Notch against Steam monopoly – Video Games Update
Minecraft creator and the head of Mojang Specifications, Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, does not want to bring Minecraft to Valve’s popular digital distribution service Steam.
Minecraft is a sandbox building game which was first released to public in 2009 in alpha stage. Since then, the game has managed to sell over 6.6 million copies for the PC placing it as the eighth highest selling PC game. The game came out of beta in 2011
and since then has also been ported to the Xbox 360 where is has managed to sell over 3 million copies.
Minecraft started out as a one man Indie project, but the vast success and demand after it went public enabled the creator Notch to start up his own game development studio. The PC version of the game is not available at retail and is a download only title
which can be acquired from the game’s official site.
Many gamers have questioned Notch’s reluctance to make the game available on Steam to which the Minecraft creator has replied, "As much as I love Steam, I do somewhat worry about the PC as a gaming platform becoming owned by a single entity that takes 30%
of all PC games sold. I'm hoping for a future where more games can self-publish and use social media and friends to market their games. Perhaps there's something we could do to help out there? I don't know. If nothing else, we might work as an inspiration
for people to self-publish."
It seems that Notch doesn’t really feel the need to use another digital distribution service when he can easily sell the game himself. Notch is also correct regarding Steam’s monopoly over the digital distribution market as even though there are a lot of
digital distribution channels, Steam is the most popular one and the majority of the gamers who use Steam are often against the idea of switching to another service.
Notch has stated that Minecraft is growing rapidly and is selling faster than ever so gamers can understand why the head of Mojang would not be willing to pay a 30 percent cut of every copy sold to Valve since he is not having any trouble selling the game
on his own. This approach might be beneficial to developers but it is bad business for Steam.
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