Tech giant Microsoft is reportedly looking to acquire independent game developer Mojang AB, the studio behind the "Minecraft" video game, according to IGN.
According to a source who claims to have inside knowledge about the business negotiations, Microsoft is willing to shell out more than $2 billion to buy the company.
The insider mentioned that the acquisition will give Microsoft, owner of the Xbox consoles, exclusive access to Mojang current and future games.
Its most popular title, "Minecraft," has sold over 54 million copies.
"Minecraft" was first released in 2011 but its beta version was made available to the public in 2009. Aside from this first-person sandbox game, Mojang is also currently working on the action sidescroller "Cobalt" and the role-playing game "Scrolls."
The acquisition, if true, certainly contradicts what Mojang founder Carl Manneh said in 2013. According to Manneh, due to the popularity of "Minecraft," Mojang has received a lot of buy-out offers from other companies.
The executives of Mojang, however, turned down the offers because they didn't feel the need to sell the company, Game Spot reported.
"We are living the dream, really," Manneh said. "An exit would be huge, but do we really need that money? In our case, we have the cash flow. We have more money than we need."
Once Microsoft acquires Mojang, the game developer will not have the same freedom it enjoyed while working on previous projects. Manneh believes this type of freedom is what drives the success of Mojang.
"We've always felt that the independence we have is one of our core strengths," the company founder said. "We can take decisions by going into a room and in 15 minutes we're done. We try to be extremely agile, to release games quickly."
For analysts, Mojang's decision to remain independent is a way for the company to maintain control while thriving in a growing video game industry, according to Reuters.
"It's such a small seed of an idea, but which works very powerfully, so they do not need to scale up to several hundred people to bring this to the audience in new ways," HIS Screen Digest's senior games analyst Steve Bailey said.
"I suspect they are just trying to keep it as low key as possible while they try and understand what they could do with it," he added.