This is a fake news story. This post is a work of FICTION. It is not true, and hopefully it never will be. With all the doomsayers about Minecraft's future, I thought it would be funny to write. But I realize now that this is in poor taste. But having already written it, I might as well post it. I just hope that Microsoft and the forum moderators take this in good humor. Otherwise, so long and thanks for all the fish!
Title: How Microsoft destroyed Minecraft.
Jun 22, 2020
This is a historical reference to how business tycoon Microsoft destroyed one of the most popular games in history, in a short 2 years.
Microsoft acquired the small game company Mojang, and it's wildly successful Minecraft for 2.5 billion USD. Unfortuantely Mojang wasn't worth even a fraction of that, at a scant 120 million in total profits.
After the deal had been finished, Microsoft started to have buyers remorse in a way, realizing that the Minecraft community wanted everything to stay exactly as it was. Unfortunately that didn't leave much room for Microsoft to monetize the game. They decided that the best way to get a short term gain to help recoup thier initial costs was to remove the appearance modification of all the players in the game. Mojang had grandfathered in a lot of this for early players. After careful consideration, they removed it only for the non-alpha, and non-beta players of the game, and started to charge 2 to change the appearance of your game avatar. For every change.
It wasn't a one time payment, whenever you wanted to change your look, $2, what's more they had removed the custom appearance of much of the minecraft community. There was much venom and gnashing of teeth, but despite the loss of a small number of players, most of the community payed up... once. Not many people they found changed their player skin very often at all. But they quickly raked in millions in profit. But the success would be short lived, as many decided to just stick with a skin, rather then changing it. Seeing the great success of this strategy, they grew more bold in their desire to charge for existing features. But knew that if they were too bold, the community would abandon the game entirely, which would leave them with very little for their purchase.
So they added a global server index to the game, to play a multiplayer game, you needed to register for the global multiplayer server list. So that it would appear on the list. You could no longer manually add servers. The registration was rather cheap, a 1 time cost of $5 for an address, unless they detected the server down for more then a day or two.
In which case it would cost another $5 to readd it to the list. Again, venom and hate from the community, the whole community rose up against this monstrous addition, and Microsoft back peddled. Obviously they did too much too quickly, and quickly issued an addendum, that they had mistakenly said every sever. They went on to "correct" the mistake, saying that it was only larger servers that needed pay the registration fee. That is, any server that wanted to host more then 20 simultaneous players. (If you tried to host more, you would be removed from the list until you went under the maximum or payed the fee).
This slight retreat was still hated, the community demanding they remove the fee entirely, but the Redmond company stood it's ground, and won big for it. They gained millions, as new multiplayer servers were constantly being created. Many new server owners thought they would be the next big server and so payed the fee, only to have fewer then 10 normal players on the server. What's more the list made it easier to find popular servers, allowing already large servers to gain more players. Destructive players known as "Griefers" to the larger minecraft community could also hold a server hostage, by flooding the server to capacity until they owner broke down and rebooted (kicking everyone) or payed the fee to raise the server capacity. Many attempted to circumvent at this by reporting a false current and maximum, only for them to be banned from the Mojang site (losing access to the game entirely) when found out, as the registration was linked to their Mojang account. Many decided the risk wasn't worth it, and others decided to leave Minecraft forever. Not long after this, Microsoft released the much anticipated development kit for Minecraft, rather then the modding API, it was a almost full version of the source code (minus a number of key components). The kit would allow mods to be made faster and easier, however it costed $100 to purchase. This almost destroyed the community efforts to decode the game by way of uncompiling. The source was very useful to modders, but the lack of many key files made it impossible to make an offshoot of the game. A compiled binary and a complex development tool was required to inject a mod into the game.
But still it was brought with much fanfare, and many modders appreciated the source code. This also allowed microsoft to start cracking down on mods which did not use the development kit. Claiming that they were using Microsoft property without purchase (the source code), they shut down many would be modders. Sending a shock through the community as offending forum threads were quickly deleted and people who released the development kit freely were quickly found and sued. Apparently each version of the development kit was unique, and microsoft could killswitch the tool needed to convert the modified source into a proper minecraft mod with any given kit. There were attempts to circumvent this check initially, but it needed to be done for each new version of minecraft, as older tools did not work on the newer source, and the kits which were "compromised" could never update.
But still the community soldered on. Fresh influxes of players had begun to flood the community as Microsoft pushed advertisements where Minecraft popularity had previously been purely word of mouth. Much of the older community was pained by the changes that Microsoft had brought, but many had pointed out it could have been much worse, and they believed the worse of the changes were behind them...
Part 2 is cancelled. I don't think it would be of help to the community to continue this (for now anyway, maybe in a year or two when the smoke clears). I would not be surprised if this page goes 404, but I was always taught not to be scared of posting your work, even if controversial. It hasn't gotten my lynched yet.
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Curse PremiumTitle: How Microsoft destroyed Minecraft.
Jun 22, 2020
This is a historical reference to how business tycoon Microsoft destroyed one of the most popular games in history, in a short 2 years.
Microsoft acquired the small game company Mojang, and it's wildly successful Minecraft for 2.5 billion USD. Unfortuantely Mojang wasn't worth even a fraction of that, at a scant 120 million in total profits.
After the deal had been finished, Microsoft started to have buyers remorse in a way, realizing that the Minecraft community wanted everything to stay exactly as it was. Unfortunately that didn't leave much room for Microsoft to monetize the game. They decided that the best way to get a short term gain to help recoup thier initial costs was to remove the appearance modification of all the players in the game. Mojang had grandfathered in a lot of this for early players. After careful consideration, they removed it only for the non-alpha, and non-beta players of the game, and started to charge 2 to change the appearance of your game avatar. For every change.
It wasn't a one time payment, whenever you wanted to change your look, $2, what's more they had removed the custom appearance of much of the minecraft community. There was much venom and gnashing of teeth, but despite the loss of a small number of players, most of the community payed up... once. Not many people they found changed their player skin very often at all. But they quickly raked in millions in profit. But the success would be short lived, as many decided to just stick with a skin, rather then changing it. Seeing the great success of this strategy, they grew more bold in their desire to charge for existing features. But knew that if they were too bold, the community would abandon the game entirely, which would leave them with very little for their purchase.
So they added a global server index to the game, to play a multiplayer game, you needed to register for the global multiplayer server list. So that it would appear on the list. You could no longer manually add servers. The registration was rather cheap, a 1 time cost of $5 for an address, unless they detected the server down for more then a day or two.
In which case it would cost another $5 to readd it to the list. Again, venom and hate from the community, the whole community rose up against this monstrous addition, and Microsoft back peddled. Obviously they did too much too quickly, and quickly issued an addendum, that they had mistakenly said every sever. They went on to "correct" the mistake, saying that it was only larger servers that needed pay the registration fee. That is, any server that wanted to host more then 20 simultaneous players. (If you tried to host more, you would be removed from the list until you went under the maximum or payed the fee).
This slight retreat was still hated, the community demanding they remove the fee entirely, but the Redmond company stood it's ground, and won big for it. They gained millions, as new multiplayer servers were constantly being created. Many new server owners thought they would be the next big server and so payed the fee, only to have fewer then 10 normal players on the server. What's more the list made it easier to find popular servers, allowing already large servers to gain more players. Destructive players known as "Griefers" to the larger minecraft community could also hold a server hostage, by flooding the server to capacity until they owner broke down and rebooted (kicking everyone) or payed the fee to raise the server capacity. Many attempted to circumvent at this by reporting a false current and maximum, only for them to be banned from the Mojang site (losing access to the game entirely) when found out, as the registration was linked to their Mojang account. Many decided the risk wasn't worth it, and others decided to leave Minecraft forever. Not long after this, Microsoft released the much anticipated development kit for Minecraft, rather then the modding API, it was a almost full version of the source code (minus a number of key components). The kit would allow mods to be made faster and easier, however it costed $100 to purchase. This almost destroyed the community efforts to decode the game by way of uncompiling. The source was very useful to modders, but the lack of many key files made it impossible to make an offshoot of the game. A compiled binary and a complex development tool was required to inject a mod into the game.
But still it was brought with much fanfare, and many modders appreciated the source code. This also allowed microsoft to start cracking down on mods which did not use the development kit. Claiming that they were using Microsoft property without purchase (the source code), they shut down many would be modders. Sending a shock through the community as offending forum threads were quickly deleted and people who released the development kit freely were quickly found and sued. Apparently each version of the development kit was unique, and microsoft could killswitch the tool needed to convert the modified source into a proper minecraft mod with any given kit. There were attempts to circumvent this check initially, but it needed to be done for each new version of minecraft, as older tools did not work on the newer source, and the kits which were "compromised" could never update.
But still the community soldered on. Fresh influxes of players had begun to flood the community as Microsoft pushed advertisements where Minecraft popularity had previously been purely word of mouth. Much of the older community was pained by the changes that Microsoft had brought, but many had pointed out it could have been much worse, and they believed the worse of the changes were behind them...
Part 2 is cancelled. I don't think it would be of help to the community to continue this (for now anyway, maybe in a year or two when the smoke clears). I would not be surprised if this page goes 404, but I was always taught not to be scared of posting your work, even if controversial. It hasn't gotten my lynched yet.
He scream