As others have stated, while he is correct on this issue, I wouldn’t look to Notch for his opinion on anything these days.
I honestly can’t even tell if Jennifer Gibbons (ESA VP of State Government Affairs who made the original statement) even has any idea what Private Servers are. It’s almost as if she was equating them to something like the community run WoW servers, which regardless of the morality argument, were in fact breaking ToS by circumventing WoW’s subscription fees.
In the case of Minecraft, that argument doesn’t apply. Minecraft has no online subscription. Private servers were the only way to even play online until Realms. While Mojang doesn’t officially support private server administration, they do provide downloads for the server binary and documentation on their official website. It’s not just allowed, it’s explicitly listed as a way to play.
Obviously they would prefer to push people toward Realms as an extra revenue stream, but the way multiplayer is architected in Minecraft makes this argument make zero sense.
I think the gaming community’s intuition on this one is correct in that she accidentally said the quiet part out loud:
The end state of the tech industry desired by corporations is one where copies of software and even the means to compute can no longer be owned, they must be rented from the gatekeepers–i.e. “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”
Exactly the meme that came to mind. Notch turned out to be such a disappointment
I don’t play minecraft, and I live under a rock so, I didn’t understand the meme. TIL Notch took the good will he received from the gaming community and summarily flushed it down the toilet.
To play devils advocate,
When Notch was still a normal developer he was pretty progressive. I still remember the blog post where declared Minecraft has no distinct genders, all animals can breed with all of the same species, therefor everyone in Minecraft is gay. As a way to bash homophobes.
The chain of events as i witnessed it. And he also spoke of a few times is that money destroyed all his authentic friendships, his wife divorced him, everyone he met wanted him just for his money and he got completely isolated, also claimed to living for the most part on potato chips when on a podcast with moistcritical.
I also high suspicion from experience with other people he developed an alcohol problem which fuel his social media posts.
It’s no excuse but it is a recipe to make an otherwise decent person act in a monstrous way. Also a recipe to be easily influenceable by the wrong kids of al media.
Last i checked he took a long break from social media, and eventually came back as more sober person.
Can’t erase the fact he made some bad comments in the past. Many people seem to trow him on the same pile as Jk Rowling, who is actively and consistently doing harm. Such is far from fair.
Found the post
Thank you for this!
Last i checked he took a long break from social media, and eventually came back as more sober person.
This is news to me, do you have any more info? While I agree that you can’t erase the bad, I would like to have another (rare) example of someone who turned themselves around.
And thanks for your post in general. I didn’t know about his opinions on gender, and they’re surprisingly thoughtful, especially for that time.
That genuinely hard to refer to, its mors of an absence of controversy. His main social media is still twitter and this might have been the second time this year he postsed at all.
What i do know, He deleted his twitter account somewhere after 2021 and since 2024 appears to be back, working on a new game and expressed enjoying game development again (after presumably no longer enjoying it
Many of his pre-2022 post read to me as actual cringe and shit jokes. X appears to shuffle posts so its genuinely not hard still to find some really nasty ones. But everything since has been just a normal dude talking about developing game. Most opinionated expressing criticism against ai/vibe coding and how the epstein case is handled.
I dont know if he commented on the controversies since but the vibe i am getting is that fading in the background a little, being less famous and bombarded with internetfandom helped.
It just hit me you where asking for info nog just specific examples of proof of turning life around.
I found this article on loneliness from before the controversies many sources seem to point to facebook which I cant access though.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ive-never-felt-more-isolated-says-billionaire-mine/1100-6430171/
Also learned this from wikipedia.
] They had a daughter together, but by mid-2012, he began to see little of her.[64] On 15 August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce.[2] The divorce was finalised later that year.[64][9]
On 14 December 2011 Persson’s father committed suicide with a handgun[9] after drinking heavily.[1] In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father:[9]
According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse.
I think what i have is more of a theory that makes me see the human but what i sadly can’t find is wether or not he is sorry for what happened.
His wife divorced him shortly after he became a billionare. Money is a disease
I know it’s a redundant statement but they became a billionaire AND became alt-right, especially in regards to their opinions towards the LGBTQ+ community. Microsoft actually scrubbed their name off of everything because of it.
It’s really sad to me because I used to really look up to them as a Minecraft obsessed teenager trying to learn to program
Why are you using they? Are they NB or just trolling them for their lgbt stance?
Money is a disease
That’s what rich people want to make normal people think.
It’s not evil, it’s plain stupid, why would I ever play Minecraft with my friends now if we can’t control the lobby?!
Nothing “borderline” about it.
Yeah, one asshole complaining about fellow assholes shouldn’t be considered news, even if it is his clock’s time of day to be correct.
I mean, it is news if he’s the one who made the game that’s being talked about.
He’s LONG since divested himself of control over it (not that I wouldn’t have done it for that price, either), so what he says about how it’s being handled today doesn’t really much matter anymore, IMHO.
I’d separate the artist from the art and let him have it… but he sold the game and all his rights to it for an obscene amount of money. So the legality of private minecraft servers isn’t really his to speak on any more.
Also, he does seem to be a fairly shit human being. The sort of shut in, obese, fedora wearing idiot who buys in to manosphere blogs and right wing rhetoric to ease his general sense of worthlessness who gives all male nerds a bad name.
It happens. Some great artists… actually a whole lot of great artists are also shitty people. Narcissists, psychopaths, awful people skills, whatever. I try to separate the art, so I can appreciate and enjoy it for what it is even if I can’t stand the artist. But in this dude’s case he made billions of dollars selling his one game. Billions. He was outbidding celebrities on mansions and shit.
If global name recognition for how successful your game was and billions of dollars aren’t enough to take case of those limp dick pudgy boy self loathing and worthlessness to keep him from being a racist/sexist/phobe/ist/hater online… and if he wasn’t smart enough to realize that ruining his name and rep just to be an asshole punching down was a bad plan… and couldn’t be bothered to spend some of that fortune on therapy and drugs so he could find his zen… he a bitch.
Definitely jealous on that “make one game, make billions of monies” part though. Prolly why he gets judged harder. But he deserves it. The world’s biggest insane success story billionaire shouldn’t be shitting on the downtrodden. But they all seem to love it.
We should kill them. Globally. .05% of the world’s population holds over 26% of the wealth. Just an idea.
