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.
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.
People like to excuse this by saying you can install resource packs for free outside the marketplace, but to me that makes it even worse. That proves without any wiggle room that the only reason the marketplace is even there is to prey on ignorant kids.
Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
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 don’t imagine the average user has a bunch of enderpearls suspended around their world.
The real performance changes we should be keeping an eye on are the redstone ones. We’ll see how good those end up being and how many contraptions they break.
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.
elaborate, please, I’m genuinely curious