Personal dividends from 2011 shared amongst employees
Minecraft creator Markus Persson has gifted $3 million of personal dividends for 2011 to the rest of team at Mojang Specifications.
Revealing the move on Twitter, Persson praised developers at the studio stating all employees had played a “massive part” in the developer’s huge success.
“Before tax, my dividends from Mojang for 2011 was about three million dollars,” he said.
“I chose to distribute that to the other employees. Every single Mojangsta is a massive part of the reason Mojang is the best place on earth to work at right now.”
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This isn't some kind of unprecedented generosity on the part of "Notch". Bonuses are fairly usual when games are successful.
Nor is the size of the bonus pool exceptional. I used to run a development studio. From projects that were much less successful than Minecraft I paid the teams bonuses bigger than $3m - and I didn't feel the need to broadcast it to the whole world.
If $3m is all the the bonus the team has earned from $100m revenue, the team ought to be looking for employers that will appreciate them more.
How about a little perspective instead of just publishing whatever latest PR story comes out of Mojang?
3 million wasn't the whole bonus pool, it was Persson's personal dividend. And he gave it all back to the team, whom I'd have thought would have received bonus money already. I think that's pretty exceptional, and most importantly a lot of potential employees probably do too.
