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
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.