He has followed it with several noteworthy projects.

People confuse popularity with merit. Things become extremely popular because of chance network effects. Humans are herd animals. You get a big hit if you are lucky enough to start a stampede. (Or if you spend a lot of energy carefully engineering a stampede).

Not getting a stampede doesn't mean you didn't make something amazing.

He did build something new and successful with 0x10c. That demo is amazing. Its a 3d shooter with an awesome laser gun and a _full 80s computer emulated inside of it_. And an abstraction for virtual peripherals, a virtual monitor, and a virtual 3d vector display. Its fucking awesome.

Did he make $100 million selling that? No. Does that mean it isn't awesome? No it absolutely does not. For starters, it was never for sale.

Here is a song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBAtAM7vtgc that is an absolutely horrible parody of itself (intentionally, for comedic effect (we hope)) that was in the top five of the charts for its category. It sold quite a lot of downloads, purchases and products. Incredibly popular. Complete crap.

Judging the merit of something on the basis of how excited the herd gets is completely wrong.

As a creator, I don't envy Notch. Imagine having the question "will this be another Minecraft?" in the back of your head EVERY TIME you sit down to try and make something. It's the same fear that comes after even a modest Big Success; will my next book beat the big one? Will my next album? It's easy to fall into a hole of just cranking out more of the same - my friend Ursula Vernon, for instance, is on something like her fourteenth book on her successful "Dragonbreath" series of illustrated kids' novels. Or look at how harshly J.K. Rowling's post-Harry Potter books have fared.

You can't always catch lightning in a bottle again. And I don't envy having that hanging over the heads of oh who am I kidding I would totally love to be in the position of potentially disappointing thousands of fans when my next comic doesn't appeal to as many people as my most successful one did.

If you're looking for an appropriate timeframe, you have to put his whole career in games in context. The first game he's credited for is Wurm Online, which he worked on between 2003 and 2007. He was also employed by King at least through 2009, when he started on Minecraft.

That is 6 years. Minecraft has been around for 5 years. If we take the premise that Notch comes up with really good ideas once every 6 years he works on games, he'll hit this timeframe next year.

Alternately, the clock might only start from the moment he stopped personally working on Minecraft, which was in November 2011. In that case we will have to wait another 3 years for him to collect ideas.

Is the definition of talent that one does something noteworthy on a regular basis?

I think that Phil Fish video that he linked really hit the nail on the head.

It's only been a few years. Not everyone can churn out smash hits like clockwork, even if they are really talented.

If he ever does create another big game, I'd expect it would be many years down the road, after he's toyed with a lot of ideas and had more than a few false starts.