Is Minecraft worth $2.5B, iOS 8's slow uptake and why do gamers and journalists hate each other?

hi it's John Jordan from pocketgamer.biz this is our weekly Roundup of the news this is the week ending the 19th of September 2014 so it's been a pretty interesting week all in all it kind of started off with a bit of a bang kind of rumored um what was happening kind of last week but um Microsoft did byy Minecraft so um I guess the in terms of the actual purchase it kind of makes sense in a in a sense that Minecraft now is is generally seen as being much bigger than than a game obviously is a game to a degree um but it's a just so massive um phenomenon really amongst particular a certain kind of age group of of kind of teenage and sub teenage boys that uh it's become like a powerful kind of platform really for Lots different things education and obviously people learning General creativity um so it kind of it makes sense in a way for a big kind of company like Microsoft to come in and they can probably we do take

it to New areas that that um the the small developer um who who came up with it kind of couldn't really handle um I guess the interesting thing is the price price is something that kind of the money men are always interested in $2.5 billion clearly a lot of money um I think it's kind probably hard for us mortal people to judge whether the the value of these kind of deals goes well I mean it's like buying a PR League footballer he kind of like he may be really good being really good before you buy him then he might break his leg and be finished or he might just working your team so um you know we can't really tell what that whether that um kind of financial outlay that Microsoft has made will be good or bad I mean clearly Microsoft has something crazy like I think I worked about $70 billion do of cash and and short-term investments in the bank so they're not really down to their last kind of kind of pennies they can easily make that investment and if it doesn't work out not a disaster for them um but some people who do know about money so there was a uh some analysts at Digi Capital who kind of are involved in this kind of stuff they compared the the Minecraft deal the price of the Minecraft deal um to some

similar kind of valuations so they looked at supercell um which was bought about a year ago um and also looked at uh King King who did an IPO this year and also looked at gungho who do Puzzle and Dragons again a publicly floated stock in in Japan so none of those were exact comparative um deals where someone like Microsoft was completely buying the other party they were look more looking at valuations based on the um profit and the sales of those companies from that point of view um Minecraft was a was the most expensive deal and quite a long way so it was at least double um as expensive as the next expensive deal um which again is not to say it's a bad deal um clearly clearly when you have a situation where a company like Microsoft and maybe other people wer involved in in interested I'm sure in buying Minecraft so you have a bidding system that kind of as we all know from Ebay that drives up um the the price you end up paying I guess what was a bit more interesting in the long term was that um

you Minecraft is very associated with its creator Notch who is a very kind of idiosyncratic kind of individual um and kind of like likes his privacy and also likes to kind of like kind of chop it up on on Twitter as well which is kind of difficult when you're running a platform that um millions of people are using and looking to see what you're writing on Twitter so um it was quite maybe the most interesting thing for me was he his personal statement saying um with the with the with the uh the acquisition he's leaving um the company he set up um moyang uh and obviously he's now he was a wealthy man before he's even wealthier now um but he he kind of pointed out he's not really been involved with Minecraft for for for kind of a couple years now it's not something he's a kind of quirky little inventor kind of Programming type guy he doesn't want to be involved in running a business um for millions of people he wants to just do his own thing and now obviously he can do that so so he's left and he basically said he doesn't want to be a symbol for other people you know it's not about the money it's about his sanity so he can go off and do um his own things now and he even said hilarious kind of hilariously really if he did another thing that he was getting like big traction like Minecraft did in the early days he'd probably like

abandon it because he just doesn't want the hassle of dealing with that kind of stuff um which kind of ties into another kind of story I it's been rumbling on for a while it's not particularly mobile Focus story but there a gamergate kind of um situation where um it seemed to be in some sort of kind of uh kind of all out War really between certain part of the games journalist community and a certain part of the Gaming Community I don't want to go into too much detail to be honest I don't really follow it in in the incredible detail that some people seem to be uh kind of uh kind of following and and creating and causing these conflicts and stuff but a couple of our writers on pocket game. be did kind of have a have a crack at contextualizing what was going on um I think it's interesting that in both cases they kind of was being quite open in the suggestion that kind of gaming is a is a culture and a community and while there's different factions within that the whole thing is presumably if you're if you're a gamer um whether you self um relate to that term or whether you just play games I mean obviously become a bit of a um argument in own right now but um effectively you like games that's probably while you're having these massive arguments about whether game

journalists are all corrupt or whether these evil hardcore gamers are are in dangered species and they're spoiling for everyone else but effectively we all we play games so presumably we all like games so presumably there should be some sort of shared Community um that we shouldn't just go around attacking each other um whether I don't really see the signs of any reconciliation yet between certainly the hardcore on both sides but uh you know I guess you can only hope that for a bit more um kind of Charity on both sides that effectively we all do like games I think um I guess the the other kind of news that is not a surprise that it happened it was um it's more like a the launch so we we have um Apple has obviously today released its new hardware so um iPhone 6 iPhone 6 Plus clearly whenever an iPhone comes out that's massive that's people queuing particularly this time around where Apple have finally kind of given into the fact that people like bigger phones so both those are bigger phones kind of comes with a bit of fragmentation um I guess for developers still obviously not on anything like the degree of Android but um but kind of I think think an interesting shift really that that um

apple and I guess as as it did with the with the iPad it has its strong views on how things should be should should be in general um but at some point it has to um agree that actually some people like bigger phones and smaller smaller iPads um I guess the more interesting news from a from a business point of view a games mobile games business point of view it's a release of iOS 8 so so the operating system um not quite as big update as iOS 7 in terms of all the IAL changes that were in there but kind of significant nevertheless stuff like um like health kit which is something that will presumably be come to the for with the release of the Apple watch next year but um I guess for game developers the most important thing is is the is iOS 8 contains this metal API which is a new way of writing Graphics so it kind of replaces open GL es which again is another fragmentation kind of issue because um so a whole bunch of developers now are announcing that they're supporting um very high highend graphical effects

using using metal um unfortunately this only works for a certain level of Hardware so it's only only Hardware that uses the the A7 or the A8 chip so that's basically an iPhone 5s and above um and an iPad uh iPad Air or iPad mini Retina so actually quite a small percentage of devices at the moment can actually use any of these these um kind of all singing or dancing new graphical um uh kind of uh improvements um which again is something we never really had to deal with on Apple devices um I guess another kind of more praic issue is how people are updating to iOS 8 so uh I haven't updated to it yet because um on on my iPad even though the download is only 1 Gigabyte it needs 5.7 gabt of free memory to to install obviously it doesn't need all that once it's installed but effectively people are having to delete half their um half their apps and remove their photos and put them up to the iCloud or whatever just to get the space to then install the uh the operating uh system system update um which if you're not that

bothered about um health kit which isn't really being used at the moment anyway or or metal it's um probably not something people are doing straight away and actually a few companies or quite a few companies have been tracking the adoption uh rates of ios8 compared to the uh iOS previous iOS updates uh and actually it's much it's the adoption rate is much slower I guess as we'd expect an iOS 7 which is the fastest adoption rate but even slower than iOS 6 and that's actually kind of similar what we're seeing to iOS 5 which um so I think we're OB we're about what are we now about 36 hours into into um since it's been released and it's just over 10 10% um you know I guess we'll have to see in the long term uh quite quite what the adoption rate is but clearly with most Apple Hardware the adoption rate over time has been pretty much gone up to 90% which is kind of why Apple has kept this nice clean ecosystem for its developers and we'll see if that kind of maybe changes looks like over time that probably has to change because there's obviously more devices out there that it's supporting um so those are kind of the the big the big stories of the week obviously on pocketgamer.biz we we don't

just cover news we cover lots of other things so we've had a good making of this week so uh world of tank split the kind of uh the the mobile kind of version um of the World of Tanks game very successful so we've been talking to the the developer um about that um and also we've had some kind of interesting uh we always like to talk to people in the industry so we've been talking to some of the guys in Korea obviously kaca is is the well-known messaging platform in kaca but there are other kind of options available for for messaging over there so we' talking to some some um some experts about that and our other experts we have some Maven groups that we run so our Maven groups are experts in Industry that we ask for comment and this week they've all been talking um about the kind of potential of of the Apple watch so Apple watch is still a very kind of like a we all know it's coming out but there's lot of things we don't know about it so kind of there's been lot speculation about the price of the gold one will the gold Apple watch be cost $5,000 um and lots of kind of other um kind of things we don't really know about how that's going to work as as a

device but um game developers always like new devices to mess around with I was quite a surpris actually we have a couple of mavens groups we have our main Maven groups those guys a bit more kind of senior in the industry um they weren't so excited about the Apple watch really I I guess they bit more kind of suck it and see what we need to know more information whereas we have a new indie mavens group who are more kind of like small develop small scale developers and they were um much more enthusiastic about what they could do with it even though they actually not so enthusiastic about wearing it it seems that it's until people can actually see it and hold it in their hands and see um whether they actually want to wear one of these watches seems people seem a little bit skeptical maybe people just don't wear watches anymore I think that's big concern or the big issue that will be interesting if people don't wear watches even if the Apple watch is the best watch in the world ever maybe if you don't wear a watch that's more important than wearing the best watch Ever So anyway uh yeah so a lot of news this week I'm sure there'll be lots of news next week hope to see you then