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
That’s a plug-in though, there’s no way to do it in vanilla.
There is a boolean in the server.proprieties files that, if i understand correctly, makes the server unable to verify your messages and disables 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.
Not necessarily double it, but add a row, two, or add bags that increase the inventory, maybe with a special type (ore bag, flower bag, etc.). Mods had it handled more than 10 years ago.
Yeah, this is so true. I always play with the datapacks from vanillatweaks that allow you to recombine certain block types back into their base type. Like wood stairs back into wood block. Makes it slightly more bare-able. Do you do anything to make it better? If you do, I need to know 😅
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.
At least the accounts are more secure now when they are Microsoft accounts. I remember being quite annoyed that Mojang accounts didn’t support MFA.
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.
They had a lot of money, but MS probably added a couple zeros to that lot of money.
I’d have taken the offer too, as I’d be set for life, and so would my kids and my kids’ kids.
Tim may have had enough money personally, but it’s always nice to not have to shut your studio and fire everyone if you release the odd stinker.
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
That’s not true. Wube is working of a big Factorio 2.0 style update. They push updated on what they’re doing every other Friday, and they all go in detail and are very interesting.
Factorio 2.0 will shine brighter than ever before. Also, there is murmurs of possibly open sourcing faction later in the lifecycle.
Didn’t space engineers get abandoned? Or was that the medieval one
The medieval one. Space Engineers is still getting free quarterly up dates.
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.
How about Wubes Factorio?
Factorio is always the same price… and the big 2.0 update is next month… with a paid DLC Expansion coming.
Well, kinda the same price, they sometimes up it to account for inflation. I do see the DLC difference (this could be said to be an equivalent of for example Minecraft Dungeons with the amount of content, but I see how it is kinda “more of the same”). Anyway, the 2.0 update does bring a lot to the base game for free.
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.
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.
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.
Yikes
Am I the only one who questioned the legality of them deleting accounts if they didn’t migrate?
No you are not, and I’m pissed I forgot to do that.
Dude i remembered six months in advance and still lost my account because the process was a disaster. I haven’t played it since.
Just pirate it.
Or use the open-source Minetest instead?
I like minetest, but it is not a exact copy of the minecraft experience and many tutorials for more complicated machinery won’t translate easily to it.
If i buy a game, which doesn’t need a microsoft account, I would like it to stay that way.
You won’t be able to play multiplayer if you do
Not even on a private server?
You could disable authentication if you run the server
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.
“mojangstas” is crazy
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
That’s wild that they try to change history like that, he was literally the sole developer of the original game, creating it entirely for a programming competition right? Even if he’s following stupid conspiracies you shouldn’t be trying to change history to suit your narrative, that’s something actual racists try to do.
I mean, it’s not like notch’s contributions to the game are hidden or something. It’s extremely common knowledge. And no one reads the Minecraft credits anyway, the entire scroll is more than an hour long!
he’s a Nazi. the dude was not welcome at the 10 year anniversary event for Minecraft.
unfortunately due to tweets being deleted i can’t give you the list i used to have but here are some samples:
https://twitter.com/notch/status/936215345400033280?lang=en
https://twitter.com/notch/status/936298788636983296?lang=en
https://twitter.com/notch/status/1070773802806603777?lang=en
here he was quote tweeting a tweet with a mention of (((they))) which is literally Nazi shit https://twitter.com/notch/status/1070773433045143557
https://twitter.com/notch/status/1101794469060337664
https://twitter.com/notch/status/901192994971410433
i don’t know what’s with the combination of being swedish, videogames, wealth and a cunt personality but it seems to result in Nazism.
The first link you provide reads “it’s okay to be white” that’s your best example of “literal Nazi shit”? The rest are all the same, not racist at all. Then, he goes into supporting conspiracies on “Pizzagate” and “Q” which idk if he even really supports or is just making fun of because it’s a random tweet your linking, but even if he does those conspiracies are anti-media and slandering elite rich pedo rings right?
Calling him a literal Nazi and showing this benign shit as your proof just makes me think you’re one of those radical people who call everyone a Nazi.
dude fuck off this isn’t 2016 anymore this song and dance won’t work. people aren’t stupid. and more importantly you guys aren’t clever.
I’m not sure if I’m way out of the loop or you’re a schizophrenic? Who is “you guys” I am just saying what I think is true, I don’t care about Notch, I am fully in support of ending racism and inequality too, but I’ve got no idea how you can link what you have and think that’s “literal Nazi” talk. It’s antisocial dork talk at best.
assuming you’re genuine, you’re wrong. it is Nazi talk. maybe you’re too young and wasn’t aware of anything back then, or you were in a coma… i guess there are scenarios in which you wouldn’t know this.
words don’t have inherent meaning. they have meaning in context. even the n-word wouldn’t be offensive without the history that comes with it.
Nazi talk is not “i am a Nazi and i hate Jews and so many other minorities”. well i guess that would be too, but usually it’s more coded. sometimes literally.
I remember thinking it was madness to spend that much on a game that was already on its way out…
@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
For me, that was the signal to end playing Minecraft.
And yet they still refuse to add vertical slabs & stairs.
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
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
@MinecraftWikiEN @minecraft I struggle to comprehend that it’s been ten years.
It was and still is good for the game. Minecraft would’ve died under Notch.
