We could all accuse him of selling out, but in reality, Microsoft buying Mojang for $2 billion will do them more harm than good. Their only franchises/brand/whatever is Minecraft, and although huge, Microsoft would never be able to produce a decent sequel to it - it would be more akin to the new SimCity and will go along with awful decisions like making it an Xbox exclusive.

Selling them Minecraft is like selling them a Picasso painting - it's very nice, but they will get absolutely humiliated if they try and make their own. Mojang is worthless without Notch and some of the original Minecraft creators, it's just a brand which owns the IP to a successful game (which is also getting past its expiration date now).

As for Notch, with that kind of money (even after tax, giving some to shareholders, etc) he could make his own new studio which will make more money than a Microsoft-owned Mojang ever would.

In his situation, I would do the same - distance myself from Minecraft so I wouldn't have to carry the burden of being "that Minecraft guy" for the rest of my life and give it to a company I hate because they won't be able to make their money back off it, then go and do something else.

For a big corporation like Microsoft, this is pretty standard practice anyway. These big companies need to keep buying smaller ones to keep their share prices up and once the cycle starts, it doesn't stop - Google probably buys 20-30 per year. And Microsoft is fighting a losing battle anyway with both consoles and phones, hopefully OSs soon enough if they manage to annoy enough people (Gaben being quite a prominent and annoyed figure already).

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It's a shame I already have Gone Home, Papers Please and Prison Architect, otherwise this would have been one of the best bundles ever for me (the first two are two of my favourite games on Steam and the latter looks brilliant but a little complicated to play without finished tutorials).

Might pick this up for the first three games though.

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Unbelievable. It is the reason why I stayed on windows this last year. And now that I'm decided to move to linux, bam, they announce that.

We should really hold a "delete your windows partition month" or something on here considering these next these next few months are going to be pretty intense in terms of Linux releases.

Dammit I will stop buying games... about half of announced to linux already bought...chilvary too! dammit!

Also maybe a "stop buying stuff before its ported month" :P

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A game built ported through a wine wrapper should be considered native (even though it's not strictly native) simply because that counts as a Linux sale when you buy it. I should make that clearer in the next one though, it's a good point.

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I've taken all the comments on board about the survey - so the next one will be far better. Despite all the flaws in this one, the data is pretty interesting (and surprising) based on the 500 surveys so far.

Something which no one picked up on is that the questions should have been time-specific if we were doing this monthly (ie. how many Linux games did you buy THIS MONTH, instead of PER MONTH. There's reasons why I dropped Maths at age 15 in school :P

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Quoting: tmtvlMy purchases/month vary wildly, because some months I find a lot of stuff that seems interesting, other months there isn't anything I'm interested in, so I just did a rough estimate of how many games I have and how long I've been using Linux and gave the average.

Also, is it distro hopping when you use two different distros, but only those exact two?

Don't worry about the stats for game purchases, they will be lower for this last month given that not much happens during these months, but the results will be different (will be interesting to see how much this changes for Steam winter/summer sales).

With the distro, just put whichever one you game on most. I use Kubuntu on my laptop and Xubuntu on my gaming PC, but I'd consider Xubuntu to be my gaming distribution (and don't switch at all). So'it's not distro hopping, that's just having two distros.

Thanks for the limesurvey and google suggestions, they're both good alternatives to SurveyMonkey. Wish i'd known sooner, but I'll use one of those next month.

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Quoting: neffoWhy isn't Ubuntu listed as a distro?

It is! It's Debian based. I just listed the main distro families to avoid having to do a massive list. I'll make that clearer in the next one :)

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Well it's been just over an hour since the survey was published, and there's been over 100 responses with some pretty interesting data...

Only snag is that the sneaky SurveyMonkey people have now decided to disclose that I require a premium account to see any results over the 100 respondents mark which means either the sample has to be capped at 100 or I have to pay £25 to get a maximum of 1000 respondents (or £300 for unlimited, which is crazy). I will consider doing it for this month since so many people have been kind enough to fill it out, but it looks like we'll need to find another way of doing this in future months. If not then I'll have to pull it and re-upload the whole thing with a free alternative.

Does anyone know of any free alternatives to SurveyMonkey? Any thoughts in general? Paying out £25 a month isn't really sustainable.

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:O those new AMD processors look pretty awesome.

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Politics may not be welcome when talking about games, but is totally related to game development. Which is why this article was interesting (healthy socialist/capitalist economy gives good subsidies and grants to game industry)

That's very true! Education above all else since you need a big amount of talented artists and programmers (not to mention people to write dialogue, create music, market the game, etc).

And yes, the government giving grants to small studios is a very big help. I neglected to mention this in the Argentina article, but the government there also gives grants to studios and pays for stands and expos.

You forgot Funcom, the makers of The Longest Journey, Conan and Anarchy Online!

Are any of their games on Linux? I checked their websites and Steam but couldn't find anything. If there's DRM-free Linux versions somewhere which I haven't seen, then let me know and I'll add them in.

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