree with you that money can make people he happy. He never intended Minecraft to become so popular. He was just making Minecraft because he enjoys programming mainly as a hobby and he likes games. Most of the games he make are for competitions. He does not want to be famous. He said on notch.net "If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately." Just read notch.net/ it explains it a lot better than I do.
Response in spoiler:
So? What's your point? I have read that, like everyone else has. Nobody is making him keep the money, and apparently it is making him happy, so happy that he is hiding it in tax shelters so that Sweden can't take their half and supply healthcare etc for many people with it despite that being his culture.
Nobody is stopping him from programming as a hobby and enjoying games. What kind of sense does that even make? Now he has even more time to do all those things you say he wants to do. In fact as soon as he started making lots of money in alpha/beta he started spending more time on vacation than on coding for Minecraft (which was his job not hobby at that point). So More Money meant More happiness for him, demonstrably, and coding became an annoyance for him.
On top of all that how did he not want to become famous? He tweets every thought including gushing about famous rich people flying him around the world and taking him to parties.. It sounds like he wants to have his cake and eat it too.. His actions (recorded no less) speak much more convincingly than anything he says now.
* I still don't understand why you would feel the need to cry for him or feel bad for him? I'm never saying to dislike or be mean to him, but feel bad for him? Really? How sycophantic do people need to be to do that? Is it some kind of Stockholm syndrome? Perhaps it's just the last dying gasp of the NDF.
- Actually, he might still play on public servers from time to time, but he wouldn't do any serious playing with an account name that was known to everyone as he'd never be able to do anything with everyone trying to chat him all the time. So you might have seen him on a server and never known it was him.
.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
* And please please don't anyone twist anything I've said in this thread to mean that I think Notch/Markus shouldn't have the money he has or shouldn't be happy. Quite the opposite! If people chose of their own free will to give him the money he has then by that standard he deserves to have it. I say kudos to him! And I hope that he does find all the happiness he's looking for, same as I wish it for everyone.
- You want to be careful. Odds are that anyone on a server with a name like "notch" is likely a hacker or an admin using a namechanging mod.
.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
A long time ago, I was a small software company. (yeah, one person, that small) I wrote and sold some stuff that at least a few people thought was really cool. I wrote the first version of the first program because I wanted to do something and needed that, and it was a lot of fun. Programming was fun. Making it do more things was fun. Adding on features that people asked for was fun. And then I realized, a couple of years down the road, that I wasn't really having any fun any more. I wasn't spending much time programming (let alone what I wrote that one program for originally). Mostly, I was putting products in packages and taking them to the post office, designing magazine advertisements, scheduling space at game cons that I would never get to actually enjoy because I was in the dealers' room selling all the time ... in short, doing all kinds of non-fun stuff, and not doing much of the fun stuff any more. I'd managed to take something really fun and turn it into incredibly boring work, with the added torment of seeing other people around me having fun with my stuff, but I was too busy marketing/selling/shipping the stuff to enjoy it myself. I was lucky: I had the option to shut down the business, and after long consideration, I did. I have fun doing that kind of thing again. But while I was doing it for a living? Not a chance. Coding was fun, meeting customers was fun, a lot of things were fun, but if I never put another product in another package and mail it off, it'll be too soon. All the work of running a small business swelled up and overwhelmed the whole reason I started doing it in the first place.
So I can really feel for Notch. He wrote a game because he thought it would be fun, and added some more stuff, and got a few people to help him, and all of a sudden he's running a company and managing a phenomenon, not writing games, and that's not what he wanted to do with his life. I would venture to guess that all the not-fun parts of running a business so totally swamped the fun parts that he hasn't had time to play Minecraft in a long time. Been there, done that (though on a much, much smaller scale!), and it sucked. There's always one more phone call to make, one more person to meet with, one more thing to read, review, schedule, or whatever.
So will Notch play Minecraft? Six months or a year down the road, when he's had some time to decompress, probably. It's an addictive game, after all. But if he does, I can guarantee one thing:
I think he'd just pop on from time to time. I doubt you'd ever see him on a public server for quite some time. Although he may stop by Mojang's private server to stop by and chat and see what's been added to Minecraft.
Yeah, and he has, Billions of tax-sheltered dollars worth of fun. If he can't manage to have fun with all that money then he has no imagination at all. I'm pretty sure most people would gladly have everyone on the planet hate them in return for that much money.
And I doubt he needs you to feel sorry for him; there are billions of people actually working hard everyday at jobs they hate trying to support families yet barely surviving that you can feel sorry for instead.
- I doubt he's actually played Minecraft as a game for years now, even when he was developing it.
.
A long time ago, I was a small software company. (yeah, one person, that small) I wrote and sold some stuff that at least a few people thought was really cool. I wrote the first version of the first program because I wanted to do something and needed that, and it was a lot of fun. Programming was fun. Making it do more things was fun. Adding on features that people asked for was fun. And then I realized, a couple of years down the road, that I wasn't really having any fun any more. I wasn't spending much time programming (let alone what I wrote that one program for originally). Mostly, I was putting products in packages and taking them to the post office, designing magazine advertisements, scheduling space at game cons that I would never get to actually enjoy because I was in the dealers' room selling all the time ... in short, doing all kinds of non-fun stuff, and not doing much of the fun stuff any more. I'd managed to take something really fun and turn it into incredibly boring work, with the added torment of seeing other people around me having fun with my stuff, but I was too busy marketing/selling/shipping the stuff to enjoy it myself. I was lucky: I had the option to shut down the business, and after long consideration, I did. I have fun doing that kind of thing again. But while I was doing it for a living? Not a chance. Coding was fun, meeting customers was fun, a lot of things were fun, but if I never put another product in another package and mail it off, it'll be too soon. All the work of running a small business swelled up and overwhelmed the whole reason I started doing it in the first place.
So I can really feel for Notch. He wrote a game because he thought it would be fun, and added some more stuff, and got a few people to help him, and all of a sudden he's running a company and managing a phenomenon, not writing games, and that's not what he wanted to do with his life. I would venture to guess that all the not-fun parts of running a business so totally swamped the fun parts that he hasn't had time to play Minecraft in a long time. Been there, done that (though on a much, much smaller scale!), and it sucked. There's always one more phone call to make, one more person to meet with, one more thing to read, review, schedule, or whatever.
So will Notch play Minecraft? Six months or a year down the road, when he's had some time to decompress, probably. It's an addictive game, after all. But if he does, I can guarantee one thing:
His username will not be Notch.
Wonderful post! Thank you for sharing your direct personal experience with this type of situation.
In theory though, notch created Mojang and hired Carl to shield him from all that and handle all the business stuff. But based on some of his tweets it was probably impossible to remain completely shielded, especially when he chose to do the MS negotiations himself.
I for one don't blame him one second for selling Mojang. If that business situation and dealing with the ever growing potential and attention for Minecraft alone was more than he had any interest in dealing with, and he had the means to hand it to someone who did and come out of it well compensated, then it was the right move for him.
It takes a very unique type of mind-set to actually want to ride something like that out all the way starting from zero infrastructure and with no business experience. It takes a lot of non-fun and stressful logistics work that a small relaxed coding crew like Mojang isn't really structured to handle. Now the Mojang crew can relax and just focus on the games again and let the various departments in the MS monster deal with all the uber-scale logistics that are still growing, like the Minecraft Movie etc.
I think he made the right move and I also think that he has been well-compensated both monetarily and recognition-wise via all the awards he received over the years. I don't think he could have really asked for more out of that experience. And now he's free to tinker around with his hobbies as he pleases for the rest of his life without any pressures that he doesn't make for himself. Good for him! I'd love it if he formed another non-descript company some day, but then again the kind of stuff he wants to do right now doesn't really require a formal company to do, though perhaps a holding company at least, which I'd bet he already has.
* Exactly; the one thing to come out of the OPs question should be to not expect to see notch on a public server using a name he is commonly known by, unless he's doing a drive-by publicity thing. Odds are that anyone on a bukkit server with a name like "notch" will be anyone but him. It would be hilarious if he was the owner of one of the Herobrine account name variations, heh heh. I know I would have grabbed that if I were him.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
He seems quite a miserable guy.
He probably doesn't though.
Response in spoiler:
And I doubt he needs you to feel sorry for him; there are billions of people actually working hard everyday at jobs they hate trying to support families yet barely surviving that you can feel sorry for instead.
- I doubt he's actually played Minecraft as a game for years now, even when he was developing it.
.
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
- Dungeon Generator for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
- QuickSAVE-QuickLOAD for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
See inside spoiler for my response to that silliness:
Also; 99.99% of those surveyed without any money were not happy and wished they had some. They were tired of starving and watching loved ones die because they couldn't afford hospital bills or expensive operations that even universal healthcare will rarely provide on time if at all. Money can give you more time with loved ones, it can stop pain, etc etc. I wish people would let that old meaningless cliche "Money cannot buy you happiness" wither away.. That saying has been taken out of context more often than it has ever been actually understood.
* And please please don't anyone twist anything I've said in this thread to mean that I think Notch/Markus shouldn't have the money he has or shouldn't be happy. Quite the opposite! If people chose of their own free will to give him the money he has then by that standard he deserves to have it. I say kudos to him! And I hope that he does find all the happiness he's looking for, same as I wish it for everyone.
All I was saying was that he has made games and had fun, just like you say he wanted, and on top of that made billions of dollars while doing it! Not too shabby. I just have a hard time understanding where in all of that he needs for you to feel bad for him? Do you want him to get the Nobel Peace Prize too? I mean geez.. He did pretty damn well for copying a simple open source game and adding a few more features to it. I think the world has given him more than enough in return, but if he's also able to somehow get you to squeeze out a tear for him on top of all else, then good for him I guess...
** You know what would be a really classy thing for Markus to do? Out of the billions of dollars he has made off of the Infiniminer idea (open source), it would be really cool if he handed the creator of Infiniminer a million dollars or something. Not only could he easily afford it, but I'm sure it would make a huge difference in that persons life. After all, if someone added a few features to something that you created and gave away for free, then made billions off of it and got all credit for it.. You might just drink yourself to death.. Just saying, it would be a really classy thing for Markus to do.
- Notch tweeted and possibly even posted a very long time ago that he was burned out on actually playing Minecraft after all the time he spent coding on it. But who knows? He might still dink around in it now and again.
.
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
- Dungeon Generator for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
- QuickSAVE-QuickLOAD for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
Response in spoiler:
Nobody is stopping him from programming as a hobby and enjoying games. What kind of sense does that even make? Now he has even more time to do all those things you say he wants to do. In fact as soon as he started making lots of money in alpha/beta he started spending more time on vacation than on coding for Minecraft (which was his job not hobby at that point). So More Money meant More happiness for him, demonstrably, and coding became an annoyance for him.
On top of all that how did he not want to become famous? He tweets every thought including gushing about famous rich people flying him around the world and taking him to parties.. It sounds like he wants to have his cake and eat it too.. His actions (recorded no less) speak much more convincingly than anything he says now.
* I still don't understand why you would feel the need to cry for him or feel bad for him? I'm never saying to dislike or be mean to him, but feel bad for him? Really? How sycophantic do people need to be to do that? Is it some kind of Stockholm syndrome? Perhaps it's just the last dying gasp of the NDF.
- Actually, he might still play on public servers from time to time, but he wouldn't do any serious playing with an account name that was known to everyone as he'd never be able to do anything with everyone trying to chat him all the time. So you might have seen him on a server and never known it was him.
.
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
- Dungeon Generator for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
- QuickSAVE-QuickLOAD for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
Who's complaining about his life? You clearly haven't read what I've written so I'll assume you are talking to someone else.
- You want to be careful. Odds are that anyone on a server with a name like "notch" is likely a hacker or an admin using a namechanging mod.
.
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
- Dungeon Generator for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
- QuickSAVE-QuickLOAD for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Curse Premium-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Retired StaffSo I can really feel for Notch. He wrote a game because he thought it would be fun, and added some more stuff, and got a few people to help him, and all of a sudden he's running a company and managing a phenomenon, not writing games, and that's not what he wanted to do with his life. I would venture to guess that all the not-fun parts of running a business so totally swamped the fun parts that he hasn't had time to play Minecraft in a long time. Been there, done that (though on a much, much smaller scale!), and it sucked. There's always one more phone call to make, one more person to meet with, one more thing to read, review, schedule, or whatever.
So will Notch play Minecraft? Six months or a year down the road, when he's had some time to decompress, probably. It's an addictive game, after all. But if he does, I can guarantee one thing:
His username will not be Notch.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Curse PremiumFigured it was time for a change.
Oh... I see sorry
Wonderful post! Thank you for sharing your direct personal experience with this type of situation.
In theory though, notch created Mojang and hired Carl to shield him from all that and handle all the business stuff. But based on some of his tweets it was probably impossible to remain completely shielded, especially when he chose to do the MS negotiations himself.
I for one don't blame him one second for selling Mojang. If that business situation and dealing with the ever growing potential and attention for Minecraft alone was more than he had any interest in dealing with, and he had the means to hand it to someone who did and come out of it well compensated, then it was the right move for him.
It takes a very unique type of mind-set to actually want to ride something like that out all the way starting from zero infrastructure and with no business experience. It takes a lot of non-fun and stressful logistics work that a small relaxed coding crew like Mojang isn't really structured to handle. Now the Mojang crew can relax and just focus on the games again and let the various departments in the MS monster deal with all the uber-scale logistics that are still growing, like the Minecraft Movie etc.
I think he made the right move and I also think that he has been well-compensated both monetarily and recognition-wise via all the awards he received over the years. I don't think he could have really asked for more out of that experience. And now he's free to tinker around with his hobbies as he pleases for the rest of his life without any pressures that he doesn't make for himself. Good for him! I'd love it if he formed another non-descript company some day, but then again the kind of stuff he wants to do right now doesn't really require a formal company to do, though perhaps a holding company at least, which I'd bet he already has.
* Exactly; the one thing to come out of the OPs question should be to not expect to see notch on a public server using a name he is commonly known by, unless he's doing a drive-by publicity thing. Odds are that anyone on a bukkit server with a name like "notch" will be anyone but him. It would be hilarious if he was the owner of one of the Herobrine account name variations, heh heh. I know I would have grabbed that if I were him.
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
- Dungeon Generator for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
- QuickSAVE-QuickLOAD for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod