14 DAY TRIAL // Markus Persson, aka Notch, has announced that he is no longer the leading developer working on Minecraft and that the reins of the indie hit have been passed to Jens Bergensten, one of his long time collaborators working at Mojang.
Speaking to Gamasutra about the move Persson has stated, “I guess we've worked close enough for long enough for me to feel confident about it. He's exactly what Minecraft needs right now. He's a bit more mod friendly than I am, and we need to embrace mods more.”
The developer admits that even if he knows the decision is a good one it was hard for him to let go of the game that he built from the ground up.
Bergensten added, “I'm not sure when the idea came up the first time (from Notch), but it has been a few months now. We all knew that Notch was going to work on other things after release, so it kind of seemed natural for me to 'take over’”.
The new leading developer on Minecraft says that he will be the only one working on the game until some point during January, which means that initially gamers will get less updates.
His priority is the creation of a mod API, which will allow those who actually play Minecraft to begin creating the content that others will then experience.
The mod API will probably be launched no sooner than March 2012, as long as development goes according to plan.
Notch says that he is planning to reveal a new project in the coming months but it’s not yet clear what game he will be working on because he has a number of prototypes in the pipeline.
The developers at Mojang are already working on a new card based battle game called Scrolls that was embroiled in a trademark battle with publisher Bethesda.