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
10 years of enshittification.
Minecraft has not significantly degraded the original offerings to Minecraft has not significantly degraded the original offerings to better serve business customers. The only things i can think of are the featured servers and the marketplace on bedrock, which, even tough are bad, both can just be ignored(you can still import skins, datapacks, worlds etc) and trying to claim bedrock is the official version and that its better than java. If you previously had one version of minecraft, you also got the other version for free so the differences between versions are less of a problem
Minecraft has not significantly degraded their services for users and businesses. Other than chat reporting that affects bedrock edition and realms, i dont think there is anything else. Minecraft also had a lot of updates that improved the game
Has minecraft even tried to maximize profits for shareholders?
I havent played on minecraft bedrock for years so sorry if im downplaying the problems of that platform
I dont think that its fair to say that minecraft has been getting worse for profits for 10 years from 5 changes, 4 happening in 2017, and one(that only affects a small group of people) that happened in 2022, while ignoring all the ways minecraft got better
There are so many other things to complain about(everything i listed here, the copper bulb changes, fireflies being removed), but enshittification isnt one of them
It really is that bad on bedrock. Stability has gone down substantially and the game is hardly playable on some platforms that used to run it well. Java is currently making one of the biggest changes to performance in the history of minecraft right now, too (ender pearls will now load and tick chunks) so we’ll have to see if that’s making it into a title update, and how seriously it affects performance for the average user.
I had only played for a little while after the acquisition, and only with my kids. I have always wondered how the game is doing these days.
It is the only video game my daughter plays, and now that she is in college I have considered putting up a server that her and I can play.
For bedrock, yes, absolutely. Bedrock used to be lauded for its performance across multiple machines and it now runs like trash on every one with the most egregious storefront in gaming. You can spend 20 extra USD on bedrock to get a single mod-equivalent data pack. You can spend that much or more on minecraft skins that won’t work outside of bedrock. Minecoins as a premium currency targeted toward children are one of the worst examples of robbing a low information userbase in gaming all around, it has reached unbelievable levels.
and they did fuck all with it
You can’t say that, they gave us Bedrock Edition!
Really wish they hadn’t.
To be fair, Bedrock replaced a lot of stilted, proprietary console versions of the game. It doesn’t stack up against Java, but it’s the best version on every platform that doesn’t have Java as an option.
The legacy console editions were far better than Bedrock imo. They were actually made for a console instead of porting a mobile version to console
@DavidGarcia @MinecraftWikiEN They switched to glorious Microsoft account system citing “security improvements”, so there is that truthfully “great” thing that happened.
They pushed the version with microtransactions as the main version (Changing Minecraft Bedrock to just Minecraft and changing Minecraft to Minecraft Java).
Not to mention microtransactions existing in any real version of the game at all. Once upon a time, that was a joke. Now it’s not a joke.
@MinecraftWikiEN And then, Notch went mask-off, retroactively making the entire series morally questionable to support (no, the fact that he sold it away is irrelevant as he’s still the original author, and no, Miku is not the author either)
There is no politics in the game. Your task is to survive alone is cubic world, no one even talks. I think that whoever is the original creator is irrelevant.
@kilgore_trout I’d usually say that, but then there’s the entire issue of the villagers still being a vague stand-in for Jewish stereotypes (and then, to make things worse, said stereotypes then rubbing off to the Piglins in the Nether).
There are multiple splashes that appear on the title screen that may be considered political
Vote for net neutrality!
Information wants to be free!
/give @a hugs 64
Save the world – stay inside!
Black lives matter!
Be anti-racist!
Learn about allyship!
Speak OUT against injustice and UP for equality!
Amplify and listen to BIPOC voices!
Stand up for equality in your community!
Made by “real” people!
You are valid!
You are welcome here!
Your gender is valid!
Contains infinite genders!
Education for the win!
Why would the original owners beliefs affect the morality of supporting a series of games that hes not benefiting from?
They even removed all mentions of notch and added pro-trans splashes
@RandomVideos They should have also removed all the code and artwork he contributed to the project as well (which is to say, the project should have been taken out of the market). Otherwise it’s merely pushing the controversy under the rug.
Why would touching anything ever created by a controversial person be considered morally wrong?
@MinecraftWikiEN @minecraft > “Everything is going to be OK”
and, now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can now definitively say that everything was indeed not ok
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.
