Minecraft sells the unfinished alpha at half price, funding development as price climbs

In 2009 Markus 'Notch' Persson, a programmer at King in Stockholm, built the Minecraft prototype in six days and faced a familiar indie problem: no publisher meant no budget for the long road to a finished game. His answer was to put the unfinished alpha on his own website and sell it at about $13 — half the price he planned for the final game — with the promise that everyone who bought early would receive every future update free.

The scheme worked as both a funding mechanism and a marketing hook. The alpha was sold under a 'half price' label, the price rose as the game matured (around €14.95 at beta, €20 at release), and sales began with 15 copies on the first day. Notch published development diaries on the TIGSource forums, and by September 2010 more than 20,000 copies had sold — enough for him to quit his day job and found Mojang with no venture capital.

The model, which Notch later called the 'Minecraft Cortex Command Model,' turned players into early funders: they paid less for the privilege of playing an unfinished game, and the developer received revenue while development was still happening. Minecraft passed 4 million sales before its official release in November 2011, and the approach spread across the industry as early access.