Word on the street is Microsoft is getting ready to snap up the Swedish company Mojang, which is best known for the mega-hit Minecraft, with Microsoft expected to make an announcement by the end of this week.
But Minecraft players, ranging from middle-school children to die-hard gamers from all over the world, are reportedly not happy about the news.
Lukas, an 18-year-old programmer from Kassel, Germany, told the Wall Street Journal that he fears Minecraft will become more expensive if it gets acquired by Microsoft. He also expressed concerns about the privacy of his information once its goes into Microsoft's hands.
"A majority of my friends don't think Microsoft is cool," says another teenager, who is currently building stately courthouses fronted with marble columns on Minecraft.
Minecraft, which made $100 million in profits last year, is largely anti-establishment. For starters, the game's blocky graphics, which seem amateurish to some, go against the flashy graphics seen in blockbuster titles published by mainstream game developers.
And unlike many other titles that revolve around a storyline, Minecraft leaves all the story-telling and world-building to the gamer. Anyone who wants to play Minecraft can choose to go on an adventure, which entails defending himself from enemies and other threats, interact with other players, or build houses, towns, castles and whatever they like. Minecraft has no limit other than what the players can create inside their own heads and transfer to the gaming world.
"My sons mostly ignore TV and much of their computer time is spent being creative in Minecraft," says Brent Smithurst, who sees Minecraft as a big part of his and his sons' lives. "I love it because it teaches them problem solving, logic and creativity."
But perhaps one of the most appealing aspects of Minecraft is the founder Markus Persson himself, better known as Notch in the gaming world. Persson is seen as something akin to a folk hero to Minecraft's devoted players, with his public stance against big corporations such as Electronic Arts, Facebook and Microsoft itself. Earlier this year, Perrson announced that he was cancelling plans to develop a Minecraft version for the Oculus Rift as a form of protest against Facebook's acquisition of the virtual reality start-up, which received $10,000 in support from Persson during Oculus' Kickstarter campaign.
"There's nothing about their history that makes me trust them," said Perrson about Facebook at that time. "And that makes them seem creepy to me."
This is why a Microsoft acquisition of Mojang, if it pushes through, would be one of the most ironic deals in gaming history, one that would leave many a Minecraft player scrambling for the door if Microsoft decides to limit the game to its own platform, as it was wont to do with its acquisition of Bungie, which was developing the blockbuster title Halo when Microsoft purchased the company.
Tommy Carpenter, lead editor of the Minecraft Forum, says Minecraft fans see Mojang as a leader in grass-roots gaming technology and that a deal with Microsoft, a software titan that's worth $387 billion, doesn't make any sense at all.
"A lot of them have seen Minecraft, and Mojang by extension, as the forerunner to the indie game development scene," Carpenter says. "To them the idea of an independent company getting acquired by a large corporation is just foreign. They don't understand what would cause that to happen."
