14 DAY TRIAL // Minecraft, the indie hit originally created by one programmer working from home, has generated no less than 33 million dollars in revenue so far, making it one of the most successful games that were not launched by one of the big industry publishers.
As part of a Question & Answer session conducted via Reddit the creator of the game, Markus Persson, has said that 800,000 people were willing to pay for the game when it was still in the alpha development phase and that more than 1 million approached the game when it was in the beta stage.
Those who got into Minecraft when the alpha was running paid 9.95 dollars but then received all updates for free while those who got into the beta phase paid 14.95 dollars.
The main Minecraft page shows the number of paying customers in real time, but the 33 million dollars amount is reduced by a number of fees paid to PayPal, which handles the transaction, and other costs associated with distribution.
Markus Persson, who is also known as Notch, has said in the Reddit session that, “I've always had a tendency to feel like I'm just not quite keeping up with demands, even before starting work on Minecraft. It's not gotten better by having a runaway hit like this.”
He added some advice for other small developers, saying, “Start with just making games to get used to it," he said. "Focus on the details. What makes a jump animation feel good? What is a good main menu? Try to finish a few projects.”
Minecraft is interesting to its player base because it links rather basic graphics with a very open world, where the player is allowed to do pretty much anything he likes.
A lot of players turn towards building impressive structures or mechanisms, with one of the most impressive including a functional 8 bit processor.