Minecraft dev to found own studio after $3.8m success

One-man Minecraft developer Markus 'Notch' Persson has clarified his plans to found his own studio, despite meetings with Valve and Bungie.

The Swedish programmer made headlines this week when it was revealed that his sandbox building and survival title was earning up to $350,000 a day.

At the time of writing, Persson had sold 278772 copies of the online-only game, at €9.95 each. This equals lifetime earnings of $3,787,748 at the current exchange rate.

The game, currently in alpha, will see an increased price when it moves to beta and then final release.

Despite these earnings, Persson has remained relaxed about his game – shrugging off piracy and even making it free to play for several days following a server collapse.

Once the registration servers came back online, the game saw 25,936 purchases within 24 hours.

However, Persson has lamented the reduced time he is able to spend updating the game following its break-out success.

"Most my time these days is taken up by meetings and lawyers, accountants, banks, potential partners, potential employees, and the occasional interview," he claimed yesterday. "The few hours I do have to develop the game every now and then are mostly spent on looking into bugs and replying to emails."

As a result, he intends to form a full studio. "The status right now is that we're up to four people confirmed, and we're talking to several people.

"All this non-development work will result in a much nicer working environment, with talented people helping out with development, an actual office, and a much better way to deal with support issues, bug reports and feature requests."

Persson and his team are already working on a second, unannounced project.