Microsoft: buys the company that made Minecraft for $2.5 billion

Microsoft has purchased gaming company Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, for the cool $2.5 billion. The company shares that its partnership with the game maker began when the two discussed the Xbox One version of the game.

Since Minecraft’s launch in 2009, it has been downloaded by more than 100 million users. As Xbox boss Phil Spencer states, Microsoft will continue to make Minecraft available across non-PC and Xbox platforms, such as iOS, Android and PlayStation.

“Minecraft quickly became the top online game on Xbox Live, with over two billion hours played on Xbox 360 in the last two years. That working relationship set the ground work for other opportunities,” he added.

Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson allegedly doesn’t want to deal with such a large and global project that Minecraft has become for the past 5 years. That’s one of the reasons he, as the majority stakeholder of the company, wanted to sell it. The rest of the co-makers of the game, Carl, and Jakob, are also leaving the company.

Here’s the Microsoft announcement video of the deal.