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Mojang, the developer of Minecract, has officially joined Microsoft, following a report last week that the two were signing an acquisition deal worth $2.5 billion.
Xbox head Phil Spencer announced the news this morning, and added that Microsoft intend to continue growing the Minecraft franchise. As a result, they will continue to make Minecraft available across PC, Xbox, PlayStation, iOS and Android. The MINECON event will continue next year as well, Spencer said.
“Our investments in cloud, Xbox Live and mobile technology will enable players to benefit from richer and faster worlds, more powerful development tools, and more opportunities to connect with the Minecraft community,” he promised in a blog post.
Meanwhile, in a post on the Mojang website, Mojang’s Owen Hill confirms the acquisition and explains why the developer has allowed Microsoft to purchase it and the Minecraft franchise.
“As you might already know, Notch is the creator of Minecraft and the majority shareholder at Mojang,” Hill writes. “He’s decided that he doesn’t want the responsibility of owning a company of such global significance. Over the past few years he’s made attempts to work on smaller projects, but the pressure of owning Minecraft became too much for him to handle. The only option was to sell Mojang. He’ll continue to do cool stuff though. Don’t worry about that.”
Additionally, Hill confirms that, while the majority of Mojang staff will remain at the company, founders Notch, Carl and Jakob are leaving.
Meanwhile, in a post on his own blog, founder Markus “Notch” Persson explains why he is leaving the company, stating that he never intended to become a symbol connected to a game that has gone on to become more successful than he could have predicted.
“I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me,” he writes. “I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.”
“As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.”
