mojang posts

For a game that's been available to purchase and download for nearly two years, it's hard to think of Minecraft as still a work in progress. Yet the hit indie sandbox game is technically still in beta. But that will change on November 11, 2011.

On his official blog site, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Perrson announced today that the game will remove the "beta" tag on 11/11/11. As he states in his blog, "The plan is to be open with this and try to get people to cheer us on as much as possible, but to be open with the fact that the game won't change much at the actual release day. (It's more a progress up until that point)"

Meanwhile the game itself will be getting a new content update, 1.5, sometime in the next week. The big addition is adding snow and rain effects to the game that will actually affect the game's enviroment.

Minecraft's sales success has been well known before but now we have some hard numbers to back up those claims. Gamasutra reports that the indie sandbox game has generated over $33 million so far for its creator Marcus "Notch" Persson and his small team at Mojang. The game itself has so over 1.8 million copies via download and still sells about 10,000 copies a day. It will likely break the 2 million sales point sometime in late April.

So what do you do with all of that cash? In a post on the Reddit web site Perrson admits. "It all ends up in an account somewhere, and I try not to look at it. I get a normal salary these days for day to day stuff, but there's a big pile somewhere."

As promised, the 1.4 beta update for the hit sandbox game Minecraft has gone live via the game's auto-updater. The update has a number of new features, not the least of which is an updated logo for the game itself.

Other additions include adding very cute and cuddly wolves to the game's environment, the addition of bed that allow players to finally pick their own spawn points in the game. The infrastructure for added achievements and player stats to Minecraft has also been added to the game but the achievements and stats themselves won't actually show up until the next major update.

Fans (and there are a lot of you out there) of the indie sandbox game Minecraft can finally look forward to a major new update sometime this week. In a post on his Twitter page, the game's creator Markus "Notch" Perrson announced, "The plan is to release 1.4 this week."

The 1.4 patch will include "a rather ambitious statistics tracking and achievement system" according to a post on Notch's blog site. It will also include the previously announced addition of wolves (the cute kind) to the game as well as the ability to change your spawn point in the game. Beyond the 1.4 update Notch is looking to "spend soome time figuring out exactly what to do with the modding, which should result in a nice modding API."

Several days ago we reported that 2 Player Productions had gone over its $150,000 goal of raising money to help fund its upcoming documentary of the team behind the hit sandbox game Minecraft. There are still a few more days until the Kickstarter.com fundraising campaign is over and now 2 Player Productions has revealed the pretty unique bonuses for people who donate more than the average amount.

Folks who pledge $60 or more get a two disk DVD of the movie and a very cool looking Creeper wind-up toy as created by Fangamer. A Box Pig piggy bank is the bonus for the $500 donation level and folks who put down $2,500 and up get a real pick ax mounted on a plague and signed by the Minecraft dev team at Mojang. You still have until March 26 to fund this project and possibly get your hands on these unique items.

Minecraft's creators at Mojang have apparently been kicked out of their office due to some "manly men with powertools" but the team has been working from home on updates to the hit sandbox game in their homes. In an update on his blog, Minecraft creator Marcus "Notch" Persson gives some more info on what the team is currently working on.

One of them is the promised addition of achievements to Minecraft which Persson states, " ... will NOT be chores like 'cut down 10000 trees', but rather challenges like 'ride a pig off a cliff." And if you want to see something so cute you will burst, check out the trailer after the jump to see Minecraft's upcoming addition of wolves. They bounce around and everything.

Minecraft's success has been a huge surprise to pretty much everyone in the PC game community, especially for its creator Markus "Notch" Persson. In a new chat over at Rock Paper Shotgun he discusses the sandbox game's success and plans for its future.

The game is still in beta and won't be officially fone until the end of 2011 but Persson states, "We're going to keep updating it, releasing expansion packs for as long as people buy it." He also talks about possibly adding new features to Minecraft. And what about a sequel? He states, "I don't want to get stuck making Minecraft 2 and 3. It might make sense for the company – I understand that – and we can get other people to make Minecraft 2. But I personally want to make new games. It's more interesting."

Mojang, the Sweden-based development team that's in charge of the hit indie sandbox game Minecraft, have announced its next project at GDC. It's a fantasy themed virtual collectible card-based strategy game called Scrolls.

Gamasutra has the first details on Scrolls which also has elements of board games. While there will be a single player campaign most of the game's focus will be online multiplayer matches where players will collect their cards (or "scrolls") and use them to summon units and cast spells on a battlefield that will resemble a chess board. Interestingly, Penny Arcade's Jerry "Tycho" Holkins will also be involved with Scrolls to help develop the game's fictional back story. The game will have a closed alpha test later this year and will consist of a number of players who originally bought the alpha version of Minecraft. The game itself will be free to play but with revenue generated from selling new "scrolls" to players.