Notch earned $ 101 million for 2012 on Minecraft licenses, now a little confused

The Swedish company Mojang and its founder Marcus [Notch] Person last year sold a lot of licenses for the game Minecraft. Notch took home 640 million kroons , which is about $ 101 million at the current rate.

In an interview on Reddit, Notch himself admits that he still does not understand where to put that kind of money: “This is fucking strange,” writes Notch , “I grew up in a relatively poor family, but since I got a decent job I never worried about finances . My hobby - playing computer games and programming - does not require large investments. I can eat when I want, go to the cinema, for this I do not need to save. "I have to put off traveling and buying computers and game consoles, but I'm not worried about that.”

“Now all of a sudden, due to the structure of modern society, a damned cloud of money fell on me. I still like playing games and programming, and as long as I have the latest hardware and the best consoles, I have nowhere to spend more money on except for traveling. Maybe in the end I will get a driver’s license, and then I can buy a car, ”says Notch.

Marcus Persson does not know for sure, but he expects to set aside part of the money for the family, another part for himself, and spend the rest on “making the world a better place to live.” This is, first of all, charity to help children and to promote the freedoms that Notch considers vital in the coming decades, as those that are protected by the Electronic Frontiers Fund.

He is also quite philosophically expressedabout the laws of copyright that made him unrealistically rich: “Well, on the one hand, I do not mind having a lot of money. On the other hand, it’s a little strange that I can once create something, and then get paid for it again, again and again. If you made a car, you can only sell it once. If you painted the fence, then you will also be paid once. But if you wrote a piece of program code that is essentially freely playable, you can receive and receive money constantly. This is probably a strange side effect of property laws created in a world where copying was NOT FREE. Although, I'm not sure that you can come up with a better system. "

Last year, Notch has already allocated $ 250 thousand to the Electronic Frontier Fund for the reform of software patents andhanded out $ 3 million to employees . Mojang then employed 25 people.