Over 10 years after selling Minecraft to Microsoft for a cool 2.5 billion dollars, its creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, seems to be itching to create a successor to the sandbox sensation. He's even willing to work with Microsoft when building this mysterious sequel, though it looks like development is still yet to kick off.
All this began with a social media poll that Persson put forth on January 1, gauging interest in two gaming projects that he had an interest in developing. One of them was dubbed a "traditional roguelike (i.e., ADOM, Nethack, etc.) mixed with a tile-based first-person dungeon crawler." The next was simply a "spiritual successor thing to Minecraft."
This post, which currently sits with over 1.2 million views on X, has already received over 260,000 votes with three days remaining on the poll. Almost 80% of the votes have gone for the Minecraft project so far.
Following the results, Persson went on to talk about how he would take the route of building this Minecraft successor. He called making an official sequel "super illegal" because of Microsoft's IP ownership. However, he said the following about a potential official partnership:
"If Microsoft, for some reason, would want me to do it, and we, somehow, agreed on the terms, I'd absolutely be willing do to that. I'd even give them a much bigger share than I'd feel obliged to just to make it clear I'm not doing it with ill intent. But I'll be a bitch to work with."
A day later, Persson reaffirmed his plans to continue with the poll's chosen result, saying that he "basically announced Minecraft 2."
"My intentions are to be clear and honest about it, saying that spiritual successors are usually kind of... you know... washed up. Tragic," says the latest post about the project. "The things I'm fearing my next game is going to be anyway and try to push myself to avoid. So why not do the thing that people DO want and are willing to give me, somehow, even MORE cash for."
He once again stated that this project won't "sneakily infringe" on Mojang and Microsoft's work with Minecraft.
"I also intend to do this in a way that in no way tried to sneakily infringe on the incredible work the Mojang team is doing and that Microsoft is successfully doing the Microsoft shittification about," Persson adds. "And I respect them for doing that. It's their job. And they, from what I understand, let the studio do things their way, which seems very fair to me."
What do you think will happen with this mysterious Minecraft spiritual successor project from Notch? Will it see the light of day, and if it does, will it be able to replicate Minecraft's open nature and popularity?
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