Last night’s news about a possible Microsoft buyout of the indie developer responsible for Minecraft, Mojang sparked quite a reaction last night. A lot of people do not seem to relish the thought.

Now Bloomsberg have reported that far from Microsoft approaching Mojang as was assumed, founder Notch approached Microsoft first. The report states that Notch “reached out to Microsoft a few months ago, based on a positive working relationship on Minecraft for Xbox,” and that details have been being hammered out ever since that time. If the deal did go through it would also see Notch leaving Mojang entirely after assisting with the transition.

The news comes as a bit of a shock given that Notch has a reputation for being big on indies but not as much on bigger companies, having once famously pulled out of a Minecraft/Oculus deal after the VR company was acquired by Facebook. Personally I am still a tiny bit sceptical, but then $2 billion is a lot of money and you can never really tell.

All we can do now is wait and see whether there’s any truth to the news flying about.

Welcome, everyone to something new and exciting.

Starting TODAY, Sanitarium.FM is going to be committed to bringing you news, opinion and coverage of the best eSports has to offer. eSports is a massively growing section in gaming, and it offers us the chance to sit down and watch top tier players compete in some amazing competition. League of Legends, DOTA 2, SMITE, Starcraft II…these are the biggest games on the scene, and we’ll be working to cover them and do our part to grow awareness of eSports as well as share our love of competition and just plain awesome gameplay.

What You Can Expect:

• Tournament Coverage
• Patch Notes Breakdowns
• POSITIVE Coverage (We don’t like negativity. Unless it’s EA. Then we really don’t have anything else to report….)
• Embeds of streams so you can watch from the comfort of Sanitarium.FM
• A shiny new forum for you to talk it up about eSports. Its your community, make the most of it
• A few surprise guests

Whos Going To Be Involved:

Our two biggest eSports junkies are Digmbot and Novindus. Expect plenty of analysis and news from them. PredictedCyborg may pitch in from time to time, as well as Lonesamurai. Even Crimsonshade might get in on the act when he’s not busy beating the servers about the head to make them cooperate.  And…maybe some surprise guests.

You Keep Saying That About Guests:

Yes. Yes I do. Better keep a close watch on this section.

Thats the basic intro folks! Keep it locked here for more in the coming days!

In the midst of the Bukkit episode, it didn’t seem possible for another shockwave to hit the Minecraft community. But it has, and from a completely unexpected direction in some ways.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that according to “a person with knowledge of the matter” Microsoft have been in some serious discussion with the makers of the sandbox game, Mojang with the intent to acquire them for themselves.

The deal, said to be worth around $2 billion could be signed as early as this week. It comes as a bit of a surprise given what else has been happening recently though.

Minecraft is undoubtedly a very popular game and it’s easy to see why Microsoft would be interested. However, Mojang founder Notch has always been fairly wary of venture capital and big business and even once criticised Microsoft’s Windows 8 as being very bad for indie gaming.

All I can say is that the idea of a Microsoft-owned Minecraft makes me feel very… uneasy.

Following on from the DMCA filed against CraftBukkit and Bukkit that took down the popular mod from the Internet and set the community asking questions about just what was happening, the situation surrounding Bukkit’s future seems to be growing ever grimmer.

Yesterday and tomorrow saw many of the prominent contributors and forum staff quit the project, some citing Mojang as being the chief reason for them no longer wishing to be involved with the project. In other news VuBui of Mojang posted a few days ago to attempt to calm the uproar on the Bukkit forum in which he explained that finding themselves having to take more charge of the project meant that they were trying to figure out how to fit it into their current work schedule.

“Deciding how we can best help Bukkit and the community is going to take time, patience and some further investigation into the Bukkit project as a whole. We are only just starting to get our heads around all of this but we are committed to doing so and ultimately we anticipate that the result will benefit all those involved.” he wrote in a topic on the Bukkit forum.

As of writing CraftBukkit has not yet been restored for download, nor has Mojang confirmed that the project is completely dead. Currently though, it isn’t looking good for its future.

Bukkit forum “Mojang and the Bukkit Project”: [x]

Well, after the minor drama-hiccup of Bukkit’s abortive shutdown, in which it emerged that Mojang own Bukkit much to the surprise of many people; it seems that all is still not well between Mojang and all the people who made up the Bukkit project. One of the main coders has filed a DMCA notice that has resulted in CraftBukkit being taken down from the site it was available at.

The coder, who goes by the name of Wolvereness is responsible for a great many lines of code that make up the backbone of the Bukkit API that enables mods to work for clients and for servers. The DMCA, which has also been filed against fellow API client Spigot, alleges that the code that Wolvereness added to the project is being used without fair authorisation or credit under the terms of which the code is licenced. Also because of Mojang’s recent enforcement of the EULA, the DMCA also says that Bukkit itself is in violation of its own original GPL/LGPL licence. It’s actually somewhat more complicated (and confusing) than that, but this seems to be the basic gist of what is taking place.

As of the time of writing there has been no comment from Mojang, any of its prominent employees, or EvilSeph, the former lead of the Bukkit project on the situation publicly about what is happening behind the scenes or to reassure people that things can or will be resolved. The lead of Spigot has posted a news post about the DMCA and has since filed a counter notice.

We will be keeping an eye on events as they play out and will hopefully be able to update you as soon as something happens that will tell us whether or not this is indeed the end of Bukkit as we know it now.

Bukkit forum – “It’s time to say …”: [x]
Spigot Forum – “DMCA’d”: [x]
Reddit – “CraftBukkit, a hugely popular Minecraft server plugin, is taken down due to a DMCA claim. (xpost /r/minecraft)”: [x]