As predicted last week by the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft used its Xbox blog to announce that it has acquired Mojang AB, the Swedish company behind the blocky sandbox game Minecraft. Last week the rumors were that the company’s acquisition price would be a whopping $2 billion, although Reuters and a few others suggested a higher amount. According to Mojang AB’s blog, those guessing high had it right—the total amount was, as Mojang puts it, "a smooth 2.5 BILLION dollars."

The obvious fear when a large company swallows a small one for a valuable IP like Minecraft is that the large company is going to radically change the formula that made the IP successful in the first place. For Minecraft, radical change would mean altering the egalitarian, open-platform nature of Minecraft or undermining the vast community of livestreamers who monetize their own Minecraft experiences.

Though the deal is only just now being made public, early indications from both Microsoft and Mojang are that fundamental changes to Minecraft's formula won’t be happening—at least, not yet. "There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC/Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android versions of Minecraft to stop," says Mojang’s blog. On streaming, Mojang notes that "stopping players making cool stuff is not in anyone’s interests."

Microsoft seems to be toeing the same line, saying that it "plan[s] to continue to make Minecraft available across platforms – including iOS, Android and PlayStation, in addition to Xbox and PC."

What could be a boon to the Minecraft community is Microsoft bringing its tremendous focus, planning, and development resources to bear on the game. Development on Minecraft has been a haphazard affair since 2010, with original developer Persson adding whatever features seemed to strike his fancy without performing adequate testing. The expectation right now is that the majority of the company's employees will remain in place and working on Minecraft. Founders Markus "Notch" Persson, Carl O. Manneh, and H. Jakob Porsér, however, will all be departing.

Even after Persson withdrew from regular development on the game, Minecraft continued to add weird and unrequested features (including a bizarre "ending") while avoiding adding features the community repeatedly and loudly asked for (like a functional modding system that didn’t require hackey third-party server binaries)—in some cases for years.

If $2.5 billion seems like a lot, the figure is likely a product of Minecraft’s massive popularity. Persson and the other Mojang founders were millionaires on the back of Minecraft sales long before this buy-out; the main reason that Persson elected to sell at this point appears to be that steering a project as ludicrously popular as Minecraft became too much to deal with on a day-to-day basis. "Over the past few years he’s made attempts to work on smaller projects, but the pressure of owning Minecraft became too much for him to handle. The only option was to sell Mojang," explains Mojang’s blog post.

The Verge notes that Persson joked in 2012 that he wanted to sell Minecraft—for $2 billion dollars. He also made some pointed complaints about Windows 8 and what he felt was Microsoft’s attempt to "ruin the PC as an open platform." The rancor didn’t last more than a few months, though, with Persson happily helping Microsoft get the game certified and deployed on Microsoft consoles and tablets.