Notch in No Hurry to Bring Minecraft to Steam

Markus “Notch” Persson says Minecraft still isn’t on Steam because he’s not entirely comfortable with Valve’s digital distribution dominance.

The biggest indie PC game of all time, the most popular PC digital distribution platform on the planet – it’s a natural fit, right? And yet if you go poking around on Steam, you’ll eventually notice that Minecraft isn’t there. Why not?

A year ago, Notch explained on his blog that while he’s a big fan of Steam as a gamer, the platform limits a lot of what he can do as a developer, particularly with regard to user interactions and DLC sales. Those limitations have since been pretty much eliminated and yet Notch remains wary, saying that Mojang is still reluctant to submit Minecraft to Steam “without knowing more about what we want to do.”

“As much as I love Steam, I do somewhat worry about the PC as a gaming platform becoming owned by a single entity that takes 30 percent of all PC games sold,” he told PC Gamer. “I’m hoping for a future where more games can self-publish and use social media and friends to market their games. Perhaps there’s something we could do to help out there? I don’t know. If nothing else, we might work as an inspiration for people to self-publish.”

“We’re trying to figure out what we want to do long term with the position we have now. We only recently decided to stay as independent as possible and canceled an unannounced project that we were doing in collaboration with someone else,” he added. “It’s going to be an interesting future.”

That canceled project is presumed to be “Rex Kwon Do,” something I’d never heard of but which Mojang killed last week “to focus on Minecraft, Scrolls and eventually 0x10c that we own 100 percent ourselves instead.”

Strategic positioning is nice. So too is money, and even though it’s coming up on two years since the Minecraft beta went live, it’s still selling like gangbusters. Minecraft.net says that 10,709 people bought the game within the past 24 hours, which totals $288,607 and change in sales – and, at 30 percent, a cut of over $86,500 for Valve. That’s $2.6 million per month, folks, or $31.2 million per year. That’s an awful lot of money just to rent a spot for an already wildly-successful game on Steam, don’t you think?

Source: PC Gamer