Minecraft bought by Microsoft

The rumors were true: Microsoft has bought Mojang, creators of Minecraft. The rumors were off a little bit — the speculation was that they’d pay $2 billion. It was actually $2.5 billion. But what’s half a billion dollars, anyway?

There’s some unreassuring reassurances, though.

There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC/Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android versions of Minecraft to stop. Of course, Microsoft can’t make decisions for other companies or predict the choices that they might make in the future.

One word: Bungie.

I remember Bungie as the great, innovative game company that was primarily a Mac shop, back in the days when my kids and I would play video games together. Marathon was great for it’s time, it was evolving into this newly announced game called Halo, with pre-announcements at Mac cons, and then it was bought by Microsoft, and everything dried up. They came out with Myth, which was cross-platform and really good, but then it was focusing on making XBox games. Bungie is now a full-on Microsoft-only company. Their next game, Destiny: consoles only.

If you want to know why Macs have a reputation as bad boxes for gaming, just look at Microsoft and their practice of strangling the market by buying up the best developers and killing cross-platform games as much as they can. Minecraft is a game where what computer you use is totally irrelevant and makes no difference in accessibility. I won’t be surprised if that changes soon.