I'd rather him resurect that space game that was teased a while back..
The premise was something along the lines of the sleep timer had a byte overflow error or something and instead of sleeping 10 years, it ended up sleeping thousands...
He could also use his money to fund promising game studios like RocketWerkz to build the engine for that game. Kitten Space Agency has a bit of a problem with end game content. To this day you can play KSP1 if all you want to do is manual control of spacecraft, but lategame you want to launch multiple space craft simultaneously, which means they need to be autonomous.
asking without malicious intent : is this behavior just attention-seeking for the rich and famous?
If Carmack mentioned a new game he was working on every other week people would stop and listen (and it would likely eventually materialize), but with Notch it feels more like "Oh, it's the annual big announcement where he reminds people that he makes games and that he continues to exist.", but the past few of those announcements have been filled with redirected ire (see: Microsoft, fans, the gaming industry, government, money), and the comments are filled with guru-like personal advice replies to fan questions about video games w.r.t. questions that don't call for the advice whatsoever.
All the more power to him if he releases another hit. I happened to think that the personality traits he acquired after his success are at odds with further critical successes.
I'm surprised Notch can even mention Minecraft without being sued by Microsoft. His reputation is beyond tarnished and they've tried to distance themselves from him as much as possible.
The Roguelike he's talking about has been his main focus for a few years now and he recently made the announcement that he's been stealth developing it in a real office with a real team. The real company in question: https://x.com/BitshiftEnt
But now he's apparently wondering if the fact that people really really want a minecraft 2 should affect his goals.
Minecraft already got a new engine, it was rebuilt from scratch in C++ for the "Bedrock" edition which powers all of the console and mobile versions, and is on PC alongside the original Java version. Unless you mean another new engine after that one, but in any case Notch's code was always a mess so he's probably not the man for that job.
I recall Java Minecraft modders having to optimize it themselves because the stock game was generating hundreds of megabytes of garbage collected heap objects every second, amongst other things.
Most of the Java performance issues are caused by modders themselves, with minecraft mods being their ever first attempt at programming.
Also the main reason the Java version is still around, and used as prototype to features that only afterwards land on Bedrock, is how limited Bedrock modding capabilities versus the Java version are.
Only a couple of custom points via JSON files, or JavaScript with limited API surface, instead of the whole engine.
The earlier console versions had finite worldgen due to memory constraints, but the newer versions of Bedrock do have infinite worlds. The main limitation of Bedrock is that it's just not as moddable since it's native code rather than easily decompiled bytecode.
He's had a lot of starts and stops on making a next game. I think the pressure from fans that think he has a midas touch has prevented him from getting very far in anything.
If Notch loves making games, I'm all for it. If it gave his life meaning and he is good at it and he loves it...bro can do whatever. Being rich, being famous or being the minecraft dude...none of that should matter. He is just a guy and everyone should treat him like any other guy. Life is life, do what you love and enjoy the short time we all have. Notch gave me lots of joy, why would I ever want anything less for him.
if i were microsoft i'd be mad that he called it "minecraft 2", even though that won't be the final name. also notch is so annoying i think people would probably side with them saying "look you can make a new game but if you advertise it as basically minecraft 2 we want some of our zillions back"
The ultimate example of ripping off someone else's idea, sell it to giant evil corp and profit unbelievably. Then he has to go on years of spirit walks to figure out what is the meaning to being rich, then has to talk about how he is a good person publicly... when all he really has to do is make and release another game and people will try it out, and buy it if its any good.
It’s not a clone of anything, it’s a genre idea that was floating around at the time and his is the version that took off. Sure it wasn’t divine inspiration in a vacuum, but nothing ever is. Predecessors had plenty of time to take off before Minecraft, and did not. Minecraft thoroughly took off before it sold out, I think it was the most expensive game acquisition ever. Minecraft didn’t engage in any sort of shady suppression, people just liked it.
And Notch isn’t an asshole, he’s clearly just some guy who found himself with billions and, like most people, didn’t suddenly become somebody who knows what to do in that role. He did the “rich guy stuff” that every average person would, then he started grasping at what’s next while becoming increasingly aware of himself as the limiting factor. You could say he should let people guide him, but he’s got millions trying and nobody to pick between them but himself.
Who cares man, he’s less evil than just about every other billionaire. The only way Notch is somebody to be pissed off at is if you expected him to be smarter and better than the rest of us just because he’s rich now, and if that’s how you think then the problem is you.
Inspiration is radically different than stealing ideas. The core gameplay of Minecraft is vastly different than dwarf fortress, and even alpha had far more to it than infiniminer.
The premise was something along the lines of the sleep timer had a byte overflow error or something and instead of sleeping 10 years, it ended up sleeping thousands...
( Edit for spelling I hope )