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Money isn't everything, according to Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson's "increasingly despondent" tweets:
Shortly after the sale of Minecraft's parent company, Mojang's co-founder Markus Persson had reportedly left the studio in order to pursue other projects. Naturally, before immediately moving on to another enterprise, the man more affectionately known in the gaming community as "Notch" has taken several beats to reap the benefits of his success, outbidding Beyoncé and Jay-Z on a $70 million home, and hosting lavish parties in his newly acquired mansion. However, he's also been afforded plenty of time to reflect on how far he's come, and not surprisingly, it's quite lonely at the top.
Recently, Notch took to his Twitter account to air his grievances with the current situation in which he finds himself. Although Persson's net worth currently rests at $1.33 billion as of writing, the famous game designer has confessed that such prosperity has essentially cursed him in the grand scheme of things, as he's "never felt more isolated". Apparently what John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote all those years ago is true, and it's that money can't buy love. Taking that into consideration, Notch's Tweets grow increasingly despondent, as seen below.
[Extended Copy]
The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance.— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
Hanging out in ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated.— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
In sweden, I will sit around and wait for my friends with jobs and families to have time to do shit, watching my reflection in the monitor.— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
When we sold the company, the biggest effort went into making sure the employees got taken care of, and they all hate me now.— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
Found a great girl, but she's afraid of me and my life style and went with a normal person instead.— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
I would Musk and try to save the world, but that just exposes me to the same type of assholes that made me sell minecraft again.— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gman003 on Monday August 31 2015, @02:26PM
If I were in his shoes, I would take that massive pile of money, and use it to make more games. Form a small indie team, and take risks, make the games the publishers will *never* go for, because you've got enough money that you can tank quite a few complete failures. (Or so I say now, with five orders of magnitude less money in my bank account).
But I can see the reason why he's not doing that: a failure might not have significant financial repercussions, but he's got a reputation now. If his next project isn't a big hit (either critically or commercially), he becomes a One Hit Wonder. That could happen even if the game is a complete success, if it doesn't become big on the level of Minecraft.
The other problem he might have is that the Minecraft playerbase was not exactly fond of him. Notch's intent for the game diverged pretty heavily from what everyone else thought it should be, he took the blame for a lot of the programming flaws (since he wrote a lot of the base code himself), and because he was such a public face of the game, he was criticized for everything else that went wrong, from schedule slip to mods breaking. Since the Minecraft community skews very young, a lot of that feedback was probably pretty nasty as well. So he probably doesn't feel like he has an audience that wants him to keep making games, or one that will act appreciative of new games.
And to finish it off, he might feel some inadequacy issues. As a game designer, Notch actually hasn't done much. He hit on success basically by accident - the early versions of Minecraft had most of the player-centric stuff (crafting, building, exploring) but barely any of the design-heavy stuff he was planning to add. That early version took off *because* it lacked all the design-heavy elements - it was a blank slate that anyone could enjoy, not the niche horror/fantasy thing he was trying to build. So he's never really gotten validation of his actual game-design skills. From what I saw in Minecraft, he actually isn't that good at actual game design, but I'll avoid judging too much on that because he was rather constrained by the time he could actually do design-heavy work.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Monday August 31 2015, @02:40PM
He has already a longish track of other games done, iirc.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by gman003 on Monday August 31 2015, @03:12PM
None that were hits, and TBH it's not exactly a long track. Scrolls was the only one to have any sort of success, and that was mostly by virtue of being the first follow-up to Minecraft after it got big. With that much free publicity, any game would be vaguely popular.