It's hard to argue that one of the biggest gaming success stories in years has been Mojang's Minecraft. In an interview with Reuters, Mojang co-founder Carl Manneh has revealed that they have turned down offers from "almost every major gaming company in the world."
Not only are they not willing to sell out, they also have no plans to go public.
We are living the dream, really…An exit would be huge, but do we really need that money? In our case, we have the cash flow. We have more money than we need…We've always felt that the independence we have is one of our core strengths. We can take decisions by going into a room and in 15 minutes we're done. We try to be extremely agile, to release games quickly.
Just last year, the 25-man strong studio has raked in revenues of almost $240 million, with around $100 million coming from license fees. Understandably, this has been noticed by major companies that Mojang has turned down.
To date, there has been more than nine million purchases of Minecraft on the PC and Mac, if you add the other platforms, that number escalates to a very impressive 20 million paid downloads. Sales have been so impressive in fact that Manneh thinks that if it things progress, they see it being able to outsell The Sims in one or two years' time.
While Minecraft has been a massive hit on PCs, it's console release, which was handled by a third-party studio, was no slouch, either. It proved to be so popular on Xbox LIVE that it even managed to encroach on Call of Duty and Battlefield 3's turf as one the most actively played game online. Mind you, this is no small feat given how the Xbox LIVE activity charts are normally dominated by shooters and sports games.
Thanks, GamesIndustry
