Scrolls' public beta due for release next month

Scrolls , Mojang's turn-based card collecting strategy, is finally set for a public release.

, Mojang's turn-based card collecting strategy, is finally set for a public release. You'll be able to tear open the game from the shiny foil wrapper of the internet next month - with the launch planned for some point around the end of April. Initially releasing in beta, Mojang are planning a discounted version for early adopters. It makes sense: they did the same for Minecraft, and that's now made about 25% of all the money in the world. Probably.

Speaking to Polygon, Mojang's Jakob Porser talked about sales expectations in the wake of Minecraft's roaring success. "That's hard, Minecraft is doing so well," he said. "People have asked, do you feel like this is a difficult second album and it's a valid question."

"The way we approach it is this is the game we wanted to make. We realize it's a narrow genre compared to what Minecraft has become. I have no expectation that Scrolls is going to sell way beyond Minecraft, absolutely not. What I would like is for the game to find a core, a bunch of players that actively love the game. The beautiful thing with Mojang and the success of Minecraft is that we really don't have that pressure, that every game has to sell x amount of copies or we're going to go bankrupt. So we're in a good position that we can experiment and try some of the stuff that we want to do and we are going to do that."

"We don't want to screw people over by saying, 'Here is Minecraft 2, it's exactly like Minecraft 1, but give us more money."

In the interview, Pilsner also reaffirms support for free updates to Scrolls, saying the developers see the game more as a "service". He also talks about monetization, saying that Mojang are considering purchases for avatar customisation or deeper stat-tracking, but reassuring that, "we want to keep [the core game experience] as far away from monetization as possible."

Thanks, The Verge.