Mojang Studios

Mojang Studios began in 2009, when Swedish designer Markus Persson started work on Minecraft and registered a sole proprietorship called Mojang Specifications. He was reusing the name of a company tied to Wurm Online, a project he had left in 2007. The word comes from the Swedish 'mojäng', meaning 'gadget'. In September 2010, after turning down a job offer from Valve, Persson incorporated Mojang AB with Jakob Porsér, a former colleague at King.com, and brought in Carl Manneh as chief executive.

Minecraft's first alpha came out on 17 May 2009 and was making money within a month. In November 2011 the studio held the first Minecon in Las Vegas, where the full version was released, and Jens Bergensten took over as the game's lead designer. Meanwhile Porsér was building Scrolls, a collectible card game whose name led to a legal dispute with ZeniMax, and Mojang started publishing games from other indie studios, such as Cobalt. During those years it turned down several investors to stay independent.

In June 2014 Persson said he wanted to sell his stake. Microsoft completed the purchase on 6 November for 2.5 billion dollars, and Mojang joined Microsoft Studios, now Xbox Game Studios. Persson, Porsér and Manneh left, and Microsoft kept changes to the way it worked to a minimum. The studio expanded the series with Minecraft Dungeons (2020), Minecraft Legends and Minecraft Earth, an augmented reality mobile game that shut down in 2021. In May 2020 it took the name Mojang Studios.

It is based in Stockholm, with offices in London, Shanghai, Tokyo and Redmond. In July 2026, as part of a reorganisation of Microsoft's gaming business, it was moved to report directly to the Xbox division, and in October Maria Angelidou-Smith, previously at Reddit, became its chief executive. Minecraft Dungeons II, again made with Double Eleven, is slated for 2026, and the studio has worked with Merlin on the Minecraft World theme park, due to open at Chessington World of Adventures in 2027.