Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
Minecraft maybe? I would say at the minimum it’s a net neutral but considering how far off the deep end Notch is now I imagine it was a good thing.
If I had to pin an exact date on it, it’d be when he bought the most expensive mansion in Beverly Hills (at the time, $70M was a lot for a mansion).
Why? Because you need to deal with life changes one thing at a time. Pro-tip for the future billionaires currently scrolling this comment section: don’t move away from your friends, family, and home country immediately after getting rich – it might screw with your head a little bit. Do what the old money does: stay grounded, dress down, and pretend to be normal.
pretend to be normal
Me, penniless: Yep, I’m so normal *nervous laughter*
Yeah - he decided he wanted a billion dollars more than he wanted his friends. All he had to do was share.
If you have to share your money for your friends to stick around you, they’re not really friends.
In addition to suddenly being a billionaire, I’m sure life in the public eye didn’t help his situation at all, especially to someone who I imagine spends/spent a lot of time online reading comments from armchair psychologists speaking about him.
They’ve made some pretty awful changes to the game since. That being said, I bet minecraft would have fizzled out if microsoft didn’t purchase them. They’re still pumping out regular updates and its popularity is huge. I’d definitely consider the acquisition an overall win.
Accidental delete.
Like forcing everyone over to a microsoft account, which will sneakily force you to hand over your phone number for verification for “suspicious activity” ~1 week after registration, no matter what you do or don’t do.
There was also something about channeling all server chat messages to a central filtering team/system, and irreversibly banning anyone who said something that’s not “child safe”, even if it was just on a private server where the measure was not turned off
The game has overall become way too easy. 1.14 villagers completely broke gameplay making trading and building iron farms way too boring. The pre-1.14 mechanics were way more balanced and fun. Raid farms are just way too powerful especially with the nerf to natural spawning that 1.18 brought making witch farms basically unusable. Loads of features like that which just made things too easy. It feels like you’re rewarded too much for very little effort.
Chat reports and microsoft migration are also really controversial, of course.
Not to say that they haven’t made lots of positive changes but that’s my main gripe with the development over the past few years.
I think the development was reinvigorated when microsoft joined the team here.
The whole ‘censorship’ narrative was a nazi psy-op. I literally didn’t even hear about it because I blocked all the mientubers for unrelated issues, and the one guy who did eventually tip me off its existence was essentially parroting talking points straight from that guy who I blocked after I caught him trying to groom his majority child audience that what Notch said on twitter was OK and he was being cancelled.
Like obviously I don’t trust macroshaft to do any chat moderation since they seem to think cracker is a deeply offensive racial slur but ret–d is just harmless banter, but when literally everyone making a stink about it is either an outright nazi propagandist or has close ties to one, it’s hard not to see what’s going on.
The censorship is kind of rediculous, tbh I thought that was in before Microsoft. Don’t see the rest as negative, and development seems more stable in the new groove, with regular larger updates. Couldn’t vote on mobs at all before, and there is DLC for Minecraft??
I’m not familiar with the detail of that one - was he always a lunatic, or did that come with the money following the buyout?
I don’t know if it is better than when notch was in charge, but certainly they have updated it more frequently and have taken good care of it, true.
I think it was at its best once Jeb started to take the reins. Notch wasn’t really good at adding features that were actually fun to play with. I liked that they were willing to take risks but that quickly soured as it pairs extremely poorly with their excessive traditionalism. It took like 5 years for them to undo the disastrous combat changes when it became quickly apparent that they sucked, and the hunger/sprinting mechanics are still a pure cancer to the experience to this day. I want to see them make big sweeping changes like in the earlier days while also not being afraid to dial it back or try again if it ends up not being fun.
