Interview with Minecraft Creator Markus »Notch« Persson - »On the Minecraft popularity wave to Scrolls«

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GameStar You use a fairly unique business model for Minecraft, charging 15 Euros in beta and then giving the final game away without any additional fee. Looking back, do you think you should have charged more from the get-go or perhaps another few Euros after release?

Markus Persson I still think it was the right decision. This business model helped with growing the community so quickly. And it is also a very interesting model for the developers themselves, because it prevents financing bottlenecks during production time.

Markus Persson is followed by a team of documentary filmers.

GameStar And after you release Minecraft, do you think about changing the business model at that point?

Markus Persson We try to consider all our options. But we don’t want to push our players into a strict model. If we charge any money it will be for a service that is worth the extra fee, for example if we host our own game servers one day. But nothing is set in stone, right now we concentrate on releasing Minecraft.

GameStar And when will that be, the moment you say »Beta is over, now we have Minecraft 1.0«?

Markus Persson There is some sort of roadmap, I expect Minecraft to be released around November or December this year. We will then continue updating the game through expansions. At present 50 percent of our time goes into preparing the game for release and 50 percent go into adding cool new features.

GameStar And there is no one putting pressure on you since you are entirely independent.

Markus Persson Absolutely, but an estimated release date is still very important for us. We just don’t want to develop into the dark.

GameStar So what is it Minecraft fans can be looking forward to? Landscape expansions? Special item sets?

Markus Persson Something like that, yes. For example I think about NPC-villages for a long time now. That could be one expansion in the future. And there might also be seasonal updates, let’s say for Halloween or Christmas. But this is all still vague; we don’t have a definite content strategy.

GameStar And what about porting Minecraft to different platforms?

Markus Persson We hired someone just yet, who is porting the game to iPhone and iPad. On his first day he already flew to GDC in San Francisco. (laughs)

GameStar And Xbox and Playstation 3? Little Big Planet has shown that games with user generated content work pretty well on these kind of platforms.

Markus Persson Currently we don’t have the necessary know-how in the company to deal with these platforms accordingly. We would have to stock up first, so the subject won’t have the highest priority for us in the near future.

GameStar How big should your team grow, do you think about imposing a hiring freeze?

Markus Persson I want to keep Mojang as small as possible. We want to develop games that don’t need 50 Gigs of graphics. The games should be fun because of their mechanics, because of the game itself. But this credo can change over time; it is just the beginning for Mojang.
Right now I’m focussing on Minecraft while Jakob develops our new project Scrolls. When both games are finished we might channel our resources and concentrate on a third concept, we will see.