Minecraft site up and running again, game launcher coming soon

Minecraft's website is back up after a traffic boost earlier in the week broke it.

So that folks loving the game don't break it anymore, its creator changed the site over to a cloud-based system.

"We've got five servers behind a load balancer, and a dedicated server for payment processing, and another for in game authentication and login, although that won't be in use until we update the game launcher," said Markus "Notch" Persson. However the web site's sales and player stats for Minecraft are not yet back up to speed.

The game launcher is said to be coming soon, and you can see a preview of it in the header image and through here.

Persson said the launcher, once live, will "ask you if you want to download the new update or not," when you start up Minecraft.

"Eventually there will also be an option in the launcher to choose where to load or save maps from," he added.

Thanks, BigDownload.