The game world is littered with 'one hit wonders' but it is very hard to repeat that success, doubly so on the scale of Minecraft.

For those that say Mojang is somehow unique, that Notch is the messiah of indy gaming, all I can say is survivor bias. The game industry is chock full of brilliant, passionate peeps who build really original games that just fail to spark the imagination of a large audience for one reason or another.

Hope the best for Mojang and co, love their work on Minecraft and hope they can follow it up with something just as unique, but this article is making some big leaps.

While I love the idea of 0x10c I don't know if it will replicate the success.

It's something I find it hard to explain to people who don't understand things like programming and emulators. It could just be too hard to have the sort of mass appeal that minecraft did.

From an office in Stockholm, a largely unknown company brought in more than half that sum. Its employee count: 29.

Ugh, this type of statement does a massive desservice to the programming service provider industry.

For a young child, this game has a tremendous lure... it's very simple to visually take in. All of the objects you build with bricks are abstract representations of real life things. For a child, visualizing a castle in minecraft is much easier to process than showing them one in a Lord of the Rings movie.

The other thing is that there's really no rules. You can pretty much do whatever you want... build stuff, explore, play the actual campaign, fight bad guys, etc. This is the exact opposite of the 'cinematic' experience most other games try to create. Kids will bec creating their own storyline in their minds.

Minecraft is the ultimate game of imagination and kids will eat it up like candy. This is why it's made so much money and has become a cultural phenomenon.

You know what's cool, being a company that is happy making things rather than being a billion dollar company and dealing with the headaches of stock price related soothsaying.

This isn't true. I bought the Minecraft (activation card) for my son through Walmart.

More than ten years ago back when I playing Counter-Strike (CS still being immensively succesful btw) I was using a "low poly" mod: this would replace the models of the players with models made of fewer polygons (the head became a cube, etc.) because it would give me a faster framerate.

And the shitty graphics didn't matter: the important thing was the gameplay.

If you can have both great gameplay, great graphics and great perfs, go for it.

But if you have to choose and want to get succesful: cut down the graphics budget. That's not what's going to make your game succesful.

What pulled me back into Minecraft was logic circuits. I found Minecraft to be an incredible teaching tool to help impart the absolute basics of circuit design to others. From the first step of turning on a bulb (or, in Minecraft terms, opening a door) with a circuit, to building memory and discovering new ways of state persistence, all the way to building entire machines for the express purpose of computation, Minecraft manages to turn the learning process into enough of a game to leave people associating "logic" with "fun."

I think it's probably only half a decade before we start seeing people in universities who were inspired to be electrical engineers by Minecraft.

While I think a $1 billion valuation is probably presumes far too much about the repeatability of Minecraft-like success, I think it's obvious that Mojang's success with Minecraft is attributable to more than just effective marketing. I also don't think it's unreasonable to think that Mojang's highly innovative game design will bring them more success in the future.

When kids grow up, they watch TV and they take the liking of characters like Barney, Thomas the Tank Engine, Spongebob etc and the companies behind those characters become ultimately huge!. The same is the case with Minecraft.

If Minecraft is crap than TV is crap and all these characters who are on it. Tell that to the growing kids on their face, just don't gossip about the degrading culture, the morality of capitalism etc.

You feel like some washed up older guy pissed off that his idea didn't make it, content to sit and pooh-pooh anything else that comes by. "My idea was so great, but no, stupid little blocks is what idiots around the world want" is the vibe I get from you.

"Crappy game" "bullshit stats" "spam it"

You're jealous and content to sit there and throw your sour grapes at anyone who dares actually like Minecraft.

Honestly, you're an insult to the spirit of this site and the people who come here. To shit all over a start up that is wildly successful for no other reason than you dislike it -- Shame on you.