>>719081060
He sold it because he wasn't cut out for being responsible for a product of the scale and cultural relevance of Minecraft. It was always just supposed to be an experimental platform for implementing shit in Java. But we kept reinforcing him, so he kept adding to it. For a time he saw it as a brief cash cow to fund other projects and/or quit his day job. But then it became an obligation being pulled half a dozen different ways by the rest of Mojang. It was over as soon as 4J were brought on to port it, because that instantly constrained the main game by a lot and a lot of shit Notch wanted to do just became infeasible. Especially Mod Support. That's when the sprint to 1.0 began. The bare minimum was implemented to make Minecraft a full game, and Notch tried to back off to make his autism space game.
That didn't work out because no one else at Mojang wanted to make such a niche product, and Notch decided he was done with major game development, sold the company and the game to Microsoft and tried to squeeze himself into the shape of an actual tech billionaire and not just an unusually lucky bastard in "retirement."
Eventually he wanted to get back to the good old days of developing weird little experimental games, did that for an extremely brief time, then decided he was going to take the Grimrock X SuperHot concept full scale by hiring a new team.
For some reason he was under the delusion that people actually wanted that game, and hoped to be vindicated when the masses magically chose the thing that appealed to his own tastes over the notion of a competent competitor to Minecraft in the spiritual successor he announced and walked back.
Believe it or not, Microsoft wasn't the worst company who could have bought Minecraft. LEGO were also in the running to do it, too. It didn't work out because the BrickCraft prototype they were working on together never saw the light of day.
And come on. Even if he wasn't sick of it, who would turn down $2.5 Billion?
