Microsoft is reportedly in discussions to buy Mojang, the Swedish games studio behind the multimillion-selling building game, Minecraft.
The Wall Street Journal cites a source who claims the deal could be tied up as early as next week, for a figure in the region of $2bn.
Minecraft was first released in 2011, and has since become the third bestselling game of all time and something of a cultural phenomenon.
The title is set in a virtual world made of cubes of different materials, including dirt, rock and lava. Most of these can be used as building blocks and/or refined into usable raw materials.
Player use the blocks to build a shelter and to create weapons to defend their character against the game’s zombies and other monsters.
They can also engage in huge construction projects to flex their creative skills. One extreme recent example involved thecreation of a working virtual hard drive.
Last year Mojang, currently a privately owned company, made revenues of $326m, the vast majority from Minecraft.
The studio’s founder, Markus “Notch” Perrson, has previously rejected attempts to buy the company. In 2011 games-publisher Electronic Arts is said to have made a bid. However, it could be that the developer, which employs just 40 people, would like to release itself from management tasks to concentrate on creating games. In June, there was controversy in the Minecraft community when Mojang tried to enforce rules about how server providers could monetise the game.
Mojang has worked on other titles, but they have either fallen short of Minecraft’s success – such as the role-playing game (RPG) Scrolls – or been shelved before completion – such as 0x10c, a space-themed game that Mr Persson had been working on until last year.
Analysis- Online gaming going mainstream
Commenting on the potential deal, Warwick Business School Professor of Practice Mark Skilton said: “This move is a reflection of the ‘platforming’ strategy that Satya Nadella and others recognise as critical to building a strong customer base.
“In the digital world the number of concurrent users directly drives many revenue charging models common in the cloud monetisation strategy. It fits Nadella’s strong leaning towards the mobile+cloud+services model which is all about the connected volume of this. Microsoft started Xbox as a separate area but this move for Mojang demonstrates it’s still very much a core platform for user traffic generation.
“The online gaming industry is fast moving from niche collective enthusiast to mass market and Minecraft is a logical move as big business follows the traffic numbers in the digital world. The recent acquisition in August of Twitch, the online gaming spectator portal by Amazon for just under $1 billion in cash, speaks volumes.
“On Twitch top gamers are enjoying online real-time sessions with more than 20,000 spectators – it’s the new way to interact in the digital sharing economy. And to think it didn’t exist four years ago. It’s a phenomenon of our time and companies are realising, particularly the media and cloud giants, that it’s a fast-evolving new business model.
“Minecraft made more than $100 million last year and has over 100 million registered users with 14.3 million copies of the software game on the PC. It is another case of a blockbuster software investment to drive the gaming platform industry. As with the latest FPS shooter ‘Destiny’ launched on PS4, it’s big business with more than one billion in sales predicted within a weekend!”
Watch this video from Bloomberg looking into why Microsoft is interested in buying Minecraft.