Mojang Studios

Following the game's initial release, Persson, in conjunction with Jakob Porsér, incorporated the business as Mojang AB in late 2010, and they hired Carl Manneh as the company's chief executive officer.With a desire to move on from the game, Persson offered to sell his share in Mojang, and the company was acquired by Microsoft in November 2014.As of 2021, the company employs approximately 600 people and has additional locations in London, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft is headquartered.Mojang Studios was founded by Markus Persson, a Swedish independent video game designer and programmer, in 2009.[4] In May 2009, Persson began working on a clone of Infiniminer, a game developed by Zachtronics and released earlier that year.[3][4][12] While Persson continued working on Minecraft, Porsér would develop Scrolls, a digital collectable card game.[13][14] Wishing to focus on game development, they hired Carl Manneh, the manager of jAlbum, Persson's previous employer, as chief executive officer.Other significant early hires included Daniel Kaplan as business developer, Markus Toivonen as art director, and Jens Bergensten as lead programmer.[18][19] A multiplayer-focused spin-off, Cobalt WASD, was also developed by Oxeye Game Studio and released by Mojang for Windows in November 2017 after some time in early access.[23] Following Minecraft's full release, Persson transferred his role as lead designer for the game to Bergensten in December 2011.[4][25] At the time, the studio ruled out being sold or becoming a public company to maintain its independence, which was said to have heavily contributed to Minecraft's success.[28] Furthermore, the company had $2.5 billion in offshore bank accounts that it could not bring back to the United States without paying repatriation taxes.[24] Nadella separately stated the possible use of Minecraft with the HoloLens, Microsoft's mixed reality device, to have been a major factor in pursuing the acquisition.[42] In April 2016, Mojang released Crown and Council, a game entirely developed by artist Henrik Pettersson (who had been hired in August 2011), for free for Windows.[45] Mojang discontinued the online services for Scrolls in February 2018 and re-released the game under a free-to-play model and with the name Caller's Bane in June.[66] Upon announcing the cancellation in July 2012, Persson stated that the move was performed so that Mojang could focus on the games it wholly owned.[86] In response to hate mail, Uniloc founder Ric Richardson denied his involvement, claiming to have only filed the patent.Attached to the letter, which Persson shared on Twitter, was a Google Search screenshot showing videos of user-created maps using the name.