Minecraft and Microsoft: What now? Mark Ward Technology correspondent for BBC News
You can see the reason Minecraft-maker Mojang was bought by Microsoft by playing the game.
The single-player version is about a lone individual surviving in a harsh world with only their ingenuity to keep them safe. Their survival depends on building a home, fighting monsters with only the tools and weapons they have at their disposal.
If computer games were subject to the same analysis applied to novels it would be easy to read this as a metaphor for the life of Markus "Notch" Persson, the game's creator. He has spoken in the past about growing-up "relatively poverty", about creating his own entertainment and about whether he will have trouble conquering the "demons” that troubled him father.
Notch's family, friends and the success he made with his hands helped him thrive in this harsh world. But, that success has also brought him other challenges. And ones that are much harder to conquer.
Minecon 2012 was a clear example of what had happened. Notch was unable even to walk more then a few feet before being grabbed by yet another fan who was eager to shake his arm, take a photograph, or sign his foam sword.
People are the power
He was never happy with his transformation from a humble programer responsible only for his code to the leader a global organization. His heartfelt explanation about why he left Mojang - "it’s for my sanity"- is a clear reminder of that.
He knows that Minecraft is now about overseeing a community - much, much more than it is about maintaining and developing a codebase.
And therein lies the potential problem for Microsoft.
It is clear that Xbox Live and its cloud services have a lot of experience in managing large scale computer infrastructures that support millions of paying customers. It will be crucial when it starts running the behind the scenes systems that keep Minecraft alive.
But Microsoft will alienate that community if it does not realise how personal the game is, not just for Notch, but for many of the people who play it. It's where they meet and make new friends, where their creative and technical skills are displayed, and where they feel at home.
I've seen this with my children, who play it in very different ways. One is a big fan of modified versions that involve arena battles or capture-the-flag-type competitions. The other spends hours building intricate homes around swooping tracks of minecarts. He has even built treehouses that span forests. They also regularly go adventuring with their friends seeking treasure, avoiding creepers, and battling spiders, zombies and skeletons.
Minecraft's freedom, openness, and accessibility allow them and millions of others to achieve this feat. The game's flexibility allows them to change it to suit their needs. It does this by giving people a degree of access that Microsoft, in its business software, has never embraced. And that is what has got the millions who play Minecraft worried. These fans don't want Microsoft to restrict their freedom to create and modify the game as they wish. They feel an ownership of the things they create within the game.
GAME BLOG
Microsoft has to accomplish this difficult task given how important that community can be.
It will have to fight the two main enemies of online gamers - downtime (aka delay) and lag. Microsoft is likely to blame any future issues with the game's availability for the company, whether it is its fault or not.
Making more drastic changes to the running of the game such as limiting how people can modify it, charging them for things that are currently free or imposing restrictions on how they can tell the world about what they have done, might, if handled poorly, turn a big chunk of that community against Microsoft.
That would be bad, given that many of its players are now children who will grow up to be the gamers of the future. No doubt Microsoft is hoping to impress them with the way it handles Minecraft. If it gets it wrong, it could end up being one of the monsters that people want to take on and slay.