In Minecraft, Markus Persson created one of the biggest, most enchanting games of the past decade. And now he has written one of the most unusual, refreshingly honest letters penned by a company founder who just got incredibly rich.
On Monday morning, Microsoft announced a much anticipated agreement to acquire Mojang, the Swedish company Mr Persson helped found, for $2.5 billion. Microsoft gets the hit game Minecraft out of the deal. Mr Persson, the majority shareholder, gets to become a billionaire.
In these kinds of situations, tech company founders usually take a break from the fist-bumping and champagne bottle-popping to write missives to their users about how selling their babies is the best thing for their companies and how the new owners will take their start-ups to an even bigger audience.
Mr Persson wrote a blog post about selling Mojang that made it sound as if he were having a large tumor removed from his body.
In the message to Minecraft fans, Mr Persson said that he would leave Mojang as soon as the deal with Microsoft was completed and that the pressures of being the figurehead of such a big and influential game were too much for him.
“I’ve become a symbol,” Mr Persson said. “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.”
In a Q & A about the deal on the Mojang website, the company said of Mr Persson: “He’s decided that he doesn’t want the responsibility of owning a company of such global significance. Over the past few years he’s made attempts to work on smaller projects, but the pressure of owning Minecraft became too much for him to handle. The only option was to sell Mojang.”
To many Minecraft fans, Mr Persson, known best by his gamer tag Notch, is a beloved figure and the public face of a game that delights tens of millions of players. There is another side to Internet stardom, though, one that can turn people like Mr. Persson into targets for vitriol in an instant.
Most company founders learn to let the fury on Twitter, Reddit and other forms of social media bounce off them. Mr Persson, apparently, did not.
He wrote that an incident this year, involving changes Mojang made to the language in its user licensing agreement, was a factor in his decision to sell the company. The modifications were perceived by members of the Minecraft community as a crackdown on people who operate their own Minecraft servers for profit. In June, after being bombarded with criticism, Mr Persson posted on Twitter that he wanted to sell his share of Mojang.
“Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig,” he wrote.
After watching a video about Phil Fish, another independent game developer who has become a lightning rod for criticism, Mr Persson said he realized he "didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had."
He said preserving his sanity was his motivation for selling Mojang, not money.
“I love you,” he told fans. “All of you. Thank you for turning Minecraft into what it has become, but there are too many of you, and I can’t be responsible for something this big.”
New York Times
