Our Tim’s letter to Microsoft about Minecraft was a hopeful but insistent plea: please don’t screw it up. Early signs are good: the company’s first act after the purchase of Mojang will be to consult the Minecraft community – and to shoo away any wrongheaded thoughts of a direct sequel.
“I don’t know if Minecraft 2, if that’s the thing that makes the most sense,” said Microsoft Studios boss Phil Spencer. “We need to meet the needs and the desires of the community before we get permission to go off and do something else.”
Spencer was asked about the possibility of a Minecraft sequel on an IGN podcast spotted by Digital Spy, and indicated that a Minecraft 2 would be the wrong move at this stage. Instead, Minecraft’s direction under Microsoft will be dictated in part by its community – “as strong as any community out there”.
“It doesn’t mean that everything we’re going to do is going to map to 100% of their acceptance, because I don’t know if there is any topic where 100% of people agree,” Spencer went on.
“But job one is to go out and meet the needs of the Minecraft community first, and then we can think about ways that we can actually help grow it. That’s our sole focus.”
Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion – but in its aftermath,Notch said the Minecraft deal was about “sanity”.
“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,” said the Mojang founder. “I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.”
At last count, 17 million copies of Minecraft had been sold to PC gamers. What would you like to see Microsoft do with some of that cash? A sequel seems somewhat unnecessary when the 20 best Minecraft mods offer so much in the way of longevity.