MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Minecraft: Sobering

Some random thoughts: It's an entirely different thing, knowing that tomorrow is the closing date of the Mojang/Microsoft deal, and it actually being the evening before that date. It's sobering and a bit depressing to literally be on that threshold, having to face up to reality. Knowing that it's effectively the end of an era.

An end of Minecraft? No, certainly not. Microsoft have done a great job of indicating that they want the game to continue unaltered for as long as possible. Nonetheless, seeing 1/7th of the company leave is pretty depressing.

More depressing still is the unique knowledge, among my coworkers, as to how corporate acquisitions go. I've worked at EA Tiburon. I've been friends with the people who worked there both before and after the acquisition. I know how corporate buy-outs go, and I know how it's only a matter of time - years, maybe - before the parent company manages to insidiously force its corporate mantra onto the rest of the subsidiary. I know the same from when I worked at Vicarious Visions, this is not a single-company thing.

All of my coworkers think I'm being overly dramatic. They think I'm just being a nay-sayer, that I'm being overly negative. To some extent I wish they had been in my shoes, seeing a third of a subsidiary getting laid off just because their bread-and-butter franchise got nuked from on high at a corporate level due to flagging sales. I wish that they had gotten to spend a year unemployed, searching for random change in the house's couch cushions and drawers just to be able to buy a packet of ramen to eat for the day. At the same time, I wouldn't wish that sort of existence on my worst enemy.

Nobody knows what the future holds. Nobody knows what's going to happen. All I know is what's based on experience, and what that experience tells me is that the next 5 years is going to be trying and not entirely fun. What I cannot stand is my fellow coworkers telling me that I shouldn't be so negative, when they have never walked in the same shoes as me and know precisely fuck-all about how this will actually go.

Oh, and the best part is that Markus threw out a book that I had loaned him when he was cleaning out his office. One last impersonal "fuck you" from the co-founders of the company.