Minecraft creator buys $70 million house in Beverly Hills

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The Minecraft creator, Zachary Barth? But I thought he got doodly-squat.


The Bentley furniture is a bit naff, but I do like the house.

I wonder why he wants to live in Beverly Hills, specifically.

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Me too. I grew up there. It’s weird. Very weird.

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I’ll never understand why people want this much house. Seems like a maintenance nightmare and money pit to me. Could make sense for people that need to entertain large groups of people a lot. Otherwise??

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Maybe he isn’t. Maybe he has other houses in nicer places. Perhaps this one is for show.

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I wonder how much diamond ore he had to go through to get that?

You’d think a company worth $2.5 billion could release a damn server that supports mods.

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I don’t know. That kind of implies he wants to do a movie deal or marry a supermodel… which I guess the later is entirely plausible. Maybe somebody he knows really wants a house in Beverly Hills. Parents or whatever.

But, yea, very probably he won’t be there 365 days a year, heh.

Still if I were suddenly a billionaire and decided to buy in SoCal my ridiculous house would be walking distance to the beach.

Maybe there is good 0.001% infrastructure in Beverly Hills he will take advantage of. An airport for private planes, helicopter pads to get to LAX, etc.

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I’ve never been in the market for a multimillion dollar house so I’ve never been exposed to the marketing around one. Very interesting to see the staging, video and related website - commissions must be good.

First order of business, a party along the line of Peter Sellers’ The Party.

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Countdown to obsessive re-creation of the property in Minecraft in …3 …2 …1 …

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What a silly way to spend 70 million dollars.

I can think of far more interesting ways to spend that kind of cash.

Hint: It wouldn’t be on unnecessary opulence.

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When you’re a billionaire, the cost of this place is a rounding error.

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Another win for capitalism!

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That’s disingenuous, at best. Notch created Minecraft. Full stop. Minecraft drew from several games, one of which was Infiniminer. This does not make Mr. Barth the creator of Minecraft.

Need proof? Minecraft is hugely successful. Infiniminer is not. Clearly, they are not the same thing.

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Rounding error or no, it’s a silly way to spend that much $.

Especially when so many laser death rays and other doomsday devices go un-built.

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Wouldn’t be my first choice of residence, but it’s extremely cool that he’s turned my $10 for a neat little beta game into solid gold Ferraris (or whatever). And the game’s still cool.

Why not have both? And the house probably won’t lose money. Or at least, not that much, anyway. He hasn’t really spent that money, just turned it into real estate instead of cash.

Really it’s just too bad California doesn’t have a reasonable property tax. This extravagance would be funding like 100 state university educations instead of 20.

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Of course, only the original could be successful.

Post hoc ergo propter.


I was being a bit facetious.

But how much of that $2.5 billion came from Infiminer? How much of Angry Birds’ popularity came from the excellent physics engine beneath it? How much reward did those creators get?

OTOH, as Ayn Rand might say, if you give your product away you do not value it.

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Imagine that you live somewhere totally different from California and you want to treat your friends to something they would never have done otherwise. So you invite them over for a LAN party and before they know it they have been loaded on to a private jet and flown to the US. They get to stay in an amazing house for a week doing whatever they like, go and see the sights, come back and hack games for a while. That would be pretty cool. I wish I had the money to do things like that.

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