Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Ad Age conference in New York.
    Battlefield 3 was released simultaneously in tens of thousands of game shops the world over. Many of the most devoted fans stood in line for hours, and several stores stayed open for midnight launches. In preparation for the premiere at the Webhallen video game store in Stockholm, extras dressed as soldiers entertained the waiting crowd with fights and staged robbery attempts. DICE employees celebrated the release by renting out one of Stockholm’s oldest and finest restaurant-nightclubs and throwing a giant party, where they toasted each other with champagne while the pop star September entertained them.
    During its first week in stores, Battlefield 3 sold more than 5 million copies. The financial people at Electronic Arts established that the game had added about $370,000 to the company’s coffers—significantly more money than Avatar , one of the most lucrative films ever, earned during its first weekend in the theaters. For the uninitiated, the numbers may seem sky-high, but they were exactly in line with what the bosses at Electronic Arts had predicted. Battlefield 3 was just more proof that computer games are big business.
    In 2010, computer games were sold to the tune of $46.7 billion. That’s more than double the total amount of music sold, $16.4 billion. If you believe the industry’s own statistics, the consumer demographics are a far cry from the usual picture of gamers as mainly young men and boys. Four out of ten players in the United States are women. Three out of ten are over fifty years old, and only one out of ten is a boy under seventeen years old. Today, gaming is one of the world’s largest, most appreciated, and most demographically widespread forms of entertainment.
    The CEO at DICE at the time of Battlefield 3 ’s release was Karl-Magnus Troedsson. For over twenty years, his career has run parallel to the development of the Swedish gaming industry. In the late 1990s, right after completing his studies at the college in Gävle, he was hired by the game company Unique Development Studios (UDS). The first game he worked on was Mall Maniacs , an advertising game developed for a Swedish grocery store chain and McDonald’s, in which the player’s task was to fill a shopping cart with advertised items as fast as possible. A couple of years later, he began working at Digital Illusions, which later became DICE. Sweden, particularly the Stockholm region, had by then established itself as one of Europe’s most prominent centers of game development. Today, Swedish games pull in almost $1.4 billion in yearly sales for the large companies. A big chunk of that money goes to DICE.
    Today, the situation is very different from the experimental workshops of the early years. Karl Magnus Troedsson calls it “mature” and “more professional.” Others would probably use words like cold and unforgiving . Enormous sums of money are invested in each game that actually makes it to market, and the demands on a successful studio like DICE are immense. New games have to place either first, second, or third on the ranking lists. Anything less is considered a flop.
    The largest games publishers, such as Electronic Arts, are listed on the stock exchange and run, like other huge companies, according to quarterly reports and the expectations of the market. They navigate using Excel spreadsheets full of sales prognoses and cost analyses. Publishers like Electronic Arts are the most powerful in the video game industry. They finance the game developers’ projects and decide whether or not a game will get produced. They also control the enormous budgets needed to market a popular game—a general rule is that just as much money is spent on advertising and marketing as on the programming itself and, in extreme cases, such as that of Battlefield 3 , several times more. And it’s the publishers alone who have access to the distribution and production contacts that are needed to press millions