On this day 10 years ago, Microsoft acquired #Minecraft developer Mojang for US$2.5 billion.
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Mojang_Studios#History
In a blog post announcing the purchase, Owen Jones wrote: “Everything is going to be OK. <3”
http://web.archive.org/web/20140915131835/https://mojang.com/2014/09/yes-were-being-bought-by-microsoft/
Ten years later, Mojang now has been part of Microsoft almost twice as long as it has been independent.
It’s interesting to look back at the original announcement video from Xbox as well:
https://youtu.be/lXNWchwDiG8
For me the only downside is having to use a Microsoft account to play.
Otherwise I think the frequency of updates and continued support of the Java version have been pretty solid.
Some of the mechanics have changed but I often grow to like them when I stop viewing them in isolation. For example I thought it was annoying iron ore became drops, but when I found I could use fortune pick it all made sense!
You forgot bedrock marketplace and chat reporting, altho I would say that over all it wasn’t bad (the acquisition)
Bedrock marketplace is fully optional though. If you run Bedrock on a PC or Android phone, you can literally install worlds, skins, addons and texturepacks from the internet. They actually have their own installation mechanism (once you have made a texture pack for example, rename it from packname.zip to packname.mcpack , then clicking it will launch Minecraft and install it)
The only place where you cannot do this is on console… Which you weren’t able to do on the 4j version either.
Also, if someone on PC has a bedrock world open with custom sideloaded packs and add-ons, etc, and someone from console joins them, they work as normal for the person on console, which is pretty neat.
Many changes are fantastic but they add more and more stuff to a game whose inventory was built around having a fifth the number of regular items in your inventory. Shulker boxes are the coolest thing in the game…until they become necessary to manage the bloat, in which case they suck, because now it’s just an inventory square that takes forever to use.
They need to double the size of the standard player inventory, at least.
Yeah, this is so true. I always play with the datapacks from vanillatweaks that allow you to recombine certain block types back into their base type. Like wood stairs back into wood block. Makes it slightly more bare-able. Do you do anything to make it better? If you do, I need to know 😅
The outcome was unfortunate (no more games ever I guess??) but Tim Schafer’s announcement video was at least self-aware and funny.
“I always wanted to stay independent and free. But then I thought: what if I had a lot of money”.
I’m just confused because they already must have had a lot of money. How much you need?
Minecraft is also the only base game I know with a retail price that keeps going up instead of down. Quite bizarre if you think about it.
Minecraft is one of the only base games on the market that is perpetually having content and features added to it. For free.
And I don’t know of any developer other than Mojang that prioritizes and targets bug fixing to such a high degree.
Edit: TIL, some people see the phrase “one of the only” and think it means “the only”.
Factorio is always the same price… and the big 2.0 update is next month… with a paid DLC Expansion coming.
And it’s definitely worth the money! Just odd. I fully expected them to develop Minecraft 2 and 3 years ago to cash in and overwork some of the basics but that didn’t happen for better or worse, but probably better. It remains to be a truly unique game till this day.
Well, “Minecraft 2” was arguably Minecraft: Dungeons which as we all know categorically failed to set the world on fire.
Just want to say it’s good they didn’t kill or make the franchise super mundane. They bought it, and kept improving on it.
I don’t play Minecraft now, however I know enough people who still do and continue to love it (all these years later). That’s just nice.
I don’t know if that’s good honestly. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I think the simplicity of the earlier game was part of the appeal. Try playing it now. There’s so much stuff that I don’t know what is happening half the time. I’ll play it a bit every few years with friends, but every time it feels like they’ve taken things too far. Is anyone actually asking for more content?
I think it’s still simple enough, and actually simpler to get into and start playing now due to QoL improvements. I’m pretty casual, but I do run a server, and the Minecraft community who play regularly seem to mostly be asking for way more content.
It’s simpler in different ways. Understanding how to play the game is easier now, and modding is a cake walk compared to what it used to be (I wrote a mod for repairing equipment that got popular, which is almost identical to what they ended up implementing), especially adding custom blocks.
Understanding what to do is a lot harder. The dangerous stuff I caves that you can’t run near or whatever, for example. Good luck figuring that out without the wiki. It used to be you’d punch a tree and then start mining. There was a lot less stuff to figure out. Sure, you needed to look up the optimal layer for diamonds if you wanted to optimize, but it wasn’t required. Recipes you also used to have to look up, which was always dumb. Some recipes make sense, but especially as the game grew there’s no way you could try all the combinations of items to figure out recipes. I still think it still works the same in vanilla somehow, but I always install a mod for that, especially since it’s so much worse now and mods multiply it.
A lot of the game feels weirdly disconnected. Like there will be something that randomly only works with bamboo and not wood. Or how copper is hugely abundant but doesn’t have many real uses.
Vanilla definitely has enough content now to be fun on its own, but I still think modded Minecraft is best.
I’ve been thinking on this comment, and I believe I can understand this from another perspective.
I’m a fan of Call of Duty, and with MW3 (Game Pass, didn’t pay for it), and a couple of my friends got into it as well. The big difference right now is the plethora of customisations available, from guns to attachments and more. Compared to the old CoDs, this one can most certainly feel overwhelming in that regard and I’m sure a bunch of people question this level of game content progression.
I still play minecraft nearly every day with my wife, siblings and soon my kids. I have no love for Microsoft but the team working on Minecraft IMO has done a great job expanding the game. The new terrain generation, mobs, mechanics are all fun additions and holy cow some of the new composers they have on the OST are brilliant.
Im sure things would be different if Mojang didnt sell out but who knows how. The game we actually have today is just as magical to me as it was in the early days.
Im sure things would be different if Mojang didnt sell out but who knows how.
Notch would be less rich but still relevant, so I’m good with Microsoft owning it. Notch is enough of a shitter that Microsoft basically scrubbed him from Minecraft and didn’t even invite him to the 10th anniversary celebration of the game, which should be telling.
Oof that’s cold. Even Bethesda invites the fallout creators to events. What did Notch do?
He’s made comments over the years that suggest he is a white supremacist, a misogynist, and a Qanon-er. Microsoft removed mentions of him from Minecraft and didn’t invite him to the 10th anniversary, making a statement that his views do not represent those of the company.
