Markus “Notch” Persson Would Rather Have ‘Minecraft’ Not Run On Windows 8 Than “Play Along”

Back

September 27th, 2012 | By

Tagged in: | |

Notch

Nothing like some good ol’ drama to get the internets a goin’ this late at night! Recently Markus “Notch” Persson, mastermind behind the hit indie game Minecraft, took to Twitter to voice his concerns with Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system. Notch stated the he “Got an email from Microsoft  wanting to help “certify” Minecraft for Windows 8. I told them to stop trying to ruin the PC as an open platform.” Ouch.

That makes it 2 for game developers, 0 for Microsoft. If you remember, one of the first critics of Windows 8 was Valve’s founder Gabe Newell when he stated that Windows 8 “Is Kind of a catastrophe”, earlier this year. Valve is now going as far as citing one of the big reasons why they’re supporting Linux is because they’re preparing for the possible downfall once Windows 8 lands.

Notch went on to state that “I’d rather have Minecraft not run on Windows 8 at all than to play along. Maybe we can convince a few people not to switch to Windows 8 that way..” Big words coming from the mind behind the most successful indie game to date.

What do you guys think? Is too early in the game to say whether or not Windows 8 will hurt the PC gaming industry? Personally, I feel these developers have a lot more insider knowledge than we do, and I’m gonna take their word for it. After all, I’ve never been F’d in the A when it comes to Minecraft or Steam…

I’m looking at you Windows Update….

You may be interested in:

  1. BAFTA To Honor Markus ‘Notch’ Persson With Special Award
  2. Minecraft Too Expensive? Notch Says “Just Pirate It”
  3. EA Reckons ‘Minecraft’ Needs Publisher Support, Notch Thinks Otherwise
  4. Minecraft announced as Xbox console exclusive
| More

About the author

(11 posts)

Charles Ferrendelli is currently a History major at Arizona State University, and Managing Editor of Mobile IGM. When not at a computer typing he enjoys film, gaming, mma, and making fun of the world on Twitter @CFerrendelli.

  • Florian Veltman

    Not really into the whole Windows business so I’m curious, why is W8 a threat to the (indie) gaming scene? Is it because of the way things are structured internally or is it because of some sort of “app store” thing going on there? (the certification part of notch’s tweet points me to that)
    What will be so fundamentally different in W8 that makes it such a clusterfuck for game developers?

  • Petey_AM

    W8 is opening their own Steam-esque game store. They are kind of attempting to add monopoly onto PC as well as the current Xbox numbers. W8 will feature an integrated gaming market, which will force Windows users into a type of closed market system, much like you would find on Xbox and Ps3. Indie devs are fighting back because the open market of the PC is kind of the reason for the increase in Indie success over the last 4 years. Hope this helped.

  • Florian Veltman

    That explains things, thanks. And indeed this is really bad then. But they won’t be able to stop games from being distributed through other platforms now can they? Microsoft can only go wrong with this, at least from my uneducated point of view…

  • Petey_AM

    I’m fairly certain it is a desperate attempt to corner a market they dont control. IMO.

  • Brad

    Windows 8 is cool, not in the desktop, but on the tablet. For the PC this is completely ridiculous. Since when have dedicated PCs ever have apps like Fruit Ninja put on them? It’s like they’re trying to go the way of Apple with OS X and their App Store.

  • Onionman

    Hahah, this was a fun read! Good on Notch.

  • Jdrm03

    Dude is a hypocritical jackass. Is minecraft available on OSx? yep it is. So tell me, what is the difference between the OSx and Windows 8? They both have their respective app stores. Oh, that’s right, nothing? And guess what, you can still download apps like you do via windows 7 and every other iteration of windows.

    Seems to me Microsoft just asked him if he want to put his game in the store and in turn he is being a total jackass for no reason.

  • John Barner

    Of course Minecraft is available on OSX, it’s a Java program. It will run on anything with hardware capable of it.

  • drabiter

    Well, let’s see the Microsoft’s market policy later. It can turn to be good, or not.

  • trentg

    That’s only true of very high level Java programs. Most games require native libraries to interface with OpenGL and so on, so an extra platform is extra work.