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Microsoft might be about to buy Mojang, which means, I guess, that Microsoft might be about to buy Minecraft. Let's think about that for a second. No, let's laugh about that for a second. Imagine! Imagine realising that you could buy Minecraft and believing, by extension, that you could somehow own Minecraft.That's not to say there aren't very good reasons for wanting to merely buy Minecraft, of course. This thing's sold around 50 million copies so far, and it's still in the charts doing well. A cut of that sort of action would be pretty nice, as would a cut of the merchandising empire that's grown up around Minecraft - the books, the T-shirts, the toys. Minecraft: The Movie - would people go for that? Could we get Ridley or Steven involved? Bear in mind, too, that the kind of people who are always itching to get Ridley or Steven involved are probably also the kind of people who increasingly worry that they will never truly understand what the kids might actually like these days anyway. Why not circumvent the entire headache of empathy and market research by just buying something you know the kids already like? Why not do all this and benefit from the good will that Minecraft brings with it while you're at it? The way Minecraft's synonymous with creativity and generosity and all the things that don't come to mind when you're opening MS Office at 9am on a Monday. The way a single screenshot, deployed at the right time - maybe 9am on a Monday? - can brighten your entire day.
And while we're on this, that's not to say there aren't very good reasons for hoping Microsoft doesn't buy Minecraft, either. I personally think Microsoft's capable of pretty delicate behaviour given the size of its operation, but that size-of-its-operation part is still a serious caveat. Like many mega corps, behind the desperate conversationalisation of public discourse, Microsoft can sometimes seem a little tone deaf to humanity. It's weird to think that the stewardship of the world's most human game could be headed to Redmond, to the people who signed off those Honestly adverts, to the people with Windows 8 and Kinect on their consciences. Then there's the Minecraft that's platform agnostic, running on iOS, on Android, on PlayStation. Surely Microsoft wouldn't do anything about the versions that are already out there. Would they? But what about the platforms of the future? What about the business model? What about the ethos behind the whole thing? Is somebody, somewhere, typing the phrase 'Minecraft 2' onto their Surface Pro non-ironically, and creating a mind map? Are they getting giddy and thinking, 'Man, we could ship this?'
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