After reports of Microsoft purchasing Minecraft developer Mojang for $2.5 billion came true, we now know why. Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson will be leaving Mojang, and elected to sell the studio for the sake of "his sanity."
Persson announced the news on his personal blog. He says that it was never his intention to make a hit game, a game that many have compared to be this generation's Lego.
"I don't see myself as a real game developer," Persson writes on his blog. "I make games because it's fun, and because I love games and I love to program, but I don't make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don't try to change the world. Minecraft certainly became a huge hit, and people are telling me it's changed games. I never meant for it to do either."
As a result, Persson stepped away from active Minecraft development more than two years ago, all the while Minecraft continued to grow into a worldwide phenomenon available on nearly every platform. Even after stepping away from active Minecraft development, Persson in his post says he couldn't escape his status as a symbol.
"I was at home with a bad cold a couple of weeks ago when the Internet exploded with hate against me over some kind of EULA situation that I had nothing to do with. I was confused," he writes. "I didn't understand."
He continues by saying he doesn't want to be responsible for Minecraft and the millions of fans it has created.
"I've become a symbol," he writes. "I don't want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don't understand, that I don't want to work on, that keeps coming back to me. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm not a CEO. I'm a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter."
Persson says as soon as the Microsoft deal goes through he will be leaving Mojang to work on small "web experiments."
"If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I'll probably abandon it immediately," he writes.
He concludes his post by telling all his fans he loves them, but that there are simply too many of them. It's because of that, and not because of money, that he made his decision to sell and then leave Mojang.
"It's not about the money," he writes. "It's about my sanity." That is likely true, but $2.5 billion certainly helped push him in that direction.
