I sympathize with him. I loved this piece. I hope he truly did let go of all the hangups he described. And it does seem that he actually did sell the the rights of use to microsoft, making this whole text a weird misunderstanding. But that does not mean that the text is bad, or boring, or uninteresting. Rather the opposite.

To be frank, the author made little to no meaningful contributions to Minecraft's success.

The author is so self-centered they belittle the contributions of other Mojang employees and seem to genuinely believe their contribution is on the same level as people like Jeb and C418. They literally describe the End Poem as a quote "Priceless Gift".

People are putting Minecraft’s ending on things because it’s Minecraft and Minecraft left an impact on them. The actual poem was a commodity that was tacked on to make the game complete as a muse.

It sounds harsh but that’s the truth and why OP isn’t entitled to any more than they got, especially with that attitude.

Wow...uh....that's kinda daft

Late at night, having defeated the Ender dragon, having spent months in the game, it turns that moment into an almost spiritual experience.

I think most HN readers reacted to that weird poem the same way the aliens in Blindsight reacted to attempts at communication

That’s why the author lets go of the dollars and gives the story away for free at the end.

Maybe the game would have made the same money. But it’s also true that Markus asked for an ending story, selected this one and put it in, and kept it there.

That may be the author's point, but their egotism also then seems to believe that a significant portion of the non-monetary value of Minecraft is a result of their own brief work on an unskippable wall of text that has a nice sentiment but is quickly forgotten by, I'd guess, nearly everyone that plays the game.

Any success exists because of the sum of its parts. I have never played Minecraft, but I've played Portal. The ending to Portal was emotional, it was the cherry on top of a great game. That song and the emotion that came with it is still ingrained in me and is part of why I still recommend Portal to people who haven't played it.

Would I have played the game without the song? Probably. Would it have made the same impact without it? I don't think so. Emotion is a large part of why people play games, so that poem might actually have an impact.

Does that mean he deserved more? I don't know, €20k seems reasonable. But I think you underestimate the impact something like a poem can have.

I'm specifically referring to Minecraft, where the poem is largely disconnected from the rest of the game and doesn't pertain to any narrative or story (Minecraft doesn't have a story, it's a sandbox game). It's a cool poem, but it isn't part of the important bits that made Minecraft the colossal success that it is.

In minecraft you have a a long preparing to do before frustrating boss fight followed by some scrolling text you likely won't be bothered to read and skip thinking "Well, that was a waste of time." (Not by a fault of the poem but by a fault of game design.) Minecraft is a great sandbox and world exploration game. I see why they wanted to add an "ending" (to make it clear it's out of beta, (releasing on time)) but the ending doesn't make much sense game-wise.

Portal is as much a story-driven game as it is about the mechanics. I know very few people who played Portal after they finished it, except maybe replaying it.

Contrast to Minecraft, where at least my peer group (adults already as of 2011), just spent hours, days, months building stuff on a map, completely ignoring the "story". I actually heard about this poem for the first time when I read this piece.

I've never finished Minecraft, but I guess I spent a few hundred hours building stuff and in my opinion, "played" it more than other games. But that doesn't mean I'm in any way stating an opinion about compensation or who did something wrong or how important anything is.

But, he did still put in the effort in creating the poem. Every part of the game matters, and I think it's fair if he gets paid or at-least gets credit for his contributions to the game.

I understand the author being hurt as he's one of the 5 people that contributed to the game, he just needed the credit or any little token of appreciation from Minecraft. The author asked Markus to mention something he refused, which is kind of the author's fault for not signing a contract, but it's still sad.

He did get paid, $20000. How was Mojang supposed to know he wanted more when he accepted that payment?

It was an awkward relationship because both sides had a completely different view of what the relationship was, and didn't really communicate that with each other. It's great that he was finally able to write this down. It sucks that he struggled, and Mojang could easily have just given him $1 million to sign the contact, but his inability to talk about this, to talk about money, is probably the main reason for this as well as possibly many of his other financial troubles.

We can write justifications for why he did this, but that he seems to believe he was entitled to more money than the offer he accepted is entirely a problem of his own creation.

Expecting Mojang to deal with his communication and mental health issues is absurd.

As he said in his writing he simply assumed that whoever he is dealing with would give him what is fair. So he accepted the $20K and he was probably perfectly happy with his cucumber. Then later after a bunch of extra money is funneled into the company he sees a bunch of other people getting grapes for what he perceives as a similar effort to his own. Now the deal stops being fair in our monkey brains and we are hard-wired to demand equivalent payment.

However business economics has an entirely different concept of what is fair. It assumes everything is fair as long as promises are kept and deals are honored. There is no concept in business of renegotiating compensation of old contracts if someone else gets more compensation for a similar effort. This is why collective bargaining by unions is the only way for everyone to get equal pay for equal work.

> He asked for their offer, Mojang offered $20k, and he took the money.

The way I'm reading it is that he didn't even want to talk about the money. It had to be all about the art. And yet he clearly has lots of feelings about the money. Like I said, it's mostly his own attitude that's his problem. And although he claims lots of personal growth because of this, I'm still not sure he really understands that he's mostly projecting his own issues on others.

Still, he's probably right that he still owns it and Mojang only had a license, and giving it to the public domain is a nice gesture, if made with some grandstanding.

> I admired the fact that he was, again, giving money to back-office staff who had just arrived in the last year, and had zero creative input into the game

> I couldn’t understand why I was again being treated worse than them. I had helped him create the actual game, I had given him the ending he wanted but could not write

He acts as if he's some creative designer that played a huge role in the creation of the game. To be frank, an intern at Mojang that was with the company for a few months and added 2 blocks to the game would have made a bigger contribution than he made.

This is, in my opinion, the core disconnect the author has with reality, and is driven by the fact that to him his work is the center of the universe and he struggles to understand why that isn't the case for everyone else.

The author genuinely believes they made contributions to the game on the same level as Jeb, and that's why it feels unfair when he sees Mojang employees getting a $300k bonus and him getting nothing. But the reality is he made a very minor contribution to the game and got paid $20k, which is a pretty nice sum for a few days of work.

I'm fairly confident that was was meant by that was exposure in the form of his poem getting put into Minecraft, not exposure in the form of a shout-out or other promotion.

Unless the author releases the email we'll never know the context, but I've been a spectator to these types of negotiations enough that I strongly believe the context would support my interpretation.

I think members of the modding community contributed much more in material terms, and both they and YouTube content creators contributed much more in driving it's rise & popularity, than the author of this poem. It seems the author had a pretty clear verbal contract on their compensation, and received the money.

They author didn't receive the promotional support for their other work that was promised, and I think should be their much bigger gripe. For an artist/creator I would think that would be the big pain point, not having their other work broadly exposed to an audience of millions, instead of the $$$ aspect they spend so much time on in this article. (Especially when that exposure would possibly have lead to significant financial success for their work as well)

C418 made the music... plenty love it, I don't. Doesn't means it has no value, it has none to me, just like the End Poem has none to you, but yet still some people got a tattoo of it.

You are the only one belittling anyone though, you are belittling what Julian did, saying he deserve less recognition than C418, while Julian just said they got recognition while he didn't (without saying if he deserved it more than them).

the end poem is a priceless gift because they made it so: they refused to sell it, they consistently refused to put a price on it.

Honestly very little sympathy from me. I would be beyond pissed if I was trying to close a deal with someone who kept sending me novels over email instead.

I figure we just have a lot of Carls in here. There's always been a very business-oriented culture here: people are looking for success in their careers and monetary success is a big part of it. Contracts and IP are big parts of the business brain and I think people just struggle to see things from a different perspective.

All I can say is I'm very appreciative for the author to share the perspective. He says it clearly, there aren't any bad guys there and I think so many people in this forum want there to be one.

But yeah I'm shocked too, not what I would have expected from an HN comment thread. Maybe if he had been a coder instead of an author? I mean, HN threads reliably are on the side of coders who release their code open source but then have that code used by someone else to make billions, thinking they have the right to be mad and deserve a cut despite literally putting an open source license on it saying otherwise! (which this guy didn't do... until now) I really don't know what's going on.

Are people actually not mad that this guy was (at points in his life) upset he didn't get a cut, but actually mad that he released his thing CC0 in the end instead of trying to get a cut? Because he didn't do a good enough job of getting a cut, and has only himself to blame for that, and should be blamed for it? But I don't want to assume people mean something different than what they say, when they say they are actually mad at him for having the temerity to have feelings about not getting a cut. I'm just bewildered.

I agree with other commenters that the author is greedy and petty. He accepted €20,000 for his work, a decent amount. Then he decided that he should make way more money because the game was successful. Then he tried to take advantage of the fact that he hadn't signed a contract, even though he had obviously accepted the terms when he accepted the money. He behaved shittily by not honoring an informal contract. He tried to paint it as some huge company legal dept vs little guy thing based on the fact that it's now Microsoft and yes, work for hire contracts drafted by corporate lawyers do look evil. But he had already reneged on his handshake agreement, after spending the 20K, even before big companies or professional lawyers were involved.

Now he's trying to parlay his brush with fame into Substack subscriptions. Good luck to him.

To me the agreement sounds like they bought the right to use the story as the ending to the game. They didn't agree on signing over the rights to the story, and he said if he knew that would have been part of the deal he wouldn't have agreed. He was caught by surprise when he found that language in the contract. Sure he was negligent in not following up when the contract didn't match his expectations, but so was Mojang for not ensuring the contract was signed before using his work.

It's kinda worth it to get access to elytra and shulker boxes but they do tend to make you a bit OP. Then again to make sensible use of elytra you need a gunpowder farm and once you're building farms like that, you're already on the way to domination...

One of the first objectives was always getting something like an Elytra, since it makes the game more pleasant imo.

https://ftb.fandom.com/wiki/Hang_Glider

Despite clocking hundreds upon hundreds of hours in the game, I too have yet to defeat the dragon.

Did he not honor the informal contract? What did he not honor?

If anything, Carl didn't honor the informal contract, he was the one saying Minecraft would promote his work, and no a name in a tiny credit is not doing that... but I'm feeling generous as let's be honest that's a bullshit clause that corporation always try to use that line without meaning much so it's to be expected.

Julian said he was never giving all its rights away. That was part of the informal contract. That's the thing that made him not sign it.

I say this with all the love in the world: it's hard for engineers to think like artists and vice-versa.

I went more in depth here about my perception.

It isn't, but it should be, because everyone is a flawed person. The fact that we have all have to act like we don't makes our current society so incredibly toxic. It causes everyone to pretend to be something they're really not, because otherwise they become ostracized from their community. This is incredibly polarizing and causes (in US politics) the right to pretend they're Christian, even though they show no actual Christian values and the left to pretend they care about the environment by eating less meat, while at the same time flying everywhere and throwing out clothes after wearing them 6 times.

If we all just accept that everyone has flaws and we can express them, then we can take them into account and deal with them. Then we don't have to pretend every single day that we are something we are not. Then we don't have to fake a smile when we have a bad day. Then we don't have to marry a person because it makes our parents happy. Then we don't have people who are afraid to come out as gay or trans or anything else.

What is society if we just accept all problems as part of the person or else society will be toxic?

Also has there ever been a society where flaws are just accepted without any kind of judgement? I would suggest that in those societies they simply did not classify them as flaws.

> If we all just accept that everyone has flaws and we can express them, then we can take them into account and deal with them

We can and do accept that but again that doesn't fix the flaw or absolve the person of the responsibility of the flaw.

I personally think the toxicity of modern society actually arises from the fact that we don't feel comfortable openly judging people's flaws, rather than the opposite.

We're moving goal posts here. You asked whether it was socially acceptable to be a flawed person and I responded to that specifically. I never wrote that any and every flaw should be accepted. That's very different from accepting that everyone is flawed in some way or another and actually dealing with those flaws in stead of pretending we aren't.

> we don't feel comfortable openly judging people's flaws

That's hilarious in a period where politics is turning into nothing more than pointing out the flaws of others, whether those flaws exist or not. Attack ads have become more common than ads talking about plans and politics. There are entire TV shows only taking about flaws of others. All while pretending that the people judging others are in some way not flawed at all.

No I'm not moving the goalposts at all. It's not socially acceptable to be a flawed person by definition, that's why they are called flaws.

> That's hilarious in a period where politics is turning into nothing more than pointing out the flaws of others, whether those flaws exist or not. Attack ads have become more common than ads talking about plans and politics. There are entire TV shows only taking about flaws of others. All while pretending that the people judging others are in some way not flawed at all.

Yes because those fulfil our desires of the fact that we don't openly attack others' flaws in day to day life. If anything they are proof of our starvation of healthy judgement.

Just saying that I found the story interesting and well… lovely (in a way) but perhaps that’s different backgrounds at work (I dabble in art) so I wonder what makes this such an unbearable thing to read, perhaps a very practical person? Not necessarily directed at you dcow.

So the sour aftertaste, for me, is likely related to the juxtaposition of positive and negative elements and I think ultimately is a reflection of the balance he chose to give each. Suffice to say, I think there's a not-so-different delivery of this essay which would have left me with a much better aftertaste.

I share your beliefs about IP, and I hope one day the world breaks free of the concept. But maybe try to be a little less mean. It’s worth it if only not to be one of those people that just post dunks for internet points. (I’ve done it a few times and usually regretted how I sounded after the dust settled.)

Cheers for openly expressing “down with copyright” though.

IIRC, back before the "favorite" feature was introduced, people would use - and some still use - upvotes to bookmark interesting threads.

Second thing I learned is to always at least skim the comments before opening the submission itself, to gauge whether the latter is even worth it. Quite often it isn't. Here I thought it is, but the text was so long and... off somehow, that I got back to comment thread and read it more carefully, and now I know why it's off and that it's not worth it (for me personally) to read it more carefully.

Exactly the picture/cover/person I thought of while reading this (nicely written but still a) rant.

I love his story, I sympathise, and I want Microsoft, or Notch, or Mojang, to just give him a million dollars. But I can also see that his financial struggles are mostly his own doing. And probably his own choice. He wants to live in a world that's not about money, but he also wants to be able to pay rent.

You're trying to ship a game. This writer keeps hitting your inbox with prose that I assume that is about as annoying to read as the original article. He's wasting your time and not getting to the point. You don't know what the guy's deal is and you stopped trying to figure out two emails ago. Compared to all the other things that you need to be doing to actually ship the game, this is incredibly minor and taking up your time daily. You finally tell him, "look, it's 20k or we go look elsewhere".

From that story, the only thing Mojang did wrong is that they didn't send him the contract straight away. We all know he would have signed whatever was on it back then, as he clearly didn't know what he wanted. Looks like someone regretted behaving completely irrationally when closing a deal, then regretted it some more than he never attempted to get more compensation even after the fact (he could have easily gotten something a couple of years later if he had tried, and once more the article completely omits as to why he didn't try to reach out through his agent or anyone that can behave as an adult after the launch) and is now screaming at the universe that he's not being showered with riches and glory when all of this was his own doing, even after he had multiple opportunities to come out winning.

wrong. by that point they are trying to close a business deal for a lot of money

Of course when the Microsoft deal came along, stakes were much higher and patience for his reluctance a lot less.

So yeah, they weren't friends. But he thought they were, between whatever interaction they had before the poem and the collaborative effort of creating the poem. So does that really make it a Flawed premise?

I have no ire towards the author. I thoroughly enjoyed the post and found several aspects of it that helped me find some introspection to something I was talking about with my wife just the other day (regarding capitalism, career, compensation).

I think in the end that's what he's doing. It's an overly long winded way to say he wrote the poem. He's trying to wrestle that recognition for his work he thought Mojang was going to provide him and he's sharing a tale of one artist who wants to live above Intellectual Property law and create beautiful things while recognizing he has to eat and put a roof over his head.

I pass no judgment on the author. I might slip him a few bucks in the paypal link he gave because I acquired Minecraft during beta and continue to play it off and on today and consider his contribution to be a nice addition to the game. Perhaps I will buy his novel. I think he did a great job trying to market himself here.

20000€ would in most European countries be a pretty good compensation for about 3 months of work, after taxes. It doesn't seem unreasonable on the face of it.

> I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt.

In this framing, these are examples of being treated as an outsider.

> Early next year, Markus earned a three-million-dollar dividend on his shares in Mojang. But, as the actual value of his company, which he mostly owned, had gone up by many tens of millions, he figured he didn’t really need another three million on top. So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending.

(Since the author seems to have spent about a month or so working on the game, you could reason that his compensation is about on par with the employees who worked for a full year. But he doesn't seem to see it that way, or he thinks he should be compensated better than them? I don't know.)

I'm speculating, but having known "artists", some of them think very differently to the average HN crowd.

He outright says it in the article, about how it wasn't about the money. If it was, there are more effective ways of going about getting that compensation than putting the story into the public domain

However, he was just a contractor found via twitter who wrote a few pages of text for the ending credits.

They really did not think of him as a friend, and when he was done with work they never contacted him again except for legal reasons.

Once again speculating, but the author didn't want to be treated like "just a contractor", and nor did that seem like how the relationship started out. Even as a contractor, I personally feel Notch could have reached out with happy words at a minimum - instead the author got silence.

the point is the gift economy

(I just wish the essay was edited down by 1/3, but that’s me)

We can disagree with him, the writing is rambling and takes for ever to get to the point, and then hits it on the head repeatedly, but in the end it does not matter. I suspect what is important (to him) is that he’s written it, not that you read it.

Anyway, I am surprised to see so much hostility here.

I didn't say he was greedy; by the sounds of it he's happy with very little. It is 100% correct to say he's entitled. He doesn't want to do the legwork of determining the terms, instead he expects that someone else does, and in a way that protects his interests. He feels entitled to that.

Yes, sorry, that was in other posts and it got blurred. I did not want to put words into your mouth.

> He doesn't want to do the legwork of determining the terms, instead he expects that someone else does

He explains why he did not involve his agent, and also that he does not expect anyone to do it. Otherwise he’d have plenty of opportunities to do it. He sounds entitled in that he has weird ideas about love and friendship but he just sounds like someone hurt that the world does not work as they thought.

In the end, his struggles seem to have lead to a lot of personal growth, and that's great, and he does seem to understand that he mostly created this problem himself, and could easily have prevented it by involving his agent. But I'm not so sure that he understands that this was never about friendship; he was hired to write an ending, had a profound artistic connection with the guy who hired him, and somehow he seemed to think that entitled him to a friendship rather than a business relationship. I'm not sure he understands that that was the core misunderstanding here, and that his belief in a friendship that was really a business relationship, made the business relationship really awkward and dysfunctional.

He didn't file a wacky lawsuit like Wyn Cooper's friend from "I Wanna Be Yours", instead he's reflected on a brush with greatness, and he's still doing art. Seems ok.

Perhaps he is better off not having Notch's riches considering that the guy went full QAnon?