Building Blocks

It is! All doors are open for us right now. Like I said, the hardest part is the saying no - that's the hardest part, trying to figure out what we should do and what we shouldn't.

But still, we have to think about what we'll do when Minecraft starts to decline? How do we set a pace with our new games, how do we set it up so that people understand that this is our new game and don't think that the company is just Notch and Minecraft. I think we're trying to educate our users to understand that there's a whole company around Minecraft and Notch. But we're still pushing Notch. We like to push the key figures in the company.

People like to hear about the story, people love the Minecraft story. How it all started with one guy and became such a successful brand.

He is. He's working full time, he wants a 100 per cent focus on coding. As far as he's concerned, he doesn't want to be going to any meetings at all so he can just sit down and code. He's working 40 hours a week, just like we do, so he's very active in the company.

We're always looking for new platforms, and consoles are very interesting for us, obviously. There are huge possibilities for us there. But I try to believe that Minecraft will be looked at just like Doom was. That created the first FPS game, if Minecraft is the first game to start a genre of voxel engine, sand box games, whatever you want to call them, we'll be really proud of it.

There will always be copies of different genres in games, so the only thing we can do is to be even better. They're challenging us to become even better. If they want to compete with us then we'll happily compete with them.

We're talking with everybody. Maybe we won't need a publisher this time, but maybe the next thing we will need a publisher. We're really just trying to connect with everybody so we can decide which one to go to later on. That's our plan right now.

When it was just Notch with Minecraft, he wanted to just be a coder, now we can back him up and connect with great people.

I think most of my co-workers joined because they wanted to work for a small company. Personally I think that's the right way to do it because we can make whatever we want to make and we don't have to depend on anyone else. I don't think it'd make much sense if we joined another company.

That's our plan, to co-publish. We hope to help people, to keep them involved in the process and create a successful game, to make sure people know about their games so they can create better games later on by themselves. So we'll see how well we can work that position.

It's really hard to tell. We still don't really know how big Minecraft is - we have to update ourselves! Last year the huge blogs like Kotaku and Penny Arcade wrote about it - that's when we realised, wow. It was already going well, but when those guys wrote about it it started to go great. They made a huge impact on our sales and brand. We are very grateful.

Well for Minecraft it wasn't that important because the game was already selling, but if you don't have that formula, or your game isn't selling, you really need to work hard on press relations. If nobody knows about it, how are you going to make your next game?

You need to make sure people are reading about your game, so they want to play it, and eventually pay for it.