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)
- and all other minecraft related products, like story mode, dungeons, ledgends, and earth
I havent yet seen a minecraft server that allows chat reporting
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.
Bedrock is a mess. Absolutely wild the things it wants you to pay for.
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.
And the stolen accounts.
having to use a Microsoft account to play
I mean… to play on most public servers, yeah, but there are certainly ways to play without an account.
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?
They sure didn’t have Microsoft volumes of money.
When one must measure their money by its physical volume, me thinks that’s too much money.
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.
Oh yeah absolutely, fuck that guy 110%
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.
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”.
Terraia and No Man’s Sky certainly leap to mind.
Stardew Valley… i’m sure there’s more
Space Engineers.
FactorioWell factorio doesn’t seem to be getting free updates anymore, that was mostly only during early access. They’ve decided to do paid DLC now instead.
The point is Minecraft is far from the only game that gets free updates.
Yeah definitely
Didn’t space engineers get abandoned? Or was that the medieval one
Deep rock galactic is fantastic, highly recommend
A lot of devs do it, you just don’t play them so you think it doesn’t happen.
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.
That’s definitely just a spin-off. It’s an entirely different genre of game and was never intended to be sequel. Same goes for the choose-your-own-adventure one.
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.
“mojangstas” is crazy
I remember thinking it was madness to spend that much on a game that was already on its way out…
Koolaid is cheap
and they did fuck all with it
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.
No, they did much worse than fuck all
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.
Every platform that doesn’t have Java? So like none of them??
@burgersc12 @aeronmelon Java may launch on pretty much any platform, but try running the Java version on any low end hardware, on base model consoles, on older smartphones, performance will absolutely tank
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
Nintendo Switch Edition was absolutely my favorite, and now you can only play it if you had a copy before they took it off the marketplace.
Apparently the Switch version runs so shity on the Switch, people hacked the Switch and put Linux on it and ran the game in Yuzu emulator which had better performance than running natively in the Switch OS. Maybe that’s more of a knock against Nintendo however.
@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
@MinecraftWikiEN @minecraft I struggle to comprehend that it’s been ten years.
Am I the only one who questioned the legality of them deleting accounts if they didn’t migrate?
They had some push to get people to migrate by giving them free Bedrock if they did but I missed that. Then they either started the promotion again or just combined the purchase but I’d already bought bedrock because I was curious about the ray tracing. For real, there was like a six month window there. I’m probably the only sucker to have done this.
And now Notch spends his time being a wasteful, hateful idiot.
wait what???
Yeah, apparently he decided to go hard alt-right at some point. Apparently with nothing better to do now that he’s retired from Minecraft development, he amuses himself by posting racist, anti-LGBT, and QAnon horseshit.
So much so that Microsoft actually removed him from the credits.
I am pretty sure he is still in the credits. They just removed random references to him in the splash texts, including an outdated one about his ex wife
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.
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
elaborate, please, I’m genuinely curious
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.
@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.
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!
@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).
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
