Have you ever actually played Infiniminer? It was a team-based, class-based, arena deathmatch game with a cube-based terrain deformation mechanic. Notch was inspired by (and gave credit for) one element of that, the cube mechanics, to create an goalless, infinite, open-world survival/construction game. It would make more sense to say that, I dunno, Fez is a ripoff of Donkey Kong because they’re both platformers. The cube mechanic by itself is novel, but not that stunningly original–Barth has said it was inspired by the digging mechanic in the 2D Flash game Motherload, which itself was iterating on concepts that stretch back at least to 1984 and Boulder Dash.
There’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed in game design. The first person to use an idea is a genius. The 100th person to use it is iterating on a tried-and-true classic. But the second person to use it is a scumbag ripoff artist. it’s weird.
Hardly anyone actually played Infiniminer. Barth shut it down less than a month after its (IIRC) 0.1 alpha release because hackers got at the source code and he lost interest. The only reason anyone’s heard of it is because Notch gave it credit for inspiring Minecraft.
Notch will be paying about $1.4 million/yr in property taxes alone due to this purchase.
What may have confused you is that, once you buy, your property tax bill can’t rise by more than 3% per year. This is the famous “Prop 13,” and is why some (older) property owners pay minuscule property taxes – they bought when property was cheap, and never moved.
Yes, California has a very low and bizarre property tax. If it had a more normal one owners of super mansions like this would be paying several times more into the state budget (or vastly more for older mansions, not sold for a while).
Prop 13 limits the property tax to 1% of the value of the home, and annual adjustments are 2% a year max.
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess. Why not just book a bunch of rooms in a really nice hotel? Or rent a sweet house for a week for your friends. I guess if you’re rich enough then this would just buy you the flexibility to do whatever you want, whenever you want. If he’s not living there, how much will the house be utilized? Think of the wasted resources keeping a house and grounds like this up and running, esp. if it’s being woefully underutilized.
What I’m saying is even if I had enough money, I couldn’t see myself spending $70M for a crash pad.
Honestly, what’s really bugged me about Mojang is how very little it’s done to improve the game over time, even as its revenues have increased exponentially. Other developers have had to create the framework to develop mods, and frankly the modding community has been much more creative than Mojang. Updates to Minecraft are mostly known for breaking the major modding frameworks, because Mojang can’t even bother to try to communicate with the major mod makers.
I remember that Mojang built up a lot of hype around adding villages, and later villagers, to the game. But they couldn’t even bother to code levelling the ground for villages, so you ended up with bizarre cliffs and other glitches when the villages were built. The villagers were worse; for quite a long time, they basically just wandered randomly, with no interactivity.
This stood out to me dramatically, because my favourite mod, Millénaire, had already been out for a year at that point. It featured NPCs with whom you could trade and interact in many ways, and who would autonomously accumulate materials, level ground and construct villages, trade with other villages, and react to the presence of monsters. It put Mojang’s feeble efforts to shame.
Notch has been resting on his laurels for years, getting incredibly rich, while lots of other people have done the hard work of improving Minecraft.
I was aware of Minecraft but really didn’t play until my son turned 11 last year. He’d been playing Minecraft at school and watching all these awesome videos of the various server mods and types out there – the Hunger Games servers, Pokecraft, etc.
So I’m thinking this is cool and we set up a Minecraft server and then I hit this wall where I realize that this huge vibrant community of modders and tinkers that surrounds this game not only has no support from Mojang, but in many ways the company discourages that community through its actions.
Most companies – even very successful ones – would kill to have that sort of dedicated community, but Mojang’s response is largely “whatever.” Even when they hired many of the folks behind the unofficial moddable Bukkit server, those folks spent a few years at Mojang and then left without any progress at all.
I suspect the issues is someone in Mojang sees all the unofficial servers as an additional revenue stream that can be monetized and the disinterest, at least for the past couple years, has been tied to wanting to do just that through their Realms service.
But it’s very bizarre that this game that is inherently about building and creating is itself such a walled garden. The average Ubisoft title is more moddable than Minecraft, which is sad.
Ah yes, when those of moderate means become insanely rich. So who has the dead pool going? 3 years, in a pool of his own vomit, penniless, with some soviet block “girlfriend” that has a shaky alibi.
Man, if I had that kind of money, I’d move out of southern CA, and buy a nice large ranch property in some quiet state, and set up a small farm where my biggest headache would be keeping up with the shenanigans of the resident goats.
So from this video I’ve learned that there’s such a thing as Real Estate Modeling and Real Estate Drone Video and Steadicam services. What a racket!
Actually was concerned for a minute that the link had been redirected to some high fashion porn.
