Rumors that Microsoft had been in negotiation to acquire Minecraft developer Mojang began to surface last week. Estimates of the negotiation had the sale coming in somewhere around an impressive $2 billion dollars and it seems those numbers were fairly accurate. Today, both Mojang and Microsoft have confirmed that the sale is official and the final number was $2.5 billion dollars.

Here’s what the official Mojang statement had to say about the motivations behind the major change…

As you might already know, Notch is the creator of Minecraft and the majority shareholder at Mojang. He’s decided that he doesn’t want the responsibility of owning a company of such global significance. Over the past few years he’s made attempts to work on smaller projects, but the pressure of owning Minecraft became too much for him to handle. The only option was to sell Mojang.  He’ll continue to do cool stuff though. Don’t worry about that."

For gamers who have been with Minecraft since the PC alpha and beta testing, it may seem hard to imagine the game existing without the presence of Notch. The co-founder of Mojang has been a vocal voice in the video game community and was incredibly open with his fans throughout the game’s popular development period. Notch, along with the other two key players at Mojang, will all be walking away from the studio to pursue other projects.

To the majority of the world, $2.5 billion dollars likely seems like an enormous amount of money even without any context, but let’s take a closer look at that number. For comparison’s sake, you might remember a few short years ago when Disney acquired all properties from Lucasfilm and took the helm of the Star Wars universe (films, video games, comics, television shows, and merchandise). That deal, for arguably one of the most popular intellectual properties in history, had a $4 billion price tag. Selling Minecraft, a five-year-old indie game, for more than half of the value of the Star Wars franchise takes the financial success of the building-blocks game to a whole new level.

The founders: Notch, Carl, and Jakob are leaving. We don’t know what they’re planning. It won’t be Minecraft-related but it will probably be cool."

Obviously, we expect to see Microsoft profit on the IP in every medium possible. Expansion packs, a sequel, t-shirts, and a movie are likely all in the cards for the franchise. Although Microsoft has commented on the sale, it hasn’t outlined its specific plans for Minecraft just yet. One detail the Microsoft team did offer, was that we can plan to continue playing Minecraft on multiple platforms…

Seeing that the game has only just recently made its launch of PS4, it is good to see that Microsoft intends to continue developing content for the non-Xbox and PC platforms.

Do you think thatMinecraft is actually worth $2.5 billion or did Microsoft overpay? Do you think the magic of the game will live on without the original creator onboard? Let us know in the comments.

Follow Denny on Twitter @The_DFC for more news on Minecraft and gaming.

Source: Mojang, Microsoft