Now I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of the users on this forum are from north america, and a smaller percentage are from Europe/Asia/Australia. You're all angry that Mojang is hardly working, but there's a good (and rather stupid) universal reason that is stuck in Europe in general.
I live in Italy right now, in a very downtrodden area, to be honest. I must tell you all that the European work ethic is COMPLETELY different from the North American work ethic. Here's how to put it simply, in North America, you live to work. In Europe, you work to live. This makes a huge difference in the work accomplished. Seriously though with the way Europe works at the minute Italy should've had a huge economic crash like 70 years ago (although for some reason hasn't). Again, Sweeden is still in Europe, and the work ethic is the same there, Work to live or going only as far as you need to and leaving it at that. This is partially the reason why nothing has really happened in Italy (or at least not where I'm staying at) and is applied to many other countries there.
I know it seems very silly that it works that way, but it does. Hell, in the place that I live or actually the vast majority of Italy, every store is closed from 1-5p.m., takes Thursdays and Sundays off, and Saturdays are half days. That and the work periods per day are usually at most 8 hours open maximum (save for the mythical McDonalds there).
My point is, it's not that Notch and his team are lazy, it's just the work ethic portrayed in the place they live, they were raised to believe that they should work only as much as they need to, and no more. Again, comparing some big time company that lives to work with a tiny indie company that works to live is ABSOLUTELY SILLY.
TL;DR Mojang works slowly because Europe in general works less than places like North America. You can't directly blame them for that. That and they're a tiny team of roughly 6 people working on a 3D game (much harder than 2D) and aren't exactly the best coders (like Valve or Blizzard).
Interesting to think about, thanks for letting us know. Sometimes you forget that people come from other cultures... Makes me wish I had been raised in Europe, haha! But the grass is always greener on the other side, amirite? :wink.gif:
Notch doesn't need to work anymore. He's a millionaire. He's really just doing it on his free-will. Plus he didn't sign up on continuing on minecraft, that's why he hired people.
Notch doesn't need to work anymore. He's a millionaire. He's really just doing it on his free-will. Plus he didn't sign up on continuing on minecraft, that's why he hired people.
Exactly, he's basically got it in his head that what he's done work-wise is enough, and doesn't need to do anymore until he actually HAS to. Lazy? Not entirely, just not given a reason to keep working, he's got more money than god, why on earth should he keep doing something he might not ever need to do again? European work ethics, man...
TL;DR Mojang works slowly because Europe in general works less than places like North America. You can't directly blame them for that. That and they're a tiny team of roughly 6 people working on a 3D game (much harder than 2D) and aren't exactly the best coders (like Valve or Blizzard).
Yes and no.
Personally, I've always taken into account the cultural differences. I know it colors my perception, and I cut them slack for that.
However...
That cultural difference doesn't prevent the team from being more efficient with their development process.
Nor does their size.
Nor does the scope of their project(s).
If anything, being small should be an advantage. No bureaucracy to speak of, tighter lines of communication.
They don't have to be a big, sprawling company to adopt tried-and-true production methodologies.
I've worked on projects with a couple-few other people, and I've worked on projects that've involved dozens of people in different departments. The fundamental practices don't really change.
Mojang can have their gameday Fridays, even if it'd wig most Americans out. They simply shouldn't schedule releases the day before it. That's just asking for trouble, no matter where in the world you're based. Common sense is universal, regardless of culture.
Yep, and the capital of Europe is Paris where you can buy drugs legally.
Haha, but in all seriousness this is one of the main factors contributing to it, again, if you have practically infinite money, why on earth would you EVER keep working? Especially when you live somewhere that reinforces that idea.
Who lives to work? (Work to me is something you get up to do that you dont want to do. As a very small minority of people I know love their jobs).
The only reason I intend to work (lol, im 30 :smile.gif:) is because if you dont you can't live.
That's true but then you have to take into account cultural attitudes to what is needed to live comfortably. In america and Australia [my home] people work longer hours to earn enough to pay for the things they believe they need to make them happy and secure in their lives.
This is why I have never faulted Notch and Co for how they do things. I've worked in France, NZed, and the US, and oh my word is things different. No one works like we do in the US except, perhaps, the Asian countries. Its not laziness: Just the way its done reinforced by Political Decisions made decades ago in which the governments became the primary source for everything needed to live. If you can game it right, you really don't have to work and can still have a decent lifestyle, at least, from what I saw in France. Not a slam or a statement, just the way things are. In fact, from what I remember from back in the day, you actually could not legally work more than 32 (Might have been 34, again, been a few years) hours a week. Period. No more hours for you! Dunno if its the same in Sweden or not, but good chance of it. Not to mention for the health and wellness of the workers, a lot of European Governments mandate an amount of Vacation time that has to be taken that leaves anyone that doesn't work for the government in the US green with envy. So, again, totally understand why it seems that they spend so much time *not* working. In fact, I bet the "Company Game Days" is a scam to actually get into the office and get at least some work done - maybe not much, after all, games are fun, but....
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Never use finesse when force works.
If violence is your last resort, you failed to resort to it soon enough.
But seriously, I don't mind the speed but more about their QA. I won't give a damn if Minecraft gets updated once a year but I will start giving a damn if update after update just brings things to a halt, especially SMP wise.
The OP posted some very educational info here. Thank you. I was already aware of a good portion of that but I'm sure many are not.
None of that, however, changes the fact that Markus created Mojang to allow him to get more done with Minecraft faster than he alone could. Any yet, there is still only one person working on it, the richest person who no longer needs to work... ( Over 10 to 20 million or more $ ) No one cares anymore whether or not he's lazy, we all are if given the chance, we just want him to have someone else work on the game too or instead of him.
While he's off on another series of vacations why not have a team of the employees that he is already paying, or new ones, continue to work on it, or maybe bug-test for a change? Him being on vacation is no excuse for the game development to stagnate, why does he have a company and employees?
I applaud you making this thread and helping to educate everyone, but the issue it addresses isn't even the issue anymore. Proper company management would manage around peoples vacations to still get the work done, that's why you have more than one employee...
If you lived to work you would work without pay. So whats great about working?
Accomplishing something and fulfilling a passion?
How to win at life:
1. Find out what you love to do and can't live without.
2. Find a way to make money off of that.
3. Live to work on something you live for.
4. Chicken dinner.
It just annoys me that to accomplish and fulfill a passion requires money.
Same. I'd actually like to see what the outcome would be if it were possible to totally take money out of the equation and see if we had enough people who were passionate about a variety of things to sustain a society. It likely wouldn't work since you don't hear of many people calling janitors or construction work their dream jobs and I've bumped into a sad amount of people who say the only thing they want in life is to make a lot of money. And of course trying it wouldn't even be possible since money is so integrated into our world.
But a little closer to the topic, I'm not sure if we can properly criticize Mojang since we don't really know what the average workday or workweek is like for them. Though if the whole European mindset on working is true, then... That kinda sucks. As an American, I can say that it's pretty much true that a lot of people here just live to work, which also kinda sucks. More people need to learn how to win at life. We'd all get **** done while doing it daily.
It just annoys me that to accomplish and fulfill a passion requires money.
* This isn't "aimed" at immodium. I constantly come across people that really need to be reminded of this for the sake of being properly grounded in reality, and this seemed as good a time as any to perform the service. :smile.gif:
Yeah, reality is annoying. And actually, it's not "money" that we "need". Once people abstract their needs to the "middleman" of money they start to lose track of reality and it all becomes meaningless to them. At which point they feel it should just be given to them for free.
In order to continue living we "Need": Air, food, water, and protection from the elements and other dangerous aspects of your environment. There are probably still some places in this world we could go to and live "the dream" without needing to worry about the annoyance of money.
But, instead of doing that we have decided that we want other people to provide the food for us, that water isn't good enough so we want other people to provide flavored water or other beverages for us. That a self-made shelter isn't good enough for us so we want other people to build and provide a nicer shelter for us. That we need other people to provide entertainment for us as well as mine materials and construct all kinds of hi-tech toys and devices for us. That we want them to spend their time teaching us whatever we want to learn etc. The list goes on and on.
You notice what the common element in all of that is? We want other people to work to give us things that we want. So there are really only two fundamental ways that can be made to happen: Either we provide services of equal value in return to these fine folks for what we get from them, or we enslave all of those people and make them give us what we want for non-equal reparation.
Money is just an abstracted system for making it easier to conduct these trades, nothing more and nothing less. Demonizing money itself is just a way of saying that you want slaves to give you what you want because you don't want to do your fair share. But yes, the reality of survival has definitely been annoying for everyone for millions of years.
* The attitude of wanting everyone else to give us what we want likely comes from all the years of our childhood where we became used to parents acting as partial slaves for us; providing all of our food, shelter, means of entertainment, education, clothing etc. for nothing in return. It can be really hard to break an addiction of life-style like that. And some people never break that addiction.
I actually have no problem with the Mojang team's work ethic. Sure, it's slow, but does it really matter?
I mean, all the people who are getting peeved that the update's taking too long are just kidding themselves. What, they'll have fun with a couple of bugfixes and maybe five, generally at most ten new features?
It won't amuse them for that long before they're back again, raving at Mojang for not working fast enough to keep things constantly new.
Sometimes, it's good to be able to get used to the new stuff before Notch and co bombard us with new features again.
Also, anyone who lives to work is just foolish. People like that are those that work without breaks, and end up breaking down or lashing out at someone every once in a while -- generally their spouse, if they're married.
Notch is smart enough to know that that approach is horribly wrong; any person who works for too long without relaxing for a good long time and relieving stress will just end up an absolute mess.
Mojang take frequent breaks to break up the monotony of coding... I've dabbled in some programming, and if there's one thing I know, it's that writing hundreds of lines of code is dreary, tends to be boring, and the only good thing is the rewarding feeling of having accomplished something. Notch generally adds new stuff that he likes the idea of, so people ought to get off his back.
As I've heard more than one person say here, Notch is already a millionaire -- he's smart enough to know that making a game with such a low price-tag is bound to attract pretty much everyone -- so he's coding Minecraft simply because he wants to. If we hound him too much, he'll probably decide it isn't worth it anymore.
So, calm down and just be patient. They work slow, but their work is quality work because of it. They take breaks often because just like everyone else, they like to have fun.
Tl;DR: Quit whinging -- Mojang have very good reasons for working slow, and you ought to be more patient.
Mojang is actually working quite fast if you ask me. Us North Americans are all obese, lazy, pricks who have been spoon-fed our entire lives and if we think something isn't being done right we will *****. Simple as that.
Feel free to keep speaking for yourself, "North American".
Yeah, I don't know how many of those mythical creatures there are though. Every single person I've ever known in all the years of my life in the US, as well as the other countries I've spent time in, work to live. There are certainly some very few people who get caught up in specific careers that pay a lot but take all of their time, but that's just more of a sad thing than something to define the other 300 million people by in the US for which that just does not apply. It's easy to just throw false labels around.
What you say is only half way true.. In Italy, Spain, Greece and many other South- and East European countries, it is true in most cases. But don't think that every European country is like that.
It is a fact that most countries have their own culture in some way, which is often based on national economy, government, wellfare systems etc.
Take Norway for example, here we are much more like America, and money is important to us (which is why we are on the top-10 list of wealthiest countries in the world), but when we need some time off, we travel to countries where we can relax, and those countries are often where the natives are relaxed of nature. Since we most of the time travel in the vacations, lots of people come to "lazy" countries in a bunch, and that's mostly when the natives have to work hard.
Coincidentally, most of the time, the countries with relaxed/lazy natives are the ones with lots of tourists :wink.gif:
I live in Italy right now, in a very downtrodden area, to be honest. I must tell you all that the European work ethic is COMPLETELY different from the North American work ethic. Here's how to put it simply, in North America, you live to work. In Europe, you work to live. This makes a huge difference in the work accomplished. Seriously though with the way Europe works at the minute Italy should've had a huge economic crash like 70 years ago (although for some reason hasn't). Again, Sweeden is still in Europe, and the work ethic is the same there, Work to live or going only as far as you need to and leaving it at that. This is partially the reason why nothing has really happened in Italy (or at least not where I'm staying at) and is applied to many other countries there.
I know it seems very silly that it works that way, but it does. Hell, in the place that I live or actually the vast majority of Italy, every store is closed from 1-5p.m., takes Thursdays and Sundays off, and Saturdays are half days. That and the work periods per day are usually at most 8 hours open maximum (save for the mythical McDonalds there).
My point is, it's not that Notch and his team are lazy, it's just the work ethic portrayed in the place they live, they were raised to believe that they should work only as much as they need to, and no more. Again, comparing some big time company that lives to work with a tiny indie company that works to live is ABSOLUTELY SILLY.
TL;DR Mojang works slowly because Europe in general works less than places like North America. You can't directly blame them for that. That and they're a tiny team of roughly 6 people working on a 3D game (much harder than 2D) and aren't exactly the best coders (like Valve or Blizzard).
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/286780-adv-church-of-lehparsi-released/
But i never knew this. Thanks for the info :3
Exactly, he's basically got it in his head that what he's done work-wise is enough, and doesn't need to do anymore until he actually HAS to. Lazy? Not entirely, just not given a reason to keep working, he's got more money than god, why on earth should he keep doing something he might not ever need to do again? European work ethics, man...
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/286780-adv-church-of-lehparsi-released/
Yes and no.
Personally, I've always taken into account the cultural differences. I know it colors my perception, and I cut them slack for that.
However...
That cultural difference doesn't prevent the team from being more efficient with their development process.
Nor does their size.
Nor does the scope of their project(s).
If anything, being small should be an advantage. No bureaucracy to speak of, tighter lines of communication.
They don't have to be a big, sprawling company to adopt tried-and-true production methodologies.
I've worked on projects with a couple-few other people, and I've worked on projects that've involved dozens of people in different departments. The fundamental practices don't really change.
Mojang can have their gameday Fridays, even if it'd wig most Americans out. They simply shouldn't schedule releases the day before it. That's just asking for trouble, no matter where in the world you're based. Common sense is universal, regardless of culture.
2) Sell over 2,000,000 copies.
3) You can now live, why work?
Damn you forum only allowing two lines in the signature.
- Thank you slimes.
Haha, but in all seriousness this is one of the main factors contributing to it, again, if you have practically infinite money, why on earth would you EVER keep working? Especially when you live somewhere that reinforces that idea.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/286780-adv-church-of-lehparsi-released/
That's true but then you have to take into account cultural attitudes to what is needed to live comfortably. In america and Australia [my home] people work longer hours to earn enough to pay for the things they believe they need to make them happy and secure in their lives.
If you could check out my map that be really sweet of you! Even just looking a the pic is appreciated! Thanks!
If violence is your last resort, you failed to resort to it soon enough.
Frogging Europeans! :<
But seriously, I don't mind the speed but more about their QA. I won't give a damn if Minecraft gets updated once a year but I will start giving a damn if update after update just brings things to a halt, especially SMP wise.
See? I'm not so malicious...
None of that, however, changes the fact that Markus created Mojang to allow him to get more done with Minecraft faster than he alone could. Any yet, there is still only one person working on it, the richest person who no longer needs to work... ( Over 10 to 20 million or more $ ) No one cares anymore whether or not he's lazy, we all are if given the chance, we just want him to have someone else work on the game too or instead of him.
While he's off on another series of vacations why not have a team of the employees that he is already paying, or new ones, continue to work on it, or maybe bug-test for a change? Him being on vacation is no excuse for the game development to stagnate, why does he have a company and employees?
I applaud you making this thread and helping to educate everyone, but the issue it addresses isn't even the issue anymore. Proper company management would manage around peoples vacations to still get the work done, that's why you have more than one employee...
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
- Dungeon Generator for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
- QuickSAVE-QuickLOAD for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
Accomplishing something and fulfilling a passion?
How to win at life:
1. Find out what you love to do and can't live without.
2. Find a way to make money off of that.
3. Live to work on something you live for.
4. Chicken dinner.
Same. I'd actually like to see what the outcome would be if it were possible to totally take money out of the equation and see if we had enough people who were passionate about a variety of things to sustain a society. It likely wouldn't work since you don't hear of many people calling janitors or construction work their dream jobs and I've bumped into a sad amount of people who say the only thing they want in life is to make a lot of money. And of course trying it wouldn't even be possible since money is so integrated into our world.
But a little closer to the topic, I'm not sure if we can properly criticize Mojang since we don't really know what the average workday or workweek is like for them. Though if the whole European mindset on working is true, then... That kinda sucks. As an American, I can say that it's pretty much true that a lot of people here just live to work, which also kinda sucks. More people need to learn how to win at life. We'd all get **** done while doing it daily.
* This isn't "aimed" at immodium. I constantly come across people that really need to be reminded of this for the sake of being properly grounded in reality, and this seemed as good a time as any to perform the service. :smile.gif:
Yeah, reality is annoying. And actually, it's not "money" that we "need". Once people abstract their needs to the "middleman" of money they start to lose track of reality and it all becomes meaningless to them. At which point they feel it should just be given to them for free.
In order to continue living we "Need": Air, food, water, and protection from the elements and other dangerous aspects of your environment. There are probably still some places in this world we could go to and live "the dream" without needing to worry about the annoyance of money.
But, instead of doing that we have decided that we want other people to provide the food for us, that water isn't good enough so we want other people to provide flavored water or other beverages for us. That a self-made shelter isn't good enough for us so we want other people to build and provide a nicer shelter for us. That we need other people to provide entertainment for us as well as mine materials and construct all kinds of hi-tech toys and devices for us. That we want them to spend their time teaching us whatever we want to learn etc. The list goes on and on.
You notice what the common element in all of that is? We want other people to work to give us things that we want. So there are really only two fundamental ways that can be made to happen: Either we provide services of equal value in return to these fine folks for what we get from them, or we enslave all of those people and make them give us what we want for non-equal reparation.
Money is just an abstracted system for making it easier to conduct these trades, nothing more and nothing less. Demonizing money itself is just a way of saying that you want slaves to give you what you want because you don't want to do your fair share. But yes, the reality of survival has definitely been annoying for everyone for millions of years.
* The attitude of wanting everyone else to give us what we want likely comes from all the years of our childhood where we became used to parents acting as partial slaves for us; providing all of our food, shelter, means of entertainment, education, clothing etc. for nothing in return. It can be really hard to break an addiction of life-style like that. And some people never break that addiction.
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
- Dungeon Generator for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
- QuickSAVE-QuickLOAD for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
I mean, all the people who are getting peeved that the update's taking too long are just kidding themselves. What, they'll have fun with a couple of bugfixes and maybe five, generally at most ten new features?
It won't amuse them for that long before they're back again, raving at Mojang for not working fast enough to keep things constantly new.
Sometimes, it's good to be able to get used to the new stuff before Notch and co bombard us with new features again.
Also, anyone who lives to work is just foolish. People like that are those that work without breaks, and end up breaking down or lashing out at someone every once in a while -- generally their spouse, if they're married.
Notch is smart enough to know that that approach is horribly wrong; any person who works for too long without relaxing for a good long time and relieving stress will just end up an absolute mess.
Mojang take frequent breaks to break up the monotony of coding... I've dabbled in some programming, and if there's one thing I know, it's that writing hundreds of lines of code is dreary, tends to be boring, and the only good thing is the rewarding feeling of having accomplished something. Notch generally adds new stuff that he likes the idea of, so people ought to get off his back.
As I've heard more than one person say here, Notch is already a millionaire -- he's smart enough to know that making a game with such a low price-tag is bound to attract pretty much everyone -- so he's coding Minecraft simply because he wants to. If we hound him too much, he'll probably decide it isn't worth it anymore.
So, calm down and just be patient. They work slow, but their work is quality work because of it. They take breaks often because just like everyone else, they like to have fun.
Tl;DR: Quit whinging -- Mojang have very good reasons for working slow, and you ought to be more patient.
Donate to help me buy people Minecraft accounts!
Feel free to keep speaking for yourself, "North American".
Yeah, I don't know how many of those mythical creatures there are though. Every single person I've ever known in all the years of my life in the US, as well as the other countries I've spent time in, work to live. There are certainly some very few people who get caught up in specific careers that pay a lot but take all of their time, but that's just more of a sad thing than something to define the other 300 million people by in the US for which that just does not apply. It's easy to just throw false labels around.
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
- Dungeon Generator for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
- QuickSAVE-QuickLOAD for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
It is a fact that most countries have their own culture in some way, which is often based on national economy, government, wellfare systems etc.
Take Norway for example, here we are much more like America, and money is important to us (which is why we are on the top-10 list of wealthiest countries in the world), but when we need some time off, we travel to countries where we can relax, and those countries are often where the natives are relaxed of nature. Since we most of the time travel in the vacations, lots of people come to "lazy" countries in a bunch, and that's mostly when the natives have to work hard.
Coincidentally, most of the time, the countries with relaxed/lazy natives are the ones with lots of tourists :wink.gif: