Wow, this article is far off base. While Notch certainly marketed himself a bit, his success really took off when Penny Arcade posted the iconic comic.
Author of the article in question here. Are you sure? The articles you refer to are just after the "PayPal Freezes $750K in MineCraft Dev's Account" news. This last part was of course, spread by Notch himself (another example of awesome marketing).
But let's agree, by then, Minecraft had already made $750K, which seems quite successful to me. And this was all before Minecraft hit the major new sites. Seems I left this part out of the article (I should probably update it).
Yeah, I would've mentioned something about the penny arcade article at least. I don't remember seeing anything about Notch or Minecraft in general discussion etc. until the comic went live. For that matter, I'd be very interested in seeing a graph of Minecraft's earnings from the early days, I imagine the spike was insane.
Minor edit: Yeah I would've mentioned something about how the marketing he did reached a self-sustaining cycle. Where suddenly the big spin about minecraft wasn't just that it was a good indie game, but an unusually successful good indie game.
In my mind the big selling moment was the "free weekend" during alpha that occurred because of a bug with the auth servers. He just decided to make the game free until it was fixed. During that time, it got a decent amount of publicity on reddit and tons of people got hooked. Come time that the auth servers were fixed, everyone bought the game instantly.
I just think Notch did a lot of things right overall. God, I remember that weekend.
I remember thinking that it was nice for once dealing with a company (or an individual) that seemed to care about the players. I was so used to game software/network bugs being badly handled.
Notch just always came off as a 'good guy Greg' of sorts, simply because he respected his users. Heck, even in the recent Molyneux interview on RPS Notch's I almost want to call it 'sportsmanship' is briefly mentioned. ("He didn’t take anyone’s money before making it with promises he didn’t keep.")
I think that more than most Notch's imprint is all over the current Indie Renaissance. The unprecedented success of Minecraft really shattered that ceiling.
More than that I really respect him for walking away from Microsoft and the monolith that Minecraft is now in order to build more games. I think it is incredibly brave (although I imagine there was more to his leaving than was publicly disclosed).
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/09/17 http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2010/09/17/mine-all-mi...
And, let's not forget part two:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/09/20/mine-all-mine-p... http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2010/09/20/mine-all-mi...