I have friends who are great developers but stress on things easily. I am generally pretty good at dealing with it. Spine has a fair number of users. I do feel I owe my users a lot and I really strive to do right by them: fix bugs, give support, listen, implement things they want, etc. I manage it though, if things are unreasonable, I can’t let it bother me. Spine isn’t anywhere near Minecraft (yet! 
), but I have an idea of how it could scale. I truly don’t care if the internet makes me a symbol or if they make up a persona for me that doesn’t match reality. Allowing that to get me upset would be akin to getting upset for people being stupid. It doesn’t matter if it’s a relatively small group of Spine users or a the Minecraft hordes. Welcome to the internet!
Well Nate, I’m impressed by how hypothetically tough you are
Haha. 
I just don’t think it’s really that hard to not care about the opinion of millions of strangers.
The opinions of millions of misinformed strangers trickle through in your personal life, I suspect.
What would you do if a little kid runs up to you and tells you to implement ‘XXX’ into your Game, or the Kid will scream around and sue you (or something)?
Because thats one of the many (bad) things that happen to extremely known developers all week long.
(Have a nice day! -Longor1996)
This is an interesting point. It’s easy to dismiss famous-people-drama with “of course I could handle anonymous randoms complaining at me on twitter”, but then you notice people you meet saying “well I heard that you said X which offended Y, what do you have to say to that?” And you find yourself explaining the same stupid thing over and over again…
Whereas before you were famous, you could just get to know people without them having ideas about you before even meeting you. And how many people now seek you out just to have arguments with you? How many people (who you would like to meet) are now avoiding you because of something they read on the internet?
How exhausting would that be?
Of course, I do not question Nate’s toughness. The “famous life spilling over into your personal life” idea just isn’t one I had really thought about before now.
It’s a PITA but the solution is simple… “don’t read the comments”. I’m gradually coming round to this way of thinking myself - just simply stopping participating in internet gutter culture aka “comments sections”. And that includes pointless wastes of space and time like Reddit and 4chan. Think I might even turn comments off on our blog too.
Cas 
Now I’m thinking about if you went under some kind of pseudonym, never showed what you looked like, etc. A “Phantom Dev” over here, just your average Joe over there. Obviously you still have to think about what people think of your secret identity, unless you ignore everything like Cas said, but then at least hopefully people can’t find you, you can choose to engage them or not.
But if you run incognito you will likely not build such a persona, that people refer to (and thus talk about you, wich
enhances you popularity, and thus that of your games)
Somehow people WANT symbols or personas.
Probably a reason some games are marked with the name of the famous designer behind it.
What about Daft Punk?
Enlighten me about Daft Punk. (because this fully a capella rip-off remix is awesome)
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Daft Punk chose their robot personas to be a symbol. They created the symbol that their fans connect with.
Notch became a symbol, that was not of his choosing and beyond his control. Big difference.
(Aside from Daft Punk being the greatest house groups ever and Notch being the indy game poster child )
I don’t know, I’m with Nate on this one
the whole world is full of assholes and the most vile of them yell the loudest
even more true for the internet
many games, shows, movies I enjoy really much, I never gave a comment about - its like vote with your wallet / you only comment when you complain
your popularity should speak for itself
who cares about rude people ? :<
I think it’s hard to understand the level of fame we’re talking about here.
Sure, if it’s just your twitter and email overrun with annoying people, fine, we can all probably handle that, and even take some kind of pride in it.
But to go down a hypothetical road, what happens when your girlfriend complains to you that she can’t get online without thousands of disgruntled/bored teenage boys messaging her, just because they know who you are? What about your parents? Or potential colleagues? What if you couldn’t meet a single person in real life who hasn’t heard something negative about you? And, yeah, okay, “that’s what people get for listening to the loud-mouths”… but I bet it gets pretty exhausting to constantly hear whispers and jokes (and flat out accusations) about what a jerk you are, just because you happen to be good at something.
What if everything you touched was overrun with thousands of “trolls” just because you happen to be successful?
It’s easy to say “psh, I could handle that” in the same way that we all believe we’d do great in a zombie apocalypse.
“Well just use a fake account and set up secret identities” - glossing over how messed up it is that that’s even necessary, it’s pretty hard to stay anonymous, especially if you’re already famous. Somebody is going to make a connection or figure it out, and then you get flack for “trying to hide” in addition to the normal crap you get. So that’s not really an option- plus it misses the whole point of what if your secret online identity becomes famous? That’s what happens to a lot of the “famous indies”, so I’m not sure what the alternative is.
The point is, Notch isn’t “selling out”, whatever that even means. He’s sick of all the crap that comes with fame, which people in this thread are still giving him, proving his point even while trying to discredit him for whatever reason. I guess I still just don’t really understand the level of vitriol this invokes from people.
I get what you’re saying Kevin but that is not what we are talking about actually.
Notch isn’t George Clooney
people outside of games dont know him, in general people on the streets dont know any game dev, let alone how we looks and what the image is, and his family and shit
plus leaving mojang is going to change ZERO about that popularity. You have to go “off the grid”
and that you could do even when you were still working there
No thats the meaning of being famous. Also lets not forget not ALL hugely successful games have famous game devs, only if they choose to talk to the media directly, which is usually a marketing/PR job anyway.
I dont really think so. If you just make any name / account and post random games, it seems very unlikely and even once it happens many people wouldnt buy into it.
Thats such a super pessimistic outlook - if your secret stuff is that good, that it too gets so popular, thats something to be happy about. I guess its a state of mind.
And no intelligent person would ever attack any famous person for trying to hide and not get noticed. and who cares about those other idiots.
not trying to attack his decision or whatever, whatever makes him happy I dont really have an opinion, I’m just saying…
especially when they know your full name, where you live, where you work, …
As someone who lives in suburbia, on the East Coast, I can tell you that you would be wrong. The amount of moms that know who “Notch” is, have seen his pic, or sat through the millions of let’s plays on YouTube makes him among the most famous of game designers in the mass space. I would venture to say that more kids know who Notch is than Shiggy. True story.
You’re all forgetting the disconnection between fame and reality. You’d be absolutely dumbfounded at how many celebs can just wander around the streets and never get noticed. Humans have a funny habit of separating the facial recognition areas of the brains from “Internet/TV” and “Reality” and have a hard time intermixing them. The honest truth is, if any of us (yes, even us) went to our local mall, and Notch walked by us, we probably wouldn’t even notice. Now, multiply that with the fact Notch isnt a TV/Movie celeb, most MC fans don’t actually see his face on a regular basis. His recognition level is probably closer to that of famous bookwriters like Steven King. . . would you recognize Steven King if you werent actively looking for him in a crowd?
Like Cero said, Notch isn’t George Clooney, and quite frankly, Notch isn’t really all that unique looking. The only thing that makes him really stand out is that silly hat.
It takes one to recognize you, and then everybody else notices. Then you’re surrounded by kiddos that think you owe them something because they once paid $10 - after having just spent $15 at Mc D. If you walk the mall three times a week, and it happens once a month, you’re going to feel uncomfortable every time you’re there. I’m not saying that what you say isn’t correct, it’s just not fully thought through :point: (trollololol)
haha, yes, that’s very true. It really does only take one and then it’s all downhill from there.
Speaking of price (semi-derail alert!) I have always found it odd how people pay $10 for a game and feel “entitled” to an infinite years of dedicated bug free content packs and patches, but yet the Pizza they ordered last night was $20.