Unfortunately, this article doesn't seem to offer any insights into what factors made the game so successful, or even really present much new information that couldn't be found in one of the many other links on HN over the last several months.
I feel like I rage on titles all too often, but I can't resist this one, particularly since this one comes from businessweek which is currently putting a grotesque pop-up to win 1000$ for a survey in my face.
There's nothing _improbable_ about the rise of minecraft. It hit the right notes, took the right steps. What it was, was _unexpected,_ particularly to an audience/demographic (excuse the coming absurdly broad brush I swear it's just for hyperbolic humor) that relies on men in suits making decisions about what sells and what doesn't.
Hopefully I got over my pedantic streak for the day via that one word.
To me the title smells of the case of "10 years to an overnight success" since Notch has been building random games for years, this was just the one that happened to take off.
You beat me to it! I have exactly the same bent - atypical but not improbable. The game is successful because it's a great idea, recursively refined into a great implementation.
As the other commentors mentioned, there's nothing improbable about it -- but there shouldn't even be anything too surprising about it. It's not even as if Minecraft is the first time this happened or the most extreme case of it happening. It's probably the most widely-publicized example though, at least among the tech media.
Of course, this doesn't at all reduce the value of Minecraft's success -- it's just that Minecraft is not some singular magical exception in a world of failures. This has happened before, and it'll happen again, and it'll happen bigger.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 25.2 ms ] threadSee, e.g.: [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740289 [2]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2107773 [3]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1718023
There's nothing _improbable_ about the rise of minecraft. It hit the right notes, took the right steps. What it was, was _unexpected,_ particularly to an audience/demographic (excuse the coming absurdly broad brush I swear it's just for hyperbolic humor) that relies on men in suits making decisions about what sells and what doesn't.
Hopefully I got over my pedantic streak for the day via that one word.
Of course, this doesn't at all reduce the value of Minecraft's success -- it's just that Minecraft is not some singular magical exception in a world of failures. This has happened before, and it'll happen again, and it'll happen bigger.