Now I love Minecraft, but as I business thinking person, I wondered just what a ballpark valuation of Notch's company Mojang would be with a run away hit like Minecraft. Notch has always been very transparent with his sales. So using that data, plus doing some internet detective work, and talking to guys around the office that do company valuations as a full time profession, I think I was able to come up with a pretty good, semi legit, valuation for Mojang.
Interesting Information?
- The site updates once a hour to use the most up to date numbers on the Minecraft stats page, but also has a running ticker that averages all the numbers its collected in the past.
- The Euro->USD exchange rate also updates every hour, so the USD number is as accurate as posable.
- Though I was using a lot of numbers from around the web that were in different currencies, I converted them all to Euros, because that's what's Minecraft is sold in.
- Being a pet project I used this opportunity to severely over-engineer the website. Things I learned (more of) for this project; Sinatra, Heroku hosting, web scraping with Hpricot, SASS, HTML5 Boilerplate, Postgres, YAML, valuation techniques, and way more facts about Sweden then I ever needed to know.
Now a disclaimer: I am not a professional company valuator, just an enthusiast. This valuation, if anything, is a gross underestimate of the value of Mojang, as I tried to always overestimate costs when I couldn't find an exact answer. Also I have no design skills, so just be happy the site is readable.
So hope someone other than me finds this kind of thing interesting. If anyone has any questions / wants to tell me how wrong I did it, send me as message, or just fork it for yourself.
Thank you.