Nah, Zynga only makes a game if it’s total shit and not actually fun, but is addictive. They’re like a casino. They’re all about maximizing revenue, not about making a great experience – and that’s why only people like Markus could make Minecraft.
No, that’s what we’d like to think Zynga do. In reality Zynga spot anything that makes tons of cash, copy it perfectly, make it nicer, then tune the hell out of it to make it make even more money. If they think they can make a million from a Facebook implemented Minecraft clone they will. The Cubelands guy only started a few months ago and he’s already got it looking good.
Cas 
Look at how small those worlds are. At those scales, it’s all simple. Even Minecraft Classic was bigger, and had better framerates. The fog distance is pathetic. These guys have a nice sandbox, in a 3rd-party game engine, which means they can’t optimize it properly, and quickly they’ll run into complexities not many people can solve. Minecraft’s engine looks easy, but it aint.
Yes, but actually, Minecraft’s engine is a lot simpler than you think, so if it takes a couple of guys a couple of months to rip off the gameplay, it’ll only take another couple of guys a couple of months to come up with a proper engine. Zynga has the money, the motivation, and the evil to do this sort of thing. Just a thought anyway. It might not happen.
Cas
[quote=“princec,post:264,topic:33567”]
Well, it makes little sense to argue about how many guys it would take a certain amount of time to do something unknown.
Also, Zynga sells freemium games. They’d need to figure out a way to monetize Minecraft as such.
In hindsight, I think it could be done (pay $1 for some diamond!) pretty easily, actually.
Indeed. Minecraft is very much a known. And it won’t be two guys, it’ll be a big team. The source code is practically there in front of you to reverse engineer. And the whole game is totally exploitable for whale harvesting by its very design.
Cas
I would say IMHO, that the harder to do is not coding but rather succed in building a comunity by finding new & really good idea (as the simplicity to build world in Minecraft, water flow, monsters, etc…), and improving the gameplay ( as Minecraft done from Infiniminer), also the use of Applet is there probably a better idea than Unity engine. if they dont bring anything new, they will be no reason that people talk about them or play it rather than minecraft.
…Zynga are experts at harvesting communities. They’ve got one ready made, called Facebook. It’s actually the core reason they are worth billions already. Trust me, they can do it if they want to.
Cas
My coworkers at ngmoco are now finally starting to play Minecraft. I’m trying to get the IT guy to start an official ngmoco Minecraft server for us to play on during lunch breaks.
Woot.
I daren’t start playing it 
Got too much work to do.
Cas
Seems a heap of people I know know plays it. We be setting up a private server so we can all join in.
This thread is not about Revenge of the Titans.
(sorry, couldn’t resist! ;D ;D)
hhahaha, it appears that Minecraft has made it to belgium :D, a couple of my freinds at school were arguing over whether or not the servers were down. hahahah, good job :D.
Overheard some work colleagues talking about it this morning on how one of them tried to install/download the game but never got round to playing it because it’s authentication server was down?!?!
Spreading like cancer. But the good kind 8)
I actually prefer the looks of Minecraft over Cubelands, which looks like it just copied Minecraft’s ideas and 3D Dot Game Heroes’ looks.
:o 12,100 (and counting) sales in the last 24 hours! the real time stats are really cool.
@Markus_Persson would it be possible if you collected and displayed more stats? be really cool to know which OS/arch/browser most people are playing on and also which java version is being used?
be really nice to see what the penetration of java plugin2 really is amongst the java applet gamer audience.
Server’s back now. I made the fatal mistake of buying it. Spent 30 mins last night wandering around wondering what the hell to do It could really do with tutorial and polish.
Cas
[quote]Server’s back now. I made the fatal mistake of buying it.
[/quote]
Hehe…
[quote] Spent 30 mins last night wandering around wondering what the hell to do It could really do with tutorial and polish.
[/quote]
One of his blog posts said he was working on that.
[quote]be really nice to see what the penetration of java plugin2 really is amongst the java applet gamer audience.
[/quote]
Yeah with the amount of traffic I would love to get hold of some of those stats.