Mojang Studios

• 1. Introduction

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  Mojang Studios is a Swedish video game developer based in Stockholm, and it makes Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time. As of 2021 the studio employed about 600 people, with further offices in London, Shanghai, Tokyo and Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft is headquartered. It is a first-party developer for Xbox Game Studios. Yet the company traces back to a single sole proprietorship and a sandbox game built in spare hours. Its story raises several questions. How did one name end up belonging to two different companies? How did a young studio turn away some of the best-known investors in technology? Why did its founder decide to sell, and what did the sale do to the people left behind? And what became of the games that never reached players?

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• 2. A Borrowed Name

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  Markus Persson learned to program at the age of eight, with help from his sister. His father owned a Commodore 128 home computer, and the boy played The Bard's Tale and several pirated games on it. Because he was a "loner" at school, he spent most of his spare time on games and programming at home.

  After graduating and working for a few years as a web developer, Persson created Wurm Online in 2003 with his colleague Rolf Jansson. It is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. During development the pair used the name Mojang Specifications. As the game began turning a profit, they incorporated a company under that name in 2007, as an aktiebolag, the Swedish form of limited company. The name comes from the Swedish word mojäng.

  Persson left the project that same year and wanted to reuse the name. So Jansson renamed his company Onetoofree AB, and later Code Club AB. Persson, meanwhile, had joined Midas, later known as King.com, where he developed 25-30 games. He left when the company barred him from creating games in his free time.

  His next project, begun in May 2009, would put the reclaimed name to work again.

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• 3. Minecraft Begins

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  Infiniminer, a game from Zachtronics, had been released only months earlier when Persson started building a clone of it in May 2009. He reused assets and parts of the engine code from an earlier personal project. The first alpha version, now called Minecraft, appeared on the 17th of May 2009. The first commercial version followed on the 13th of June. Persson revived the Mojang Specifications name for the release and registered a sole proprietorship under it on the 18th of June.

  In less than a month, sales had earned him enough to take time off his day job. He quit it entirely by May 2010. Every sale went through the game's own website, so he split no income with outside parties. At one point the payment provider PayPal temporarily disabled his account because it suspected fraud.

  In September 2010, Persson travelled to Bellevue, Washington, to visit the offices of Valve. He took part in a programming exercise and met Gabe Newell, and the company offered him a job. He turned it down. Instead he contacted Jakob Porsér, a former colleague from King.com, to ask for help building a business around Mojang Specifications.

  Porsér quickly quit his job, and the two incorporated Mojang AB on the 17th of September. Persson stayed with Minecraft, while Porsér took on Scrolls, a digital collectable card game. Wanting to concentrate on making games, they hired Carl Manneh, a manager at jAlbum, Persson's former employer, as chief executive officer. Early hires also included Daniel Kaplan as business developer, Markus Toivonen as art director and Jens Bergensten as lead programmer.

  Porsér's card game would soon bring the young studio its first legal trouble.

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• 4. Staying Independent

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  One million registered accounts: that was Minecraft's tally in January 2011. Six months later the number stood at ten million. The success pushed Mojang to build a version for mobile devices. The game's Java-based framework would not work on those devices, so this version was programmed in C++. An Xbox 360 version was outsourced to the Scotland-based developer 4J Studios, which also used C++.

  Venture capital came calling. Manneh talked with a plethora of firms, including Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, and turned every one of them down because the company needed no money. Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and former president of Facebook, offered to invest privately in 2011 and was also refused. The studio ruled out both a sale and a public listing. That insistence on independence was said to have contributed heavily to Minecraft's success.

  Mojang marked the full release with Minecon, a convention of its own, held in Las Vegas on the 18th and the 19th of November 2011. Minecraft was formally released during a presentation on the first day. Minecon then became an annual event. In December 2011, Persson handed his role as lead designer to Bergensten.

  Kaplan said in May 2011 that, after many requests, Mojang planned to publish or co-publish games from other indie studios. The first was Cobalt, from Oxeye Game Studio, announced in August. An early version appeared in December 2011, and the full game reached Xbox 360, Xbox One and Windows in February 2016. Oxeye also made Cobalt WASD, a multiplayer-focused spin-off that Mojang released for Windows in November 2017 after a stretch in early access.

  By March 2012, Minecraft had sold five million copies. In November that year Mojang had 25 employees. In 2013 it released an education-focused version for Raspberry Pi devices. An exclusivity clause with Microsoft had limited where the console edition could appear. Once it expired, Mojang announced editions for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. In October 2013 it hired Jonas Mårtensson, formerly of the gambling company Betsson, as vice-president.

  Less than a year after Mårtensson arrived, the studio that had refused every investor would be up for sale.

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• 5. Selling to Microsoft

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  In June 2014, Persson, exhausted by the pressure of owning Minecraft, tweeted to ask whether anyone would buy his share in Mojang. Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts and Microsoft all showed interest. Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft's Xbox division, urged the newly appointed chief executive Satya Nadella to buy the studio, to set out "a pretty bold vision" for Microsoft's gaming business.

  There was a financial angle too. Microsoft held money in offshore bank accounts that it could not bring back to the United States without paying repatriation taxes. Nadella separately named the possible use of Minecraft with the HoloLens, Microsoft's mixed reality device, as a major factor. Microsoft first approached Mojang in June 2014 and made its first offer soon afterward. Mojang then hired advisers from JPMorgan Chase.

  Microsoft announced the agreement on the 15th of September 2014. The deal was finalised on the 6th of November, and Mojang joined the Microsoft Studios branch. Only three shareholders remained: Persson, Porsér and Manneh, with Persson holding 71% of the shares. All three left the company afterward, and Mårtensson succeeded Manneh.

  Bergensten said the change of ownership went against the studio's indie culture. Many employees were wary of what lay ahead, and some staffers cried at the offices. Anyone who stayed for six months afterward received a bonus, which came out of Persson's share.

  Microsoft's Matt Booty oversaw the studio, and integration was minimal. Mojang kept running independently, backed by Microsoft's financial and technical resources. That light touch shaped how Microsoft would approach buying other gaming companies.

  Persson himself would be left out of the game's tenth anniversary celebrations in 2019.

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• 6. Life Under Microsoft

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  December 2014 brought two announcements. Scrolls came out of beta, though further additions to it stopped in 2015. And Mojang and Telltale Games announced Minecraft: Story Mode, an episodic, narrative-driven game that Telltale would develop in the Minecraft universe.

  In April 2016, Mojang released Crown and Council, a turn-based strategy game made entirely by the artist Henrik Pettersson, who had been hired in August 2011. It was free for Windows, and an update in January 2017 added Linux and macOS versions. In February 2018 Mojang shut down the online services for Scrolls. It re-released the game that June as a free-to-play title named Caller's Bane.

  To widen the franchise, Mojang built two spin-offs. Minecraft Dungeons is a dungeon crawler. Minecraft Earth was an augmented reality mobile game in the vein of Pokémon Go.

  In May 2019, on the tenth anniversary of its first public alpha, Mojang released Minecraft Classic, a free browser-based version of that early build. By then Minecraft had sold 147 million copies. Persson was explicitly excluded from the festivities because of controversial tweets he had posted since 2016. They concerned gender, feminism and race, and expressed support for the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy theories. An update to Minecraft removed references to him.

  On the 17th of May 2020, Minecraft's eleventh anniversary, Mojang announced its rebranding as Mojang Studios, to reflect its multi-studio structure. A new logo came with it, designed at the agency Bold under creative director Oliver Helfrich. Minecraft Dungeons was released later that month for Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Minecraft Legends, an action-strategy game, was announced in June 2022.

  Leadership changed several times. Helen Chiang served six years as head of studio before moving up to Xbox Game Studios in December 2023, and Åsa Bredin replaced her. Bredin stepped down in February 2025 to focus on personal goals outside the company. Kayleen Walters took the post, joined by Amy Stillion as chief of staff.

  Mojang worked again with Double Eleven on Minecraft Dungeons II, slated for 2026. It also worked with Merlin Entertainment on a Minecraft World theme park, set to open at Chessington World of Adventures in 2027.

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• 7. Side Projects and Casualties

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  Catacomb Snatch, a shoot 'em up, was Mojang's contribution to Mojam in 2012, a game jam event run with Humble Bundle to raise money for charity. The bundle sold 81,575 times. The next year Mojang made three mini-games for Mojam 2: Nuclear Pizza War, Endless Nuclear Kittens and Battle Frogs. In 2014 it joined Humble Bundle's Games Against Ebola jam with three more: Docktor, Healthcore Evolved and Snake Oil Stanley.

  Other ideas never got that far. In 2011, Persson and Kaplan imagined a hybrid of Minecraft and Lego bricks, and agreed with the Lego Group to develop it as Brickcraft. Its codename was Rex Kwon Do, a reference to the film Napoleon Dynamite. Some descriptions call it a first-person shooter. Mojang hired two new programmers, and Persson built a prototype.

  The project was cancelled after six months. Announcing it in July 2012, Persson said Mojang wanted to focus on games it wholly owned. Daniel Mathiasen, then a Lego Group employee, later blamed legal hurdles that Lego had set up to protect the product's family-friendly image. Kaplan lamented that the Mojang staff had felt more like consultants than designers. Lego also considered buying Mojang at this point, but decided against it because it had not foreseen how popular Minecraft would become.

  In March 2012, Persson revealed 0x10c, a sandbox space trading and combat simulator in the spirit of Elite. It was set in the year 281,474,976,712,644 AD, in a parallel universe. By August 2013 he had shelved it, citing a lack of interest and a creative block.

  Minecraft Earth went into early access for Android and iOS in November 2019. In January 2021 Mojang announced it would be withdrawn from sale in June, with all player data deleted in July. The studio named the COVID-19 pandemic as the primary reason, since its effects conflicted with the game's concept.

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• 8. Courtroom Battles

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  In August 2011, ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Softworks, the publisher of The Elder Scrolls, sent Mojang a cease and desist letter. Mojang had tried to trademark the word "Scrolls" for its card game, which had been announced that March. ZeniMax claimed infringement of its Elder Scrolls trademark and threatened to sue. Persson offered to give up the trademark and add a subtitle. But Mojang ignored the letter, and ZeniMax filed its lawsuit in September.

  Bethesda's Pete Hines said Bethesda was not responsible for the suit, and that the issue centred on "lawyers who understand it". In October, Mojang won an interim injunction. The ruling held that Scrolls and The Elder Scrolls were too easy to tell apart, though ZeniMax could still appeal. In March 2012 the two sides settled. All "Scrolls" trademarks and applications went to ZeniMax, which licensed the name back to Mojang for the card game and its add-ons, but not for sequels or similarly named games.

  On the 20th of July 2012, Uniloc, a company specialising in digital rights management, sued Mojang. It claimed that the licence verification system in the Android version of Minecraft infringed one of its patents. The case, Uniloc USA, Inc. et al v. Mojang AB, was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. After hate mail arrived, Uniloc founder Ric Richardson denied involvement, claiming he had only filed the patent. The patent was invalidated in March 2016.

  In July 2013, the minigolf chain Putt-Putt sent a cease and desist letter to Mojang and to Don Mattrick, who had once been affiliated with the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft and had since joined Zynga. It alleged infringement of the "Putt-Putt" trademark. Persson shared the letter on Twitter. Attached was a Google Search screenshot of videos showing user-created maps that used the name.

  Mojang's lawyer, Alex Chapman, answered with an analogy. He said: "Suing Mojang for what people do using Minecraft is like suing Microsoft for what people do using Word."

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