Blocks and Billions

Minecraft's first years as a hit product were partly spent inside two lawsuits, and neither of them was ever priced in public. One was over a word: a card game called Scrolls, and a publisher that sai…

Minecraft has given its updates away for free since 2009, and the people who make them are the part of the story nobody counts. This episode follows the studio instead of its founder: the twenty-five…

Minecraft has sold more than three hundred million copies, and every one of those buyers got the updates afterwards for nothing. That is the promise the game made in 2009, and it has kept it. This epi…

On the twentieth of September, 2017, Mojang stopped selling its own console version of Minecraft and put a different one in its place. The version that won was not the PC game that started it all: it…

In June 2014 the people running Minecraft's biggest servers were running real businesses — and most of them believed they were doing nothing wrong. This episode follows the server economy that grew up…

In May 2009 a programmer in Stockholm spent six days building a game and gave it away. By 2014 the company that grew around it was bought for two and a half billion dollars, and he had left. This epis…